J. Kerrey

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. I will just take a few minutes and conclude for this evening. The distinguished ranking member went through the 14 part checklist and said that among other things this checklist--for my colleagues who are wondering, this is in section 221. It actually becomes section 255 of the communications act. This checklist says this is what a Bell operating company, your local telephone company from whom you purchase your telephone service, this is what they have to do in order to be able to provide long distance. That is, they have to do all these things and present that to the FCC. And when they do that and meet one higher test, one additional test, public interest test, then they are allowed to get into long distance. Now, the idea here is that that 14 part checklist substitutes for meeting a test called no substantial possibility of interfering with demonstrable competition, or some such thing as that. The idea is that this 14 part checklist is all we need to have in order to make certain that we have competition. Now, the phone companies in their defense are a bit frustrated with all this because they say oh, my gosh, I have this 14 part checklist and now you want me to satisfy the Department of Justice. I want them to have a role in this thing as well. That is too much. Mr. President, I actually think that in these negotiations we sometimes sort of seize onto something and begin to feel as if it has to be this way and there is no better way. I say to the phone companies, you would be far better off if your interest is getting competition without litigating it, you [[Page S8017]] would be far better off with both of these things. You have a checklist. I know exactly what it is you have to do. We have gone through that exercise. We have said that is what you have to do to get into long distance. You present that to the FCC. You go through the process as Justice simultaneous with that and then there is no dispute. There is nobody that can say to you you have not satisfied what is required to make sure there is local competition, and for us in the Congress no risk that we will not have that competition, and it is the biggest risk in this whole deal. Fail to get that competition at the local level and most assuredly regret will come to your mind sometime in the not too distant future. I am going to just make one last comment and then wrap this up. One last thing that was said was there is a lot of money over at FCC from the auctions. As I understand it, in fact I know it to be the case, that auction money is hardly available if you are going to add staff over at the FCC in order to be able to handle the increased caseload, and there is going to be increased caseload. There is going to be increased pressure upon the FCC. They are going to have to hire new people. They do not have this expertise over there right now. They are going to have to hire at the FCC in order to be able to handle these applications, in order to be able to make those determinations. We are going to have to build what does not exist today in a Federal agency that previously has not had this kind of responsibility. And you are going to have to find an offset in some fashion in order to be able to get the job done, whereas, as I see it anyway, at the Department of Justice we already have those folks on the job. Mr. President, once again I say I hope that in the process of debating this, this will in the end lead to a piece of legislation I am able to enthusiastically support based upon my confidence that this is going to be good for the American consumer, this is going to be good for American workers that are hoping that this country will create more high paying jobs, that this will be good for American citizens who increasingly are dependent upon information in order to do a good job in their schools, to do a good job in their businesses, to do a good job in their operating rooms and various other places where Americans either work or play. I appreciate the tolerance and the assistance of the distinguished chairman of this committee and the ranking member who has already left. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. KERREY. I hear that. But one of the reasons Congress did not do that was when you get right down to it, it is difficult for us to say to a company you have to be competitive. I say to my friend from South Dakota that when the Cohen amendment came up earlier we were on the opposite sides of that issue. The Cohen amendment said we are going to take the set-top box industry and allow it to develop in a competitive fashion. There were concerns from smaller cable operators that it could result in some hardship to them. It could result in some problems for them. I understand. I think it is very difficult for the U.S. Congress to take a position to say to any industry that we are going to require you to go from a situation where you are not competitive, where you have been given Government protection of some kind, and in this particular case it is the telephone industry, given a franchise, given protective status, protected from competition, we are trying to figure out how to protect them from that protected status to a competitive environment, and the only Federal agency in town, in the people's capital in Washington, DC with the experience of having done it is the U.S. Department of Justice is given a consultative role. ``Oh, what do you think of this transition, Mr. Department of Justice?'' It seems to me, odd. I do not understand. I understand why the people who are going from a monopoly to a competitive environment oppose this. I understand why they are nervous about it because they saw how effective the Department of Justice was the previous time they did it. They saw how rigorous the Department of Justice was in

