Johnny Isakson

Mr. ISAKSON

Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my amendment No. 3430 be modified with the changes at the desk.

Mr. ISAKSON

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ISAKSON

Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I was unavoidably detained during rollcall vote No. 36 on the motion, motion to waive section 403(a) of S. Con. Res. 13, 111th Congress, re: Sanders amendment No. 3353 as modified; rollcall No. 37 on the motion to table, motion to table Bunning amendment No. 3360; rollcall vote No. 38 on the motion to table, motion to table Bunning amendment No. 3361; and rollcall vote No. 39 on the motion, motion to waive Budget Act points of order re: Baucus amendment No. 3336. Had I been present I would have voted ``nay'' for rollcall vote No. 36; ``nay'' for rollcall vote No. 37; ``nay'' for rollcall vote No. 38; and ``nay'' for rollcall vote No. 39 and ask that the Congressional Record reflect that. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ISAKSON

Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I rise today to bring to the attention of my colleagues that March is National Eye Donor Month. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced, ``One of the most magnificent presents that one human being can bestow upon another is the gift of sight. Incredible as it may seem, it is within the power of each of us to give this precious gift simply by making arrangements to donate our eyes after death.'' In less than 50 words, President Reagan expressed how simple and incredible it is to give the gift of sight. He declared March as National Eye Donor Month, and today his words hold no less relevance. During National Eye Donor Month, we should take time to honor past donors and their families for the tremendous gift of sight they have given. These gifts have helped to improve the lives of over 1 million recipients since this procedure was introduced into America's health care system. Throughout the United States today, more than 40,000 corneal transplants take place yearly, over 750 each week. The Eye Bank Association of America was founded in 1961 and promulgates medical standards for eye banks throughout the world. Its initial membership of 25 member banks has grown to 85 banks in the United States and 15 international banks. Corneal transplants can restore sight to people of all ages and all walks of life, whether it be a newborn, an adult or an aging grandparent. While success rates for corneal transplants have always been high, advancements in recent technology have increased success rates to over 95 percent. When the procedure was first performed, patients would spend upwards of 1 month in the hospital recovering from the transplant. Today, it is an outpatient procedure. Today, we possess the knowledge and technology to give the gift of sight to thousands of individuals through the generosity of eye donation. Anyone can become an eye donor. Cataracts, poor eyesight or age do not prevent a person from being a donor. I encourage all Americans to become eye donors. It is a very simple process. All you need to do is sign up on your State's donor registry and talk to your family to ensure they understand that you wish to give the gift of sight. Donated human eyes and corneal tissue are used for research, education and transplantation. There is no substitute for human tissue donation. Corneal transplants cannot take place without the priceless gift of corneal donation from one human to another. I encourage my colleagues to work with their local eye banks to help raise awareness within your communities and throughout our country. I am honored to recognize March as National Eye Donor Month today in the Record.

Mr. ISAKSON

Mr. ISAKSON. Madam President, today I honor the life and service of Diane Caves, a bright and talented young woman whose life ended far too soon, in the tragic earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12, 2010. Diane worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as a policy analyst in the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response. Her commitment to public service was recognized just last year when she was named 2009 Federal Employee of the Year for Atlanta in the Outstanding Professional Category, at the age of 30. Diane led the development in 2008 of CDC's first comprehensive nationwide report on public health preparedness, ``Public Health Preparedness: Mobilizing State by State.'' Her work launched a regular series of reports that demonstrate accountability and drive program improvements to help protect the Nation from public health emergencies. She shined equally bright among her friends and in her community. She was an avid soccer player, an insatiable reader, and a world traveler. She brought people together to share their interests in food, knitting, books and sports, and motivated others with her energy, wit and unyielding optimism. Diane recently volunteered for a short assignment to Haiti to work on the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. Congress reauthorized this historic commitment to the fight against global AIDS a little more than a year ago, with strong support from both parties. PEPFAR represents the very best of America. It is a remarkable program that is saving lives around the world with the contributions of people like Diane and her colleagues at CDC. Diane didn't go to Haiti for the recognition. She went because she was passionate about public health, because she was a committed public servant, and because, above all, she wanted to help people. She didn't go to Haiti because it would be easy or comfortable. She asked to go where the challenges were greatest, the work was the hardest and the potential to help was limitless. Diane didn't go to Haiti to be a hero. But she has come home as one. She was brought to Dover Air Force Base last week, and a family memorial service was held in her hometown of Oak Ridge, TN. Her family and friends will mourn her quietly and privately as a loved one. We will also mourn her as a nation, as we do any American who dies in service to this country. There will be a ceremony at CDC in her honor on March 1, 2010, where her name will be added to a memorial for employees who died while in service. We are thankful for the life and service of Diane Caves. Her smile, her laugh and her spirit will always be remembered. Her service will always be celebrated. Her extraordinary gifts and talents were shared with many during her short life, and they will never be forgotten. Our thoughts and prayers are with her husband Jeff Caves; her parents Lee and Linda Berry; her brother David Berry; and with Jeff's family and all of her friends and colleagues who will mourn her and miss her and strive always to live up to her example.

