J. Kerrey

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, my view is that this is a reasonable amendment. I understand there is no budget cost.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I echo what the majority leader said. There are many evenings where we arrive here at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, and then we start to do the sorts of things that we could have done at 5 o'clock in the evening. We know what needs to be done. We have put out contacts to offices. There are many amendments that we are prepared to accept, but we need Members to come to the floor and offer the amendments up or notify us if they are willing to take the amendments down. Otherwise we will be here until 2, 3, or 4 o'clock in the morning. We could wrap this thing up quickly. The substantive disagreements, at least on the bill itself, have all been taken care of. We have some disagreements on some amendments we are working on right now that we think we can work out, as well as getting a managers' amendment to wrap this up. I hope those who would like to get out of here at a relatively nice hour tonight, or those who desire not to have votes tomorrow, will get down here as quickly as they can. Both Senator Shelby and I are willing to work with Members to see whatever reasonable differences there are and we will work them out. Amendments Nos. 5313 and 5314, En Bloc

Mr. KERREY. I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. So that the public can put this into perspective, there are 1.971 million Federal employees. Right now, there is an allowance for 3,400. I think we are at 2,800 now. This would take us down to 2,300. My concern with the Senator's amendment is based upon having been elected for 4 years as Governor, where I came into office with very little opportunity for appointments below the top slot. It made it difficult, therefore, to come in, having promised to do something, for example, with agriculture, with taxes, or with some other area of government, and carry that out. The public expected me to be able to do it. But, in fact, I would come in with very little real power, because there was little opportunity to bring people in who agreed with the positions that I had taken during the campaign itself. That is why I was concerned when I heard that. It runs against my own common experience, my own personal experience. It does not seem to me that running at the current level of 2,800, with 3,400 being the cap, that does not seem, on the surface, to be like a thickening of the Government. It is less than half of 1 percent--current political appointees. I know the administration raised concerns, not just for themselves but for whoever might follow, that this could impede their ability to carry out whatever he or she campaigned upon. It seems to me the people expect him to be able to come in and run the bureaucracies with the people that have similar views to theirs.

Mr. KERREY. The one statement that the Senator from Wisconsin made that causes me to have some concern is the statement that I believe the Volcker Commission said that political appointees actually make it more difficult for the President to carry out whatever it was he or she campaigned upon. One of the facts here is that this would take it from 2,800 down to----

Mr. KERREY. You have cited a Volcker Commission report repeatedly here. Can you describe the details of that commission and how many people were on it? Do you have any other cites besides the Volcker Commission to base this on?

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I listened, I regret to say, only to about the last half of the Senator's statement. If he doesn't mind, I would like to ask a couple of questions. First of all, my memory, such as it is, says that there was not a rollcall vote on this last year, is that correct?

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I have the amendment now in front of me. I did not earlier. The $9.7 million comes from the delay required by the act in implementing field restructuring of the Internal Revenue Service. We have not passed that delay yet. That delay was added as an amendment. It has not been enacted yet. I did receive notification from Secretary Rubin that he is concerned about a delay in reorganization. I do not know, perhaps they are not going to support it. It was in the IRS recommendations that they wanted to do this reorganization. To be clear on this, or attempt to be clear on this, the reorganization effort itself has not been fully justified to me. A reason we put the amendment on, asking for delay, was for the purpose of provoking a full justification from the standpoint of the mission of the IRS, as well as customer service of the IRS. We have some problems already with their 800 numbers and we want to make sure that this reorganization was both cost justified and was not going to produce a deterioration in service. The second area is one that I must say, if the administration supports this, really flies in the face with things they have been talking to our committee about every single time they have come up. Mr. President, $11.6 million from administration and other savings in tax law enforcement activities--we cut back tax law enforcement activities from the levels that they requested. Tax law enforcement activities are a tool we use to try to get compliance from about, I believe, 83 or 84 percent today, and hopefully up to the 90 percent goal, which is the administration's objective. The more, of course, we collect in taxes, the less pressure you have on people who are voluntarily complying and saying, ``I will send my taxes in; I know I owe them.'' Tax enforcement is for the purpose of relieving the burden on law-abiding citizens willing to pay their taxes without having to be jostled by the IRS. I am interested to see what the administration says, if they are willing to make a statement on both of those things. First, I do not know how they will be able to work out the objection they raised to reorganization. Even if they do, it is not clear that will be in the law. Second, as I said, with great respect to the Senator from California and the Senator from Massachusetts, I think they have a good proposal on that. It does, as I said, fly in the face of the recommendations. I am prepared to make an argument anyway that we are dangerously close to underfunding what we need to be able to fund on tax enforcement so that we can say to our taxpayers that 83 percent to 84 percent of American taxpayers file voluntarily the correct amount. They do not make any mistake at all. Mr. President, 85 out of 100 or 83 out of 100 Americans--Coloradans, Idahoans, Nebraskans, Californians--are filing taxes and they are all right. The enforcement division and the enforcement effort is to try to reduce the burden on them. Once we have decided how much money needs to be collected to pay the bills, the more compliance; the higher compliance rates we get, the lower the burden is going to be on everyone. This is a very important effort. Again, I have great respect for the intent of the amendment but until and unless the administration or someone is able to persuade me that this would not be a good offset, I continue to oppose the amendment.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, as I understand it, half the funding would come from savings that would occur only if the reorganization proposed by the IRS would not occur, but the reorganization is supported by Treasury. The IRS actually has objected to the reorganization delay that is contained in another amendment that is on this bill. It is not clear whether or not that reorganization amendment is going to be sustained. I had one conversation with Secretary of Treasury Rubin about that.