Mr. KERREY. We are not proposing a Government standard with this amendment, I do not believe. Maybe I misunderstand the amendment of the Senator from North Dakota. I do not believe so. I do not believe we are proposing that. I do not know if the Senator from South Dakota is familiar with it. I suspect the Senator is since he has been inundated with all of this stuff involved in this piece of legislation. There is an issue of interoperability. I introduced an interoperability bill a month or so ago, and immediately was approached by some people in the private sector who said that if the Government comes in and sets a legal de jure standard, what that does is it inhibits the development of the de facto standards, and I yielded to that argument. Indeed, I do not want the Government to establish in technology with the de jure standard that makes it difficult for the companies to go to the marketplace and say we are going to give what the marketplace wants and after we have given you what you want that becomes the standard, that becomes the new standard. I do not want to inhibit that at all. What I am concerned about, again I say for my colleagues, I am concerned about that the consumer who will not benefit unless there is competition so rigorous that I can take my business someplace else if I do not like what is being offered either in the way of price or service, not in independent lines of business, not in cable, not in dial tone, not in tech. But if they want to come in and sell it to me all put together for a lower price than I am currently paying, that is where I am going to get innovation and reduction in the cost of my current household information services. I am not going to get it if you preserve out of concern for what the Department of Justice is going to do, if you preserve a line of business differential in some artificial fashion. I think that is what this legislation does unless we get the Department of Justice with a role, an active role. I mean I am willing to consider any suggestions on what to do, to reduce any potential duplication, overlap. I am willing to consider any suggestions to make sure we shorten the time. We do not want to stretch it out. The idea is do what Justice did in 1984. You go into court. If you get the parties in hand, you write up a memorandum. You get in this case a consent decree. You walk into the judge at a Federal court, and you file it. All parties agree. You do not have litigation afterwards. You do not have any dispute to tie this thing up for a long time and tragically prevent the very competition that we are trying to see. I hope my colleagues understand that. If this thing is litigated, if I as an owner in a monopoly fashion have the right to deliver information services at the local level, and can tie this thing up in court for a long enough time to prevent that innovation from occurring, it is prevented permanently for the very reason that the Senator from South Dakota said, because innovation only lasts a little while and then it is obsolete. So I understand this delicate balance. I truly do. The distinguished chairman and the ranking Member have worked so hard on it. I understand that maybe it could all come apart if this amendment is agreed to. Members say, ``Oh, my gosh. We settled that in committee. We cannot now take it up again.'' I hope that we get some reconsideration of that conclusion. If I am wrong, if I have reached a conclusion because I have myself diagnosed the scene and do not understand what is going on, come and tell me. I am prepared to admit. If I see that incorrectly I have assessed on behalf of consumers and people making certain this legislation does set off some innovation that results in new and higher paying jobs for the people of the United States of America, I do not believe that this is a precedent that we should fear. Indeed, I believe it is a precedent that we should seek based upon the success of having done it once before. I heard one of the comments here this evening. Well, if the Justice Department has specialized expertise, then maybe we would ask them to do this. It does have specialized expertise. That is precisely the point. It has specialized expertise. Let us define what we want the Justice Department to do based upon that specialized expertise and have the FCC do what it does well, based upon its specialized expertise. And in that kind of a situation, Mr. President, we must be able to come to an agreement on how to make certain that we do not end up with overlap and duplication and a long regulatory process that makes it difficult not just for the RBOC's to get into long distance, but far greater concern for all of us who want to make sure that our vote turns out right, and that consumers end up with lower prices and higher quality service as a consequence. Mr. President, I really could talk a bit longer. I do not know what the distinguished Senator from South Dakota has in mind for the evening. It looks like there is a shortage here of red-blooded American men and women, unfortunately, elected to this great body that want to talk on this wonderful issue.

Mr. KERREY. It had a voluntary Government standard, and I was willing to make changes and make certain that it did not become a rigid Government standard, this is true.

Mr. KERREY. Network and network interoperability.

Mr. KERREY. I appreciate that. In fact, I am sure people will be interested--and I believe there is a lot of promise of jobs, by the way, in changing our regulation and going more to competition. But do not count on the jobs coming from the companies that are typically coming up here on Capitol Hill urging us to do one thing or another. I have some interesting facts in that regard. Regional Bell operating companies in 1984 in the United States of America employed 556,561 people. In 1993, that was down to 395,639. They dropped over 160,000 employees in that period--160,000 employees in approximately 10 years. The LEC's/Independents went from 180,000 down to 140,000. So now you are down 200,000 employees over that period of time. The cellular industries everybody talks about really added a whole bunch of employees. They have added 40,000. So now you are back to a net loss of 160,000. So you hear from the RBOC's, LEC's and you hear from cellulars. They are talking about jobs saved. I am down 160,000 thus far. Are you going to keep going in that direction and give me more of the same? The broadcast industry has gone from 170,000 down to 150,000, so another 20,000. Now I am up to 180,000 jobs. I bet you an awful lot of those people did not get jobs that paid the same as they previously had. In cable television, you see increased employment in cable television, 67,000 or so up to about 109,000. So you are still about 150,000 jobs or so down. We have the computer industry that we talk about an awful lot, a surprising number. I heard--I cannot remember who it was--a colleague come down and talked about we ought to do it like the computer industry has done. For your information, the computer industry in 1985 employed 542,000 Americans. Guess how many employees in 1993? 400,000 employees, down 150,000. When you are at home in your hometown meetings and they say to you, ``Senator, what is this telecommunications deregulation bill going to do for me?'' and you say, ``Jobs,'' you better be prepared to say where those jobs are going to come from. You better be prepared to answer that person who says, ``Thus far, technology has not been all that kind. I used to make $40,000 a year and now I am down to $15,000. How is that working for me?'' I hope that this particular attempt to strike this section will be rejected. As I said earlier, the reasons I would cite are the following: One, it is about the only hope we have, I believe, of improving the quality of education both in the home and in the school. It is working. It is working out there. Secondly, if you believe that the progress that is being made out there in the States right now is exciting, understand that the language in other sections of the bill takes away the incentives the RBOC's have had to do those things. It truly does. There is no disputing that. In every single State--every single State--where this kind of effort has been made, it has been made in exchange for regulatory relief, particularly going from rate-based rate of return to price caps. The premier example is in the State of Georgia, but it is not alone. Finally, Mr. President, this well-meaning attempt to strike this section should be tabled because this is one of the few pieces of this legislation where, indeed, we are hearing from our citizens, where, indeed, we are hearing from mothers and dads and the PTA, the PTO that are coming to us and saying, ``This one is going to work. We're trying to figure out how to make computers work in our school. We are up against the property tax lid, we are up against sales and income. We are trying to figure out how to do it, and this is going to give us a little help.'' Do not believe it is a giveaway. These schools are going to make a maintenance effort on top of that. They have to. They have to spend a lot of money on software and hardware. This is just a little bit of help asked for by the companies that, indeed, can afford to do it given what this legislation allows [[Page S7988]] them to do, given what this legislation provides for them. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Several Senators addressed the Chair.