Mr. ISAKSON

Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I wish to honor in the Record of the Senate a great Georgia company, Chick-fil-A, Inc., and a great Georgian, its founder S. Truett Cathy. Last May, at age 88, Truett Cathy, founder and active CEO of Chick- fil-A, celebrated 63 years in the restaurant business. In 1946, he opened his first restaurant, The Dwarf Grill, in Hapeville, GA. In December, Chick-fil-A, which Mr. Cathy founded in 1967, reached the $3 billion mark in system-wide sales and posted its 42nd-consecutive annual sales increase since the company's inception. While our economy was facing difficult times, the Cathy family and president and COO, Dan T. Cathy, was prepared and committed to carrying on a family tradition. The Chick-fil-A model of slow and steady growth that has proven so successful in the past has paid off during these tough economic times. The chain maintained its pace for new restaurant openings by opening 83 new restaurants across the country in 2009, creating approximately 4,200 new jobs. In addition, Chick-fil-A continued its reinvestment in its existing restaurant infrastructure by remodeling or expanding 60 restaurants across the chain. Despite the uncertain economy, Chick-fil- A continues to be on track to honor the commitment Truett Cathy and his family made at the end of 2006 to eliminate all company debt by 2012. I am also proud to say that this Georgia-based company also continues its strong commitment to education. In August 2009, Truett Cathy awarded the 25,000th Chick-fil-A Leadership Scholarship since creating the program in 1973. To date, the leadership scholarship program has awarded more than $25 million in financial assistance to more than 25,000 Chick-fil-A restaurant team members who have attended 2,300-plus educational institutions throughout the country. In 2009 alone, Chick- fil-A awarded $1.4 million in scholarships to 1,425 Chick-fil-A team members across the country. Congratulations, Chick-fil-A, and best wishes to Truett Cathy and the entire Cathy family for their ongoing success in Georgia and throughout the country.

Mr. ISAKSON

Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, first of all, just to amplify the record on the Lilly Ledbetter case, the Supreme Court did not rule against Ms. Ledbetter. They upheld the statute of limitations of 180 days for claims filed under civil rights laws. She had come to the court, not a few months after the alleged incident, but years and years later. Only then did she try to make a case. The Court was upholding the law which this Congress passed. Secondly, I rise, reluctantly, to oppose the nomination of Craig Becker, and I do so based on experience, not based on a whim, not based on politics but based on what I have experienced in the past 6 months in terms of confirmation in labor-related positions. As you may know, I am from Atlanta, GA. That is the home of Delta Air Lines that has recently merged with Northwest Airlines to form the largest airlines in the United States of America. The National Mediation Board oversees labor issues with regard to the industry. In the merger of Delta and Northwest, the merger of two different companies with different cultures--Delta less organized and Northwest more--one of the major questions about that merger as it related to labor law was what would the law be to govern a unionization vote, in this case, of the flight attendants. Northwest flight attendants were organized; Delta's were not. For the 75-year history of the Railway Labor Act in the United States of America, the principle of the National Mediation Board called for a majority vote of all members of the company in the employee class, meaning if there were 1,000 flight attendants in the class, it would take 501 votes to pass a motion to organize. As we considered the nominees for the National Mediation Board in the HELP Committee last year, I spent extensive time questioning the two Democrat nominees who were nominated for the Board. I pressed them on this very issue trying to ensure that we had what Senator Durbin referred to; that is, absolutely equal treatment and not a bias in terms of determination of labor decisions. I listened to these appointees over and over again say they would be fair, they would not be biased, and they did not have a preconceived position, and I voted for them. Within weeks of being seated, they issued a proposed rule at the behest of labor unions, voting 2 to 1 to change the 75-year-old policy. In the face of a unionization vote getting ready to take place at the world's largest airline, they are attempting change the 75-year policy of the National Mediation Board. If they are successful, they will allow a simple majority of the number of people voting to replace the current policy which is a majority of the total number of employees in the class. In the case of the example I gave before in which if there were 1,000 people in the class, under existing law it would take 501 to organize. That is fair. By changing to a majority of those voting if only 100 voted, it would only take 51 to vote to organize the entire class of 1,000 employees within a company. That is a radical shift in the balance between labor and management, without any changes on the ground to merit such a departure from precedent. Secondly, many on the other side are always talking about the Employee Free Choice Act and how we ought to make it easier to organize. In 2008, which is the last year for which I have statistics, 67 percent of all unionization votes under existing law were in favor of organizing. EFCA amounts to a solution toward a problem we don't have. Mr. Becker is a very gifted, talented attorney. I sat in for Senator Enzi as ranking member at the confirmation hearing we had in the HELP committee 2 weeks ago, and I asked him about these specific questions. He was very careful and crafty in his answers. I came away not convinced that the statements of Mr. Acuff, the statements of Mr. Iglitzin, and the statements of former NLRB Member Gould were inaccurate. Each of those pro-union experts has written that Mr. Becker's appointment offers an opportunity to do by regulatory authority what could not be done on the floor of the Senate in terms of card check and government-written first contracts. This concern, combined with the National Mediation Board's refusal to obey 75 years of precedent leads me to only one conclusion. Out of an abundance of caution, I am going to vote against the confirmation of Mr. Becker in hopes the administration will send a nominee to the floor who is committed to a balanced treatment of both organized labor and management in this country. Mr. President, I am grateful for the time, and I yield the floor.