Mr. KERREY. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, as the distinguished Senator from Alabama, the chairman of the subcommittee, said, we are trying to--and we are alerting both Senators and staff--we are trying right now to identify those amendments that we can agree to accept. We also are trying to identify those amendments where we are going to agree together that we will both oppose or move to table. Senators need to be alerted to that, that there will be amendments offered on both sides of the aisle--Democrats will offer amendments that I may move to table; and, likewise, Republicans may offer amendments that Senator Shelby agrees to table--and we are going to be aggressive in tabling amendments that we regard in some cases as nongermane or to be incorrectly offered, to just let people have a heads-up on that. Third, we will look for opportunities, if we can, to talk to Members that have open--that is to say, they filed a place mark in here to identify whether or not their concerns have been taken care of in other areas, so that we can begin to winnow this list of amendments down. There is a very good chance, as we now understand it, we will be on this bill all night long and until we get it passed.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. KERREY. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, with respect, I think the unanimous consent request is good. I would love to get it approved. I do not object to the unanimous consent. But the next pending business is the Kassebaum sense-of-the-Senate resolution.

Mr. KERREY. If we can go into a quorum call for about 5 minutes and get it resolved. We have work to do. We know what needs to be done. Let us get the votes. For gosh sakes, one is a sense-of-the-Senate resolution. It is hardly what I would call Earth shattering.

Mr. KERREY. I am making a recommendation. I recommend that we modify the unanimous-consent request to include these two amendments for rollcall votes immediately. That is what we have to do to get these votes up and out and get our business done. We have been talking about it for a couple of days. I say let us start voting.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, we have reviewed the amendments. There is no objection.

Mr. KERREY. Unless we propound a unanimous consent to agree on those two amendments, I think it is going to be difficult to proceed. We just won't be realistic about it. If leadership will help us get that done-- I don't know why--I personally don't understand. We are prepared to accept both amendments, by the way, to be cleared on this side. I would be prepared to accept both of the amendments. We are going to conference, for God's sake. Everybody knows what that means.

Mr. KERREY. Reserving the right to object, I would like to ask the majority leader. One of the biggest problems that we have stuck in our throat on this bill right now is the Kassebaum sense-of-the-Senate resolution followed by a second Wyden amendment. If we could wrap those two up, if we could get unanimous consent to vote on those right away, we could move on. There are a lot of these amendments that have been offered with Senator Shelby and I working with Republican and Democratic Members trying to see if we can reach some accommodation so that we get this thing done. We have been on the bill 2 days. We have, as I said, the Kassebaum sense-of-the-Senate resolution and the Wyden amendment. If we could add those to the unanimous consent and vote on those right away, we think we have a pretty good chance of resolving most of this.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, we have reviewed these amendments, and we concur. They are all worthy amendments and we support their adoption.

Mr. KERREY. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. KERREY. Kansas.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, we have an hour of deliberation following this vote on an abortion amendment and Members on both sides that are anxious for that vote to occur have asked me to expedite it in order to be able to do other things. And so I think we have debated this. I will be pleased to allow it to go on if I have something additionally constructive, but I think people pretty well have this thing laid down. Mr. President, I have not made a statement on this. I hope that Members actually will vote to waive in this case. We are trying to move in the direction of managed care, particularly those of us who are trying to work both sides of the aisle and get some agreement on providing incentives in Medicare to control costs, to increase choice, and allow people to purchase into managed care. The CBO does not calculate any savings that occur as a consequence of people liking managed care as a result of knowing that they are going to get all the information to purchase it and reduce taxpayer exposure as a consequence. All they do is calculate some marginal increase in costs that might occur as a result of more expensive treatments being done. They offer no savings as a result of people saying we now like managed care better because of what occurs. This is eventually going to become law. Later on, we are going to pass an amendment with a big vote that gives Federal employees the same right. They are going to have the same right that the Senator from Oregon is now asking for all other people, especially for Medicare patients that are out there who are trying to ascertain whether or not they want to purchase into a managed care environment. So I think especially for budget reasons, CBO, with all due respect, has not calculated the increased savings that will occur as a consequence of seniors in particular saying we now have more confidence in managed care as a result of getting all the information.