Mr. KERREY. You run a tight ship, Mr. President. I say to the Senator from South Dakota, I am not trying to unreasonably object. I am uncertain as to how much longer is a reasonable time. I myself would be surprised if I am going to talk for 30 minutes, and if no one comes down here at that particular time, between now and the time that I stop I think we can put a time on this pretty quickly. Mr. President, again I hope colleagues understand that this bill is being asked for largely by American companies and corporations that would like to do things, lines of business they currently cannot do. I have heard colleagues after I have said that say, no, we have lots of people in our State who really understand and would like to have this. That may be the case indeed. On this particular section there are quite a few people who understand the potential and positive impacts. Indeed, I would argue that--perhaps somebody has a countervailing argument--but I would argue, of all the sections, this section has more Americans excited about what might happen if this proposal were to become law. There has been more straight grassroots citizen support for this section of the bill than any other section of the bill. We have heard from companies, we have heard from a whole range of people. The Senator from Arizona raises some valid and interesting points. I do not dispute all the points he raised. But one of the points that is raised, dealing with K-12 education, where we have the largest amount of support, the distinguished Senator from Maine earlier read off a list of organizations that are in support. I will not go through all these again: American Association of School Administrators, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, school boards, and other people who understand that, if you leave the status quo in place, these schools are going to get further and further behind. That really is a given. It is not going to go away. When the distinguished Senator from Arizona comes and says there is lots of progress being made out there, it is true there is progress being made. But colleagues should not be taken in by that argument because this law takes away the incentives that schools have used to get State public service commissions to negotiate for them. That is what has been going on. What has been going on in Georgia and other States is that they have negotiated and given the regional Bell operating company the right to price differently in exchange for connecting the schools. They did not do it for eleemosynary reasons or as a consequence of saying we can give away a little of our cash flow. They did it to get something in return. Mr. President, this legislation goes into every State public service commission, and says you shall allow price cap regulation. There is no more incentive for an RBOC to negotiate the sort of things we have seen happen in State after State after State. So understand that the reason that section 310 is needed in this legislation--and it is contained significantly, I point out to colleagues, in the title III portion that calls for the end to regulation--is because in other sections of the bill, we take away the very incentives that have been used to get the progress that we have been seeing in other States. So do not come to the mistaken conclusion that if this title is stricken you are going to continue to see the kinds of progress that we have seen in States. You will not see it. It will stop. I would like to make a point and talk a little about why we need this. Again, I understand there are lots of other areas of concern-- libraries, hospitals, and so forth. My No. 1, 2, and 3 concern is the educational environment. The question is why is it important? Is there a sense of urgency attached? Is there any reason for us to be excited about this? Is there any reason to believe that the promise of this technology will be different than the promise that lots of us heard 40 years ago when people were saying we are going to put this television set in your home. They bring a television set into your room, into your home. Television was going to be a great learning technology. We are going to learn more. That was the idea. In some cases, with children's educational television, we have seen some improvement in test scores. But for many of us adults, we hold I think the correct conclusion that television has produced a distraction, larger and larger volumes of time being consumed with young people watching television, not doing homework, not doing the work required in school, and as a consequence, people say maybe this technology is just another one of those items, just another promise to do something, another easy solution to the difficult work of education. Mr. President, this technology is different. Computer technology is much different than we have seen in other educational applications, in other technology applications. We can cite research. You can use anecdotes. You can talk about any measurement you want out in your local community. But computer technology, particularly when it is network and particularly when there is access to a database outside of the school, particularly when the network concludes a connection between the home and the school itself, there are advances in mathematics, impressively so. There are advances in reading, almost counterintuitive for those of us who have seen this technology. How can you possibly learn to read and write better? But there are improvements in test scores in both areas when the technology is available to young people. The fact of the matter is this technology does offer substantial hope to do something for public education that a lot of us have begun to believe--we are wondering whether anything is going to work. We are wondering whether anything is in fact going to do something to turn around what we see as decline in test scores in many significant areas. I note that the National Assessment of Educational Performance not long ago said that high school seniors, a full third, cannot read at the basic level; that approximately a third can read at the proficiency level or above, down 10 percent from 2 years ago. You cannot graduate from high school anymore--and half of our young people will graduate and go right into the work force and are not able to read and write, and do multistep mathematics, to be able to think in creative, in complex ways, and expect to earn very much in the workplace. It