Mr. ISAKSON

Mr. ISAKSON. I ask to be recognized for up to 10 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I reluctantly rise to oppose moving forward with the nomination of Patricia Smith. I do not do so easily nor happily because I believe the President of the United States has the right to make appointments, and I think within reason those appointments should be confirmed. The question before the Senate, with this nomination, is not whether wage and hour laws should be enforced. They should be. The question is not whether Ms. Smith has done a good job in New York State because Republicans and Democrats said she has. The question is whether the Senate will tolerate a nominee intentionally misleading a standing committee of this body. My guess is the Democratic majority would not have stood for that under the previous administration, and we should not today. Unfortunately, Ms. Smith has been consistently evasive in response to numerous questions from members of the committee, specifically with regard to a program called Wage Watch, which deputized private activist groups to inspect small businesses to look for and seek to find wage and hour law violations. For 5 years I have served as the senior Republican on the Employment and Workplace Safety Subcommittee that maintains the oversight responsibilities over the Department of Labor. I am a vigilant, longtime supporter for fair and fully enforced wage-and-hour laws. The program in question, Wage Watch, is a program that empowered pro- union special interests to enforce the myriad of labor laws that cover small employers. This approach is simply inappropriate. It can at worst be entrapment and at best an improper attempt to enforce the law. One can imagine the outcry if the Minutemen who patrolled on their own on our border to the south had somehow been deputized by our immigration department under the last administration. There would have been outrage, and there should have been. The ``Wage Watch'' program specifically targeted small- and medium- size businesses. In discussing the success of the program, Ms. Smith bragged that one business was closed as a result of this program, telling the New York Times that she had ``made the determination that it would be better for workers to lose their jobs than to continue working there.'' Ms. Smith stated the program would not be used for union organization; however documents obtained by the HELP Committee from the New York State Labor Department and a union newsletter show plans specifically to use the program for union organizing throughout New York. Worse than the program itself was Ms. Smith's refusal to provide the committee with accurate and complete information about the program. In April of 2009 I wrote to Ms. Smith to ask if she foresaw ``the possibility of instituting similar efforts on a national level.'' On May 12 she replied in writing that she had ``not considered or advocated expanding it across New York to other parts of the country, to the Federal level or to other laws.'' However, documents procured by the HELP Committee revealed that Ms. Smith wrote in January 2009, 4 months before the letter I just mentioned, that she would like to double the number of organizers involved, ``while laying the foundation to expand the program to various parts of Long Island and upstate New York.'' She continued: We're creating a movement here, and the more the merrier. Clearly she had both considered and advocated expansion of the program, thus her statement to me was inaccurate. Her deceit on this issue forced me to write the President on September 10, 2009, and request that Ms. Smith withdraw her name. I asked the President that a new nominee, one who would both look out for the interests of workers and be honest with the Congress, be nominated. We now see a similar program like Wage Watch, now called We Can Help, developing in the U.S. Department of Labor. In fact, one of the pro- union special interest groups Ms. Smith deputized to implement her New York program, the so-called National Employment Law Project, has been chosen by Secretary Solis to assist in the enforcement of Federal workplace laws. On a personal note, I ran a business for 22 years, and it was a small business. I employed golf course superintendent workers, I had independent contractors who were real estate agents, I did a lot of construction where we were subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act. We were subject to all types of labor laws. I vigorously made sure that whatever the case might be, we worked hard to see to it we obeyed not only the letter of the law but the spirit of the law. But I, too, in my experience, from time to time encountered the kind of organizations Ms. Smith used in ``Wage Watch.'' They tried to entrap me and punish me. I think the proactive enforcement of labor law should be vigilantly looking for violations and vigilantly looking for correction, not vigilantly looking for someone--as in the case of Ms. Smith and the businesses in New York--you can put out of business and cost the jobs of many employees of that small business. As such, I reluctantly rise today to oppose the nomination of Ms. Patricia Smith. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum. I withdraw the request for a quorum call.