may have been true when most of us went to high school and graduated that you could do that, but not anymore. Today you have to know more. You use that computer in the workplace, and you have to know a lot more besides the sorts of things that were required when I got out of high school in 1961. Mr. President, there is an urgency attached to this section. That is what I am trying to describe to my colleagues. Not only is there a demand for it. Not only in this case do we have people in the community saying: Senator Kerrey, this is one where I know it is going to help. I am not certain about all the rest, and I am a little bit nervous about what is going to rate telephone or cable. I do not know about all this promise about new jobs. I have some stats I am going to talk about later when I talk about this promise of employment. An awful lot of people [[Page S7986]] were turned out onto the bricks as a consequence of technology. They get a little nervous when I tell them there are going to be a lot of jobs. They do not know about all of that. They say to me, I know because I have seen computer technology work in my home. I have seen it work in the school. I know it can work. We are trying to network it inside our school buildings. We are trying to make progress there. What are we up against? We are up against a number of things. The people are saying to me and with schools that I have worked, that the principle among those things is that if you want to fund it, you have to fund it out of property or sales and income taxes. I am going to get to a subject that will probably put my colleagues to sleep because I talk about it perhaps too much; that is, how we fund not just education, but how we fund other things that we try, other services that we try to provide to our people. In the State of Nebraska, we have about 275,000 people in the K through 12 environment. We have 275,000 people over the age of 65. We spend $1.3 billion on that K through 12 environment, and $4.5 billion on people over 65. Now, the source of revenue for retirement and health care is payroll taxes. It is relatively easy to get that from people in the work force; apparently about 16 percent of total wages. The source of revenue for the schools is property, sales, and income tax. The incremental cost expenditures from the schools will be $50 million against the $1.3 billion base. On that retirement and health care data, the differential is going to be close to $500 million. The reason the cost increase is so low is that the people at the local level are saying: We are fed up with property tax increases, and we are not very excited about sales and income tax increases, either. And our schools get squeezed. I had a rather unpleasant encounter with an educational organization that said this is not going to be a big deal because it is only going to address the cost to the schools, about 16 percent, and phone activity is not a problem, and affordable dial tone is not a problem. It is a problem. It is true that States have been able to negotiate with the public service commissions. But that only affects interLATA costs. It does not affect long distance calls, and it does not let these kids get on line and access databases in long distance education. It does not provide the kind of high-speed activity these schools need. We are not asking for a bailout. Schools are still going to have to put a ton of money in software, a ton of money in hardware. They are going to still have to make a good-faith effort and contribution in order to make this work. This is not a subsidy that is unreasonable. It is a subsidy that is not only quite reasonable but it is a savings. If we do not provide it, we are going to lose a tremendous opportunity to bring education technology to our children and give them, I think, a learning tool that can enable them to increase math, increase reading, increase verbal scores. I have seen it work. I have looked, as I said, at research data. I have seen anecdotal evidence, as well. It in fact gets the job done. Mr. President, one of the arguments again that we hear a lot, or at least I have heard a lot--I am not sure how much it applies to this particular amendment; perhaps it does, perhaps it does not; I believe it does--is that we are giving special attention to a particular group of people, and that they do not deserve the special attention. I am not really talking about the comments of the Senator from Arizona. I heard comments made by others. Why would we want to single out one particular group? We have 100,000 school buildings in the public school system, 16,000 school districts out there, 45 million students, government-run operations, pure and simple, and we have to figure out some way to help them out. But what very often is annoying to me is the argument--and I have heard it from the business sector, mostly; it is made by businesses who have been given special protection, who have been given a monopoly franchise, and now are complaining when we give somebody else special attention. It is not like the RBOC. It is not a mom-and-pop started in Charleston, SC. This is a regulated monopoly. It is not like they started from scratch or something. It is with tremendous cash flow, and tremendous resources. I am prepared to let them compete. I am prepared to provide deregulation to them so they can get out there and go head to head. I think there will be benefits from it. But please spare me when it comes to trying to help 45 million school children with this argument that I am giving them special attention. For god's sake. You would not even exist were it not for a franchise granted to you by the people of the United States of America. At least, that is how I see it. I would be very interested to hear, and I asked earlier if the Senator from South Carolina would be willing to give his own description of that. It seems to me that when a regional Bell operating company--I have good friends, at least I used to have good friends in that particular sector--when they come and say why would you want to provide special attention to these schools like this, it seems to me that I am deserving of saying to them, well, did we not give you a special franchise? Did we not give you a special right to do business in a monopoly way? And did we not keep all the internet competition away so that you could do all this stuff over the years? Am I missing something, I ask my friend from South Carolina?