Mr. ISAKSON. Is the current business the nomination of Patricia Smith?

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

Mr. ISAKSON

Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I rise tonight following on the heels of three more bank closings in my State last Friday; not new banks, one of them over 60 years old, one of them over 100 years old. I want to talk for a few minutes tonight about the unintended consequences of well- intended regulation. We are now going into the 26th month of the current recession. This will arguably be the longest recession post-World War II America has experienced. I can tell you from having gone through four of the recessions post-1960, this is by far the worst of anything that we experienced. We are at a point where we have to make some good, solid decisions, but we have to help our economy, help our businesses, and help our financial institutions. Don't get me wrong at the outset. I am not talking about waiving or dispensing or looking the other way. I am not talking about loosie- goosie regulation which got us into the mess we are in: shoddy underwriting and poor credit. But what I am talking about are realistic approaches to difficult problems and looking to our past to understand the answers for our future. I wish to talk about rule 114, which is called mark to market. Mark to market is where an appraisal of an asset held by a bank is appraised at what it would sell for today, and in many cases because of a difficult real estate market, in both commercial and residential, those values are dramatically depressed, in most cases below the loan that is against them. So the asset deteriorates, the asset side of the balance sheet of the bank deteriorates, and you have difficult problems. In the late 1980s and early 1990s we had a similar period of time. We had something called the Resolution Trust Corporation, the RTC. It was kind of a bad bank that took all the assets of the failed savings and loans around the United States. We waived mark to market for 3 years. We had a 3-year moratorium so the banking institutions and their regulators could deal with loans in a practical, pragmatic way rather than Draconian, rigid application of mark to market. Second, we have to consider doing something on the appraisal rules that have been passed down. I have talked to our Secretary of HUD on this matter, and I intend to talk to him more about it. I was in Clayton County, GA, south of Atlanta, just 2 weeks ago, a county that has been hit hard by the housing recession, a county where values are 42 percent below what they were in 2006. That is a significant decline. I talked to one realtor after another and one lender after another who told me the interesting thing that has happened. With the new appraisal regulations, the appraisals on these houses when they sell at a short sale or foreclosure are coming in at exceedingly low values. But when the people have to get their homeowners insurance to insure the house, they are having to insure the house for more than they paid for it. Why? Because you can buy houses in Georgia today or around the country for less than what it costs to replace them. When I entered the business in the 1960s, cost to replace was the principal way real estate was evaluated. Later, comparable sales took over cost to replace. I think it is time we look at cost to replace becoming the primary mechanism for establishing lending and insurance purposes. The short sale situation is another problem. It has taken banks in some cases 10 to 12 months to give somebody an answer on a short sale. A short sale, for those listening, is when you have a house and you are in default, you can't pay your loan but it is not in foreclosure yet, you find a buyer who can pay 80 cents on the dollar. Say you owe $100,000, and they can pay $80,000. You go to your bank and say: Will you take $80,000 and forgive the $20,000 and let me sell this property rather than foreclose it? Banks are reluctant to make decisions and most of the time, therefore, they didn't. Those houses they could have sold on a short sale go into foreclosure. When they go into foreclosure, more often than not they are vandalized. Their value declines 1, 2, 3 percent a month and the house comes out at an even lower value. To show you the value of some well-intended regulation, I want to commend the Treasury because last week the Treasury issued a ruling to banks that received TARP money that they must respond within 10 days on any short sale offer on a mortgage that bank holds. We are going to see a remarkable change in Denver, in Atlanta, in Houston, and a lot of other places. We are going to see some sales that have not been taking place start to take place. We are going to see some inventory reabsorbed. I commend the Treasury on their good approach to short sales. I wish to talk a minute about loss-share. The