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I say to----

Mr. KERREY. I will be pleased to yield.

Mr. KERREY. I thank very much the Senator from South Carolina. Mr. President, this amendment is important, but I say to the Senators who will be perhaps watching, or the staffs who will be over the next 30 minutes trying to figure out OK, what is going to happen next? Where are we in this piece of legislation? Remember, there are 9 sectors of the telecommunications industry, all directed to approximately 100 million American households. That is where they do business. They are selling to commercial customers as well, but they are focused on those households, and that is where we are going to hear whether this legislation is successful or not. That is where, a year from now, a year and a half, 2 years from now, you are going to hear people say, you know, this really did work. You were telling us it was going to work. It did work. Nine sectors. I will run through them briefly again. Broadcasting is the big one, cable is one, telephone is one, Hollywood and music recording--that is music and the images--publishing is one, computers is one, consumer electronics, which is the subject of this particular amendment, wireless is one, and satellite is one. All nine of them, Mr. President, represent hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of sales into the American household on a constant basis. They are making judgments about what to purchase and what to buy. What has happened is that the technology has changed so that it is possible now for people to buy in a package, and what we are trying to do is give them real competitive choice. It is going to be traumatic. What we need to do is to say what is more important to us, the trauma faced by those consumers, those citizens in the households, or the trauma of businesses as they face competition for the first time in their business lives? Mr. President, not only does this amendment need to be adopted, but we need to change the underlying bill so that the Department of Justice, which has been the prime mover in this--I know that many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle think the Department of Justice should be left out, with just a consultant role, if necessary. I really urge you to think about that. That is going to be the next order of business. The DOJ, the Department of Justice, is the one that started this in motion in 1948, in a consent decree, with the Department of Justice action against AT&T. That is what produced the competitive environment in long distance. If you hook the Department of Justice of that Republican administration to another Republican administration to a Democrat administration, they have consistently been the best advocates in this Nation's Capital for competition. They are the ones that said: Look, I know you want to own all the market. I understand what you are trying to do. But you cannot. We have to keep this competitive because not only will consumers benefit, but the economy will benefit as well. I understand people said oh, no, that is not going to work. I have talked to the companies about this. I know why they do not like it. The Department of Justice needs to be more than just a consultant in this thing. Otherwise, I tell you, Mr. President, my colleagues, I think you are going to regret this vote. You are not going to get the kind of vigorous competition that is needed in all of these sectors, in a package fashion, that is going to have our consumers say I was paying $120 a month for all of my information, all these things taken together, all nine of them, and now I am paying $80. This is terrific. This is working. Disregard, if possible, the companies that are coming in and saying, gee, I do not want to do it that way because this is going to be a better way. Think about those consumers in the households. Think about those individual families in the households. This amendment is going to look a lot better, the DOJ role is going to look a lot better under those circumstances. I suggest, Mr. President, that another particular portion of this legislation that says a local telephone company can buy a local cable company, we cannot allow that in the local area, because then you are only going to get one line to 75 percent of the homes. So I hope as we go through this thing colleagues will see that there is an intent with this legislation to produce a competitive environment about which, if we do it, the citizens we represent will say this did work; we are glad you provided that for us. It is not completely unregulated. It is not completely unfettered competition. The structure here that we are trying to produce allows competition to satisfy not just a public interest that we understand is still present but also a consumer interest. So once again I understand very much the concern raised by the distinguished Senator from Kentucky and perhaps there is some accommodation that can be made in the area of a study. I do not know. I certainly would not necessarily object to that, if the distinguished Senator from Maine could work it out. But I think we have to really make sure we understand that if competition is something we are going to use to reduce prices and increase quality, then we have to turn back some folks who are going to be coming to us, and I really think the toughest one of all is going to be the Department of Justice role. And I understand people are digging in on it, but I hope you do not dig in too much because you are the one who is going to have to live by this vote. You are the one who is going to have to explain whether this works or not. I would not be on the floor all day today and last night not feeling very strongly as I do. Unless we get this thing right, we are going to live to regret it.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, may we have order in the Chamber?

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I know there is some confusion. I see my friend from South Carolina and South Dakota as well. I have a great deal of respect for them. I take a great deal of interest in this legislation. They have been kind to allow a member of my staff to sit in on lots of the deliberation. But I want my colleagues to understand there is a lot in this bill that is not very well understood. I declare straight out I will not vote for this bill in its current form. I am here because I see great promise in telecommunications. I see great promise, in fact, in deregulating the telecommunications industry and using competition to regulate as opposed to having Government mandates and so forth do the job. But in 1986 I signed a deregulation bill. I may be, for all I know, the only Member of Congress who can come to the floor and say ``I signed a deregulation bill for telecommunications.'' And I know that deregulation does not mean competition. You can have deregulation and have no competition. I call upon my colleagues who wonder about the impact of their votes. There is a great deal of concern about, for example, the budget resolution we took up. ``Gee, what is this going to do to me? Is it going to be difficult to explain at home? There are lots of things in there that might become unpopular and am I going to pay for voting yes on the budget resolution?" We have lots of issues that are extremely controversial. This is a lot more controversial than meets the eye. I ask my colleagues who are considering voting yes for this and want to move it through quickly to recall what life was like in 1984 when Mr. Baxter, from the Department of Justice, signed a consent decree divesting AT&T of the Bell operating companies, filing that decree with the Federal court here in Washington, DC. I remember I was Governor of Nebraska at the time and I can tell you, you could have selected a thousand people at random and asked them this question: Would you like Congress to put the Bell companies back together? Do you like what Baxter and Judge Greene did? And of the thousand people I will bet 998 people would have said ``Reverse it. Put it back together. We do not like the confusion that we have. We do not like trying to figure out all this stuff.'' It was not popular. Do not let anybody be misled by this. This is going to create considerable confusion in the early years. You are not likely to be greeted by a round of applause by households, consumers, who have not been consulted about this legislation. This is not a Contract With America. Most of the things that we have taken up in this Senate have been carefully polled and researched to determine whether or not they are popular. I have heard, whether it is the balanced budget amendment or the budget resolution or term limits, all sorts of other things, people come down to the floor and say, ``In November the people of the United States of America spoke and here is what they meant.'' I have heard speaker after speaker say that. And in many cases I agreed with them, because I ran in November of 1994. But I did not have a single citizen, when I was out campaigning, come up to me and say: ``Boy, make sure when you go back, if you get reelected, if you go back and represent us, make sure you go back there and deregulate the phone companies. Make sure you go back there and deregulate the cable industry. Make sure. Bob, make sure, if you get back there, get rid of the ownership restrictions on television stations, on radio stations. Because that is what I want. I am really excited about all this stuff. I really think there is a lot in this for me. That is what I want. That is the sort of thing I would like to have you go back there and do.'' The American people have not been polled on this one. The distinguished majority leader came down and said there is bipartisan support. It is not a Democratic issue. It is not a Republican issue. He is quite right. It is not. This is an issue that has been discussed at length and I discussed it at length with many corporations that want to be deregulated. They want to be deregulated. In many cases they are right. But if you listen to the rhetoric, just this far, you would think that the current regulation is holding back the telecommunications industry to such an extent that we have lousy telephone service, that we have noncompetitive industries. You would think America was somehow backwards compared to all the rest of the world. That is not true. If you look at the OECD examinations of our industries, telecommunications, including the telephone companies, are among the most competitive in the world and among the most productive in the world. It does not mean, because a company is regulated, that it is not productive or that it is not competitive or that somehow it is going to produce an unsatisfactory thing for the American people. I am telling my colleagues a lot of people will come down here and say, ``It must be good. There is a lot of bipartisan support for it.'' Walk up to the desk, check out a lot of these amendments, see which way people are voting--this one is going to be remembered. This vote is a big vote. In my State I have about a million households. If you talk telecommunications to those households they do not talk faxes. They are not thinking about enhanced digital processing and all that stuff. They are saying, ``What is my dial tone going to cost me? What is my cable going to cost me?'' That is what they talk about. I think we need to come down to this floor and ask ourselves a question. What is this bill going to do for those households? What is it going to do for the consumer? I hear people say it is going to create lots of new jobs. In the course of this debate we are going to come down and examine the question: Who has been creating the jobs? (Mr. LOTT assumed the chair).

Mr. KERREY. Where are the jobs going? One of the things I hear from people, an awful lot of telecommunications industry people working for the telecommunications company, is substantial downsizing. I say, ``Do you want to deregulate? Are you going do get more jobs?'' They say, ``I do not know. You know. It has not been working too good thus far.'' I am down here to talk about what this is going to do for the many households, and for the American consumers. I look forward to the debate. There is much in this legislation that I support. I believe in many cases deregulation will produce a competitive environment that will benefit the American consumer, and that will benefit the American household. But let no one be mistaken. When we pass this piece of legislation in the Senate and go to conference with the House, and get final passage in the early days, do not expect to have the people who vote for you say you were right. ``Boy, this thing has really worked.'' It may take 9 or 10 years, which is what happened with divestiture. It took us a good 10 years before people began to say, ``Wait a minute. This is working. Competition is bringing the price down. The quality is going up. This appears to be in fact generating something beneficial to me.'' So I would like to get a little fundamental here. I very often, as I am sure the distinguished Presiding Officer does and other Members do, get [[Page S7910]] asked, ``What is it that you do? What do you in Washington, DC?'' Do I just come down to the floor and give speeches? Do I just answer my telephone and answer letters and do constituent service for the people are having trouble with the IRS, the EPA, or various other agencies of the government? Yes. I try to explain to them I am involved with writing laws. That is what we do here. We write laws; and that the laws matter. I am not a lawyer. I very often wonder whether or not one of the most important things lawyers do is write the laws that are so darned confusing we have to hire them in order to tell us what is in them. But the longer I am on the job, the longer I am on the job of being in politics and being a politician, the law is becoming more important to me. I see that they are alive. They have an impact on people, and they make a difference. This bill has about 144 pages in it. Every single word is important. Every single phrase here is going to affect something. We all know it. We have them coming into the office saying we are concerned about this particular phrase, we are concerned about this particular paragraph. I have heard it already referenced--some of the agreements have been difficult to get. They have been difficult to get because every time you do something somebody says, ``Gee. That is going to affect me in an adverse way.'' The distinguished Senator from Alaska had an amendment earlier that paid for the cost of the universal service, and one of the things that he did--I believe he is quite right--the National Association of Broadcasters is going to object. There are going to be people who say, ``I do not like where you got the money.'' Everything we do in this legislation we know affects one interest group or another. But it is also going to affect more than almost anything we have discussed thus far this year; Indeed, perhaps for a long, long time, every single American household. If you have a telephone in your home, it is going to affect you. If you have a cable line running into your household, this bill is going to affect you. I just said to citizens out there who are wondering about what the mumbo jumbo is about, you are going to hear a lot. You had better pay attention because, if you have a telephone, and you if you have a cable line coming into your household, you had better pay attention to this legislation because it is going to have a big impact upon you. You are going to hear a lot of people coming down saying this is going to be good for you. You did not ask for it. You did not say, ``By gosh. Let us change this law.'' You did not ask for this thing. But we have figured out this is going to be good for you. And make no mistake about it. We have really paid careful attention to this legislation. We know exactly what it is going to do. Mr. President, I believe that the American people deserve as a consequence of the impact of this legislation a good and healthy and lengthy debate. I heard the distinguished occupant of the Chair earlier say he hopes this thing does not degenerate into a filibuster. I do not intend to filibuster this thing. I point out with great respect to the Senator from Mississippi that 1822 would have passed last year if it had not been filibustered and slowed up and tied up by people who said we do not want this thing to go. This would have been law last year I believe. I do not know if the Senator from South Carolina can confirm that. I do not want to tie this thing up with filibusters and delays. I intend, when there is a manager's amendment or incidental amendment, to examine the language because the language is important. It is going to have an effect on people. I say, again for emphasis, that I believe this vote is going to be a lot more controversial the further away you get from it than people suspect today. One of the things about laws that citizens need to understand is that very often it is about power. That is to say, who has the power? I joined with, again the distinguished Senator from South Carolina, in voting against tort reform bill a little earlier because in my judgment that was about power. That was about saying to the citizens of this country you are getting swept away saying the trial lawyers are making life miserable for you. Just ask yourself this question: You get hurt out there, you have a problem out there. Who is going to help you? Is congress going to help you? Are you going to call up your Congressmen and say, ``I am getting abused by the phone and cable companies. I do not like what is going on out there. Do you think Congress is going to rush to your defense? Do you think it will be possible for you to get the agencies of the Federal Government to rally to your cause? And you probably do not even have enough money to buy an airplane ticket to come back here, and if you came back here you will not know where to go. This is about power. And regulations are in place to protect the interests of the people. That is what they are there for. Let us deregulate. I have a little case going on right now in Omaha, NE, that illustrates what I am talking about. We have a plant in Nebraska which employees a couple of hundred people. Unfortunately, the company processes lead, and they put a lot of lead in the air and water. And it has been determined--and no one disputes it--that lead damages newborn babies without dispute. We do not have leaded gasoline any longer because we have decided that is the case. We have a Clean Air Act, we have a Clean Water Act. This company has been out of compliance for over 15 years. Guess how we are going to resolve it? Do you think we resolved it because a U.S. Senator intervened on their behalf? Do you think the Congress came to the rescue? Do you think it was the administrative branch? No, sir. A couple of citizens filed a suit in court. It was the judiciary. It was the right of a citizen to go to court and say, ``This company is not obeying the law of the land. I am going to insist that they obey the law of the land.'' Mr. President, make no mistake about it. This piece of legislation is about who controls the airways, who controls your telephone, who controls the information? It is about power. I hear a lot of people say, ``Well, we ought to get the government out of that.'' Let us have a debate about what the government should or should not do on behalf of the citizens. I am prepared to do that. I think it is a healthy debate. Let us not presume it is quite so easy as just saying competition is the best regulator, which I heard three or four or five times. Competition does not give us clean air. Competition does not give us clean water. Competition would not likely make every single factory in the workplace in America safe. Maybe somebody wants to come down here and say that is the case. I get 1,000 Americans who say, ``You tell me.'' Do you trust the corporation? You have a corporation out there that is desperately worried about their quarterly profits. They are worried about bottom line. They have the shareholders out there to perform for, and they have to make a decision. They have 1,000 people working for them, and have been working for them let us say 30 years; 30,000 man and woman hours in that corporation. They have to make a decision to lay all thousand of them off, and give them no fringe benefits, no severance pay, no retirement. All of those things add cost to the corporation. I ask my Americans. Do you trust that corporation? Do you think that corporation is going do say ``No. I think it is right and decent; I do not care what the stock holders say, what Wall Street says; I am going to