FDIC has come up with a loss-share proposal for the banks that take the troubled assets of banks that have failed. FDIC says: If you will take these assets, we will guarantee the most you can lose is 20 percent on the value. We will cover the other 80. But to make sure we do not get in worse trouble, you cannot extend credit beyond 10 percent of the debt owed to the borrower. The problem with that is a lot of these assets are, in fact, performing, but they have not been completed yet. To complete the asset so it begins to pay back, sometimes you have to extend credit beyond 10 or 15 or 20 percent. To have an absolute rule that you cannot is causing loans to go bad or to go unfunded that otherwise should have been funded. In 1974, we went through a housing recession as deep and as problematic as the one today. Foreclosures were every bit as rampant-- maybe not as big in numbers but as rampant and as difficult. As is beginning to happen now, the commercial loans began to fail in 1975. An interesting thing happened around the country. Commercial lenders and the regulators recognized very quickly if they foreclosed on commercial loans like they had foreclosed on residential loans, the banking system would collapse; the asset side of almost all banks would collapse. So what they decided to do was encourage banks to work out these assets by going to the developer who was in trouble, who owed the money, and say: I'll tell you what. If you deed this property back to us in lieu of foreclosure and then let us hire you on an earned-out process so we can develop our way out of this debt rather than foreclose ourselves into a loss--and more often than not, probably three out of every four transactions, it happened. The house I live in today I built on a lot I bought in a subdivision that had been taken back by the C&S National Bank. They had hired the developer to do a workout. I bought it at a good price and later did most of the sales in the development. It became a great development, and the bank eventually was made whole. The bank would have lost lots of money if they had to take that thing and foreclose on it and had not worked it out. I encourage our regulators to give the great American ingenuity and entrepreneurship the chance to work. Sure, some of these people are in trouble, but there are avenues outside of that trouble. There has been a lot of talk about taxing banks that receive TARP money. I want to address that for a second because, the best I can tell, every bank that has received TARP money is paying it back at a 5- percent dividend. We are making a profit. The only people who have not paid it back are GM and Chrysler, who probably never will. But if we put that much more of a burden on top of the people who are paying us, and paying a premium when we have a banking system under stress and duress, it is only making it more and more impossible for them to stay in business, for them to be vibrant and come back to bring credit to our communities. On that point, with mark to market enforced at a Draconian rate, with appraisal rules driving down the values of properties that are financed by the banks, with the regulatory environment being so stiff to recognize losses and deteriorate the balance sheet, there is not any credit for small business to speak of. We are making a recession that is deep, that is broad, and that is pervasive worse because of the unintended consequences of well-intended regulation. Last, I have enjoyed working with Senator Kaufman so much over this issue of short sales that I just want to put in one more plug for what we plugged in this entire session and encourage the SEC. In the collapse that took place in the markets, one of the things that went out of hand was the short selling of financial stocks to terrible lows. That short selling took place in large measure because there was no uptick rule, which was the old rule that was good for years on the stock market that once you had a declining value in the stock, if it ticked up on a trade, you stopped the short selling from continuing to take place. We need the SEC to revisit it. They took 30 days a year and a half ago and suspended it and it helped, but we don't need those speculating in the marketplace to take unfair advantage of the values of equities that are owned by Americans all over this country for the sake of making a buck on a short sale. My remarks are very simple. There are unintended consequences to regulation, and we need to start looking at the cause and effect. Where we can find opportunities for banks to work out, for mark to market to be suspended, for appraisals to be based on cost to replace rather than comparable sales, we will begin to give the flexibility to the banking system to begin to recover, to stop the losses, stop the failures and, over time, recover our economy. I yield the remainder of my time.