ignore all of those people up in New York City; I do not care what they say; I am going to do the right thing; I am going to give you severance pay; I am going to provide you with your health care, and take care of that retirement benefit because I care about you; you are a human being; I am not going to treat you like trash?'' I do not believe many Americans are going to say that is likely to be the case. If a company is a mom and pop shop, owned by an individual which owns 100 percent of the stock, that might be different. But when that company CEO worries about the value of its share, that companies CEO does things differently. They have to. I do not say they are doing the wrong thing. I do not blame them for doing that. But please do not come and say that the market is going to get the job rewards a much different set of values than the values that I have just described with these thousand families. So again, the next thing I say to citizens who are wondering about these 144 pages and all of the amendments that will be offered, it is about power and power over your lives, power to deliver you information, power to give you a phone service, power to give you video information, power to give you the things that you say that you want. For your information, a lot of people who are coming down here saying get the government out of that are very strongly supportive of unfortunately a title offered by the senior Senator from Nebraska, title 4, which said we need to have a lot more government involvement when it comes to regulating. I understand there is going to be some amendment to make even tougher penalties. That is popular. That one we all know. People are fed up with obscenity and they are fed up with the stuff they see on television and they want us to do something about it. And title IV attempts to do that. I hope we are a bit careful, to say the least, with title IV, but title IV is more Government, it is not less. Title IV is the statement by Members of Congress that says the market does not work when it comes to obscenity. Do some people want to come here and tell me it does? Does somebody want to come down here and say the market is the best regulator of obscenity? I do not think so. I do not think there is going to be a single Member come down here and say just let the market take care of it; we do not care what kids are getting over the Internet. We do not care what is coming into homes. No. In that instance the market goes out the window. In that instance we say Time/Warner is putting out slime. We have to regulate them in some fashion. So, Mr. President, again, I have a great deal of respect and appreciation for the managers of this bill. They have done an awful lot of work on it. I do intend to carefully examine the amendments that are offered. I do believe that increased competition can be enormously beneficial. I believe that it can, properly done, result in lower prices, higher quality service, particularly, as I said, if it is done in a fashion that lets everybody compete. Again, I do not underestimate the difficulty of this. I am going to have a lot of explaining to do to my citizens to tell them why this is good for them because in the early days when they get competition they are going to get confused. And in the early days they may even get some price increases. They may find themselves paying higher telephone service. They may find themselves paying higher cable. We do not know. We are saying let the market set the price, in general, once you get to the final end of this thing. Let the cost determine what people are going to pay. We have a very small amount of subsidy in the universal service fund. We have an education provision that some people are going to come down here and try to strike, saying the market ought to have taken care of that. After having given speeches saying this is good for health care, this is good for education, they do not even want to have that provision in this piece of legislation. I have many problems with this bill, Mr. President. I do believe the Department of Justice needs a role in this. I do not think consultation is enough. I would cite as case No. 1 why consultation is not enough, the very thing that Members will use when they are saying that competition works, and that is Mr. Baxter and Judge Greene getting together, the Department of Justice getting together with a Federal judge and putting together a consent decree. It was the Department of Justice. It was the Department of Justice that gave us the competitive environment. It was not the Federal Communcations Commission. I am not calling for increased authority, increased power, but I want them to do more than consult. They understand competition. The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice understands where and when competition is, and they are about the only ones in this town that, at least by my measurement, are out there fighting to make sure that that marketplace in fact is working. I have serious problems saying that telephone companies can acquire cable companies inside of their area immediately. Mr. President, I believe we have to have two lines coming into the home. I believe you have to have--if it is going to be fiber or some kind of combination of coax and fiber, I do not know what it is going to be, but I want two lines coming into my home. I have heard people talk an awful lot about competition, and I have heard all the companies coming in saying they want a competitive environment. This is one thing I know. Competition to me means I have choice. Again, this idea of choice is a two-edged sword. You are going to have a lot of households out there that are not going to be terribly pleased with this new choice they have, and they are not going to be terribly happy when they see what that choice might do. We have to be prepared to stay with this thing. To my mind, choice means if a company does not give me what I want, I can take my business someplace else. Competition means to me I can go wherever I want and get the service I want. And I believe in many ways this bill does just that. The requirements of unbundling, of dialing parity, the requirements that are in this legislation in title I, in my judgment, provide a good basis for us to have a competitive environment. Allowing the phone companies to go out and buy cable inside their own area, Mr. President, is going to restrict competition immediately. We are not going to have the local cable company and the phone company competing because the phone company is going to have an incentive to buy them. If they buy them, it ends that competition. I am prepared to hear arguments about that, but I think allowing this cable-Bellcore ownership in the local area does precisely the opposite of what this bill intends to do. The other objections and problems that I have with the bill I will come later to the floor and try to address. I see the Senator from Pennsylvania is down here. I suspect that he wants to make a statement. I just wanted to stand up at this point in time and say to the Senator from South Dakota and the Senator from South Carolina I do not intend to stand down here and stop this piece of legislation from being enacted. But I do intend to stand down here and examine every amendment that is proposed and make sure it is an amendment that I agree to for all the reasons I cited earlier. The consumers of this country, the households of this country have not been consulted. We are presuming that it is going to be good for them because we have talked to American corporations and they are saying it is going to be good for them. They are saying this is going to be good for consumers. The corporations are saying it is going to be good for those households. They are saying it is good because they are getting more jobs, higher service, better quality, and lower prices. That is what they are saying. It is not coming from households. This is not coming from the people of the United States of America, whether it is the people of South Dakota, the people of Nebraska, South Carolina, Mississippi, or Pennsylvania. We believe that we have something here that is going to be good for them, but they have not come to us and said: Please do this because we think this needs to be done. So I again will have many opportunities to stand and talk, and I look forward to what I hope will be a straightforward and healthy and honest debate, something that I hope does produce a final change in the 1934 Communications Act which I think does need to be changed. But at the end of the day I wish to be able to say to the consumers of Nebraska that this is going to be good for you. I wish to able to say to every household in Nebraska you are going to get benefits from it and these are the benefits that I believe are going to occur. At this stage of the game, Mr. President, I cannot support this legislation for the reasons cited, and I look forward to engaging in what I said I hope will be a constructive debate. Mr. PRESSLER addressed the Chair.

Mr. KERREY. But I object.

Mr. KERREY. Reserving the right to object, Mr. President.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I have reviewed the amendment that the distinguished Senator from Alaska is offering, and as I understand it, what it does is it offsets an adverse score that this bill has received from the Congressional Budget Office. CBO has said this bill, in particular the universal service fund, is going to cost $7 billion over the next 5 years. Even though that is $3 billion less than what the current universal service fund does, there is the need to come up with $7 billion to avoid a budget point of order. Now, I point out that under the budget resolution that was passed, when was that, 1\1/2\ weeks, 2 weeks ago, I believe that the Commerce Committee is going to be looking at having to reconcile $20 billion, $30 billion anyway, so you are going to have your hands full. The committee will be trying to come up with money to try to get within the recommendations of that budget resolution. What this amendment does, it comes up with that $7.1 billion in the following fashion. It extends the spectrum actions that are scheduled to expire in 1998 for another 2 years, generating $4.5 billion according to CBO, and then it does something that is of particular interest, I believe, Mr. President--and many people would ordinarily oppose this but they are not--and that is the broadcasters have today assigned a 2-gigahertz spectrum in order to do auxiliary services. When they are going out in the field and they are doing some broadcasting out in the field, they use that 2-gigahertz spectrum. This amendment would transfer that over a 7-year period from 2 gigahertz to 4 gigahertz, and then that 2-gigahertz spectrum would be auctioned off, generating an estimated $3.8 billion over the 5-year period. Under normal circumstances, the National Association of Broadcasters would probably oppose this, but there are other things in this bill that they like, so they are not going to oppose it. I believe that the distinguished Senator from Alaska has made a good amendment that will in fact cover the $7.1 billion. And so, therefore, Mr. President, I will not object to this being accepted by unanimous consent. Mr. STEVENS addressed the Chair.

Mr. KERREY. I have great respect for the Senators from South Carolina and South Dakota, but I have not read the amendment. It was just brought to me. It is 40-some pages long and I understand there is lots in it. I cannot. I object.

Mr. KERREY. Reserving the right to object, is this just a unanimous consent to read the amendment?

Mr. KERREY. Reserving the right to object, Mr. President, what are we doing here?

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to withhold the request for the quorum call.

Mr. KERREY. Reserving the right to object, Mr. President, I am not objecting to having it laid aside. I am here to inquire what the procedure is going to be. The Senator is offering an amendment and is not going do debate it here this evening? It will be laid aside? I have not seen this copy. The Senator is not proposing it be accepted at this moment?

Mr. KERREY. I will not object, but I will inform the manager of this bill that I will not give unanimous consent to this being accepted until I have read it and signed off on it.

Mr. KERREY. Is the Senator asking to set a time for a vote?

Mr. KERREY. Reserving the right to object.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.