Mr. ISAKSON

Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I come before this Chamber to speak about good news. The Mine Safety and Health Administration confirmed that 2009 was the safest year in the history of American mining. As many of us have learned in the course of our lives, sometimes good can come from tragedy. Indeed, this is true of American mining after the 2006 disasters at the Sago, Aracoma, and Darby mines. Overall that year, 73 miners perished in American mines. Last year, that number decreased by more than half as a result of efforts made throughout the industry. Thirty-four American miners perished, a new record low. Also in 2009, nearly 85 percent of all U.S. mines recorded no lost- time injuries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2009 incident rate of nonfatal occupational injuries for mining was 3.5. For comparison, the incident rate for all of private industry was 3.9 and manufacturing and construction were 5.0 and 4.7, respectively. Four years ago, after a decade of steady improvement in mine safety, the Nation was riveted to the unfolding mine tragedies in Appalachia that claimed the lives of more than a dozen miners. And as some of you in this Chamber will recall, those accidents prompted us and the mining industry to revisit mine safety. Several of us, including Senators Byrd, Enzi, Kennedy, Murray, and Rockefeller, spent long hours and conducted extensive hearings on how we could make our mines safer. We delved into the safety challenges and how the industry and the Federal and State regulators were meeting them. We consulted professional safety experts inside and outside the mining community-- including academicians and technology experts. The result was the MINER Act that Congress passed in the summer of 2006. At the same time Congress was responding to these tragedies, so was the entire mining industry--employers and employees alike. Complacency about safety was no longer acceptable for 21st century mining. Employees and employers set out to put the industry on course to drive serious mine accidents down to zero. Among their first actions was to go outside the mining community for other perspectives on how best to meet the mine safety challenge. The result was the Mine Safety Technology and Training Commission--a panel of independent experts from public, private and academia established by the National Mining Association, the industry's trade group. Among the recommendations of the Commission, perhaps none was more far-reaching than the recommendation to better manage risks. The Commission advised the industry to focus particular attention on areas of the mine where incidents were more likely to occur, then manage those risks aggressively with programs specifically designed to raise awareness of them. The idea was not just to respond to accidents better, but to prevent accidents from happening in the first place. U.S. mining is acting on these recommendations, and has taken steps far and wide with more sophisticated technology and enhanced training to further improve mine safety. A third component of this effort is raising safety awareness among everyone who works at our mines, and one example is a series of initiatives launched by the industry to reduce accidents by drawing attention to the risks in three high- incident areas: proximity to mobile underground equipment, slips and falls, and driving safety. At the same time, U.S. mining has been investing almost a billion dollars in communications technologies; increased oxygen supplies underground, enhanced rescue capabilities and other safety measures under the MINER Act and to meet the recommendations of the independent safety commission. Every time we discuss mine safety, I cannot help but remember George ``Junior'' Hamner. Junior Hamner died in the January 2, 2006 disaster at the Sago Mine in Tallmansville, WV. His loving daughter gave me a picture of him and asked that in my capacity as chairman of the Employment and Workplace Safety Subcommittee, I would work to see that future generations of miners would not suffer as her father did. I promised her I would. It is in light of that promise that I will continue working with the industry, the Obama administration, and my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to ensure that American mining is unquestionably the safest mining industry in the world. We know the 34 lives lost last year in American mines were 34 too many and remain committed to seeing zero fatalities and injuries in U.S. mining. That is a goal worth striving for, and it is a goal that increasingly appears to be in reach.

Mr. ISAKSON

Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleague Senator Chambliss to endorse the confirmation and hopefully unanimous confirmation of Judge Beverly Martin to the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. I thank President Obama for sending this nomination forward and for the consultation his people had with Senator Chambliss and myself. I thank Senator Leahy, chairman, and Ranking Member Sessions from Alabama of the Judiciary Committee for the diligence with which they approached this confirmation and the speed with which we have now brought it to the floor. I am proud that the vote on Judge Martin today will be the first vote of the 2010 session of the Senate. As Senator Chambliss said, Judge Martin comes from a long, distinguished family of lawyers from middle Georgia. She comes to the bench with a balanced temperament and the evenhanded process that comes from growing up in middle Georgia and having respect for one's fellow man. I don't know Judge Martin and did not know Judge Martin until she was nominated. I am not an attorney so I didn't have a lot to fall back on when I made my first judgment. I decided what I would do is what I always did in my 33 years of business. I figured you could always find out what was at the heart of someone by calling those who competed with them, other members of the same profession. So I called lawyers, judges, prosecutors around Georgia, friends I had, and said: Tell me what you know about Judge Beverly Martin. Without exception, every response was positive. It was interesting. One district attorney said: I like her because she has the tenacity of a prosecutor. She was a prosecutor for the northern district of Georgia. I talked to a dear friend of mine who is on the Georgia Supreme Court who said she has the temperament for a judge. I talked to another practicing attorney, who had tried cases before her and had competed with her when she was a practicing attorney herself, who said: Johnny, she is tough. She is fair. But she has a passion for the law, a passion for doing what is right. I don't think you can come up with a finer endorsement than those three quotes. I also join Senator Chambliss in acknowledging and studying one's record. Some of her decisions I think have been outstanding. As a former prosecutor, she understands the dangers our law enforcement officers go through. She understands the value they serve. I think her ruling not to stay the execution of a murderer of a Columbus, GA policeman was absolutely the right decision. Her defense of the Georgia death penalty law as being constitutional was not only appropriate but right. Throughout all of her decisions, one thing is for sure: Whether you agreed or not, she gave it the thought and time necessary to make what she felt was the right decision. In 2000, the Senate confirmed Judge Martin to the northern district court in Georgia. It did so unanimously. It is my hope that on this day the Senate once again will unanimously approve the confirmation of Judge Beverly Martin to the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. I yield the floor, suggest the absence of a quorum, and ask unanimous consent that the time be charged to each side.

Mr. ISAKSON

Mr. ISAKSON. Isn't it true that is what is wrong with Social Security today? We have spent it for years and years rather than putting it in a trust fund, and now the baby boomers are going: The money is not there? Isn't that the same thing?

Mr. ISAKSON. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. ISAKSON. I think the Senator from Texas is exactly right. I will be the first to tell you, I am in the process of reading the 400-some- odd page managers' amendment. I haven't read all of it yet. It does take out the public option, which, by the way, that was originally in. It still may reappear at some date in the future. That was a real killer. That raised tremendous costs. In fact, it made it more beneficial for a company not to provide insurance and pay the fine and put people in the government option. That is not in the bill now, I understand that. But let me tell you what is in the bill. What is in the bill are a number of taxes on small businesses that produce medical devices and medical treatments. You know as well as I do that when the government raises your taxes, you have to raise your price to the consumer. What does that mean? It is not lowering the cost of health care. It is, through the tax mechanism, raising the cost of health care, either to the insurance company that is in the exchange or to Medicaid or to Medicare or to the individual person in terms of their copayments. You cannot hide the fact that when you are raising those types of revenues--$514 billion; $50 billion a year over 10 years--that money is going to ultimately be paid by the consumer of health care. It may be paid by the company on its tax return, but it is a pass-through cost that they are going to pass through to their consumer, which in turn is going to put more pressure on whoever insures that consumer, if, in fact, they are insured. So anytime the government raises taxes, it raises the cost of living for the American people. That is just a common, well-known fact. The Senator is exactly correct.

Mr. ISAKSON. Like the Senators from Texas and South Carolina and my senior Senator from Georgia, we all represent the people who vote for us. And in reference to Senator Cornyn's question about popularity, about the way people feel about this legislation, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record two letters--one from the Medical Association of Georgia and one from a consolidated group of medical associations representing 92,000 physicians.

Mr. ISAKSON. I want to tell my colleagues what these letters say. The first one is to me from Gary Richter, the president of the Medical Association of Georgia. He writes in great detail about the difficulties and problems they have with this legislation, beginning with the stonewall against tort reform by only putting in a demonstration project. The Senator from Texas is aware of what tort reform can do because his State has made a great improvement in medical malpractice costs because of tort reform, and we in Georgia have tried to experience the same type of thing. There are many other reasons in here as well. The interesting thing about the letter from the 92,000 physicians represented by their medical associations is they talk not only about what is in the bill but what is not in the bill. I want to read, if I may, one paragraph to demonstrate that point: Our concerns about this legislation also extend to what is not in the bill. The right to privately contract is a touchstone of American freedom and liberty. Patients should have the right to choose their doctor and enter into agreements for the fees for those services without penalty. Current Medicare patients are denied that right. By guaranteeing all patients the right to privately contract with their physicians, without penalty, patients will have greater access to physicians and the government will have budget certainty. Nothing in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act addresses these fundamental tenets, which we believe are essential components of real health system reform. That is a pretty strong statement from 92,000 American physicians about this particular piece of legislation. To follow up on the point made by the distinguished Senator from South Carolina, I have a vested interest. I just got my Medicare card. December 1 I became Medicare eligible. When you talk about cutting $470 billion, it gets personal. It gets personal with all those other seniors. Think about this. Seniors in America have paid their entire lives, at least since 1966 when it was created, They have paid a tax and their employers have paid a payroll tax to go into a trust fund to pay for their health care after they are 65 years old. We are now basically saying, I say to the Senator from South Carolina, we are taking $470 billion of the tax money you have paid over years of work and we are going to put it in a plan to pay for somebody else's health care. That is basically what it does, and that is patently wrong. One other thing I want to mention that is critical to me. We are all professionals at what we do. We all argue from our point of view. I understand that and respect that. But something was said earlier today which draws me to have a flashback to make the point about how much we tried on this side to contribute to improvements in health care and better access for all. The very distinguished majority whip said he talked with realtors and that three in four realtors were uninsured and this would help. The reason they are uninsured is they are not able to form risk groups together associated and affiliated as a like practice. Because of the IRS Code, which this does not amend, a company's employer, who has independent contractors working for them, cannot by law provide them with medical insurance. In 2006 on the floor of the Senate, 57 Republicans and Democrats offered and voted for the associated health care bill or the small business access to health reform--57 out of 100. We needed 60 like this bill needs to get to cloture. That bill would have allowed associated professions to join together, compete for insurance nationwide, form risk pools that are large enough to mediate and ameliorate high rates and have a more competitive rate. He was correct in his statement that three in four do not have health insurance. I was in that business. I know. The reason they do not is because they have to buy on the spot market because they cannot have a group plan. When they buy on the spot market, we are talking about $1,500, $1,800, $2,000 a month, which is unaffordable and unsustainable. But this bill does nothing to address that situation which is one of the largest holes in the uninsured problem. In fact, when you see the estimates, those who are still left uninsured, a great many of them are going to end up being just those kinds of people--- independent contractors that the tax laws prohibit from associating and affiliating with others. And I was proud to be part of that 57, along with the other three distinguished Senators on the floor and a number of Democrats. There have been lots of efforts made by people on both sides to get us better access and affordable health care. But, unfortunately, they have been blocked all over this philosophic argument of whether health care is going to be government provided or competitive in the private sector. Unfortunately, the ship of state is moving toward the government provision with this legislation, which is one of the reasons I oppose it. I turn it back to the distinguished senior Senator from Georgia.

Mr. ISAKSON. I appreciate the Senator bringing it up. It is what is known in the trade as an unfunded mandate, but I will put some meat on that bone. This year the State of Georgia had a budget of about $17 billion, and the Medicaid portion--just the Medicaid portion in Georgia--was over $2 billion. So it is approaching, or getting close to, 16, 17, or 18 percent of the entire budget. If this bill passes raising the eligibility from 100 percent to 150 percent, then in 2017--which is the trigger date on this Medicaid provision--Georgia would go from $2.15 billion to over $3\1/4\ billion in its share of Medicaid, and this at a time of declining revenues and greater pressure. That is a recipe for disaster. Our State, like 43 other States in the United States, can't borrow money. We have to have a balanced budget. If the Federal Government mandates that we spend $3 billion, we have to cut it out of someplace else in our State, such as education or our prisons or the park system or somewhere else. But it is ironic that Senator Chambliss asked me that question because this morning, as I was preparing to come over, I had the television on, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, was being interviewed. He endorsed this provision originally, but he raised the question that the provisions in this amendment will raise by $3 billion the cost of Medicaid, just in the State of California--a State that had a $60 billion shortfall last year, and next year, he estimates, will have a $20 billion shortfall. If we continue in Washington to mandate funding and don't put our money behind it, we are pushing our States to the brink of bankruptcy, where a number of them already are. It is not fair to say we are covering more people when we are bankrupting our States. We are not covering anybody if we are pushing the cost off on someone else. So I appreciate the senior Senator from Georgia raising that point, and I associate myself with Governor Schwarzenegger and his remarks this morning about urging us not to force unfunded mandates on our States. The Senator from Texas.

Mr. ISAKSON. Just a question on a followup on the fiscal part the Senator from South Carolina brought up. It is also still true that the taxes on this bill begin in 11 days--January 1, 2010--but the benefits begin on January 1, 2014, and in that score of the first 10 years of cost, you have years of program that are not costing anything while you are raising revenues. So it is a ruse and a masking of the actual fiscal effect on the United States of America.

Mr. ISAKSON

Mr. ISAKSON. If there was a deal, it wasn't made with everybody. I have a letter that was sent December 4 of this year to me from Judy Adams, executive director of the Georgia Association for Home Health Care Agencies, endorsing the Johanns amendment. So they must not have been part of the deal. They represent Georgia. Further, in here----

Mr. ISAKSON. They estimate that 68 of the 100 Medicare-approved home health care agencies in Georgia will go out of business. So if there was a deal, it wasn't made with every State because the State of Georgia is on record. I ask unanimous consent to have this letter printed in the Record.

Mr. ISAKSON. I want to put a face on what home health care means to the quality of health care and the lowering of the cost of health care in America. My youngest son was in a horrible accident in 1989. He was hospitalized for 8 weeks, had four surgeries, developed an infection, and had some bone marrow threats. He was put in home health care after those 8 weeks. At a cost of pennies on the dollar, a visiting nurse came and helped my wife and me administer antibiotic drips periodically so he could continue to have the protection he needed to fight off the infection. The 8 weeks he was in the hospital cost over $100,000. The 8 weeks following that, when he was at home, home health care cost only a few thousand dollars. We are taking an agency and a service that has provided to the American people that greatly reduces the cost of health care, improves the quality of life of the individual and forcing the only option for somebody hurt like that to be in a hospital. Granted, my son was not in Medicare, but people in Medicare are in accidents and have the same type of thing happen. The patent effect of this is, on the one hand you save money to pay for somebody else's government option health insurance, but you take away an affordable, effective way to deliver health care.