J. Kerrey

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Yes.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that John Libonati, a legislative fellow with the Appropriations Committee, be permitted the privilege of the floor during the remainder of the debate on S. 735.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I offer this amendment on behalf of myself and Senator Shelby of Alabama, Senator D'Amato of New York and Senator Mikulski of Maryland. The amendment that I am offering authorizes funding of $262 million over 5 years for the U.S. Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Of this, $100 million goes to BATF and $162 million goes to the U.S. Secret Service. The substitute we are considering contains an authorization of $1.779 billion from the violent crime reduction trust fund for the various law enforcement agencies. Over 5 years, it authorizes $1.226 billion for the FBI, $400 million for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and $100 million for the U.S. attorneys, $25 million for INS, and $28 million for the U.S. Customs Service. I trust the evaluation of how allocations occur across various law enforcement agencies was done in a very thoughtful and deliberative fashion. However, I believe the exclusion of ATF and the Secret Service from the allocation of resources inside of this antiterrorism bill will impair Treasury's capacity to engage in antiterrorism efforts. Thus, I offer this amendment to authorize resources for both the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Secret Service. Since 1970, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has been mandated to enforce the criminal and regulatory provisions of the Federal explosives law. ATF has regulatory oversight of the legal explosives industry in excess of 10,000 licensees and permittees. ATF personnel have unequaled experience in [[Page S7735]] identifying the postblast explosive devices, components, and logistics involved in investigating postblast crime scenes of any size. The fiscal year 1995 supplemental and rescissions conference report, just approved by this body, provides quarter-year funding for the hiring of 175 new agents, inspectors, and intelligence analysts for ATF, as requested by the administration. These positions will be used to form four new national response teams for the purpose of responding within 24 hours to assist State and local law enforcement and fire service personnel in on-site investigations in the event of an explosion or fire. Each team is composed of veteran special agents having postblast, fire cause and origin expertise, forensic chemist and explosive technology expertise. The 59 inspection and intelligence analyst positions will be devoted to the inspection and investigation of groups and/or individuals in violation of Federal explosives laws. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has been much maligned over the years. Much of this criticism, in my view, has been unjustified. I am quick to point out, some of the criticism is justified. This is an agency, like virtually any other in Government, that has not been operated in a perfect fashion. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms does not enact the laws related to guns, but is instead sworn to execute the laws which originate from this body, that is the U.S. Congress. In my opinion, if we do not like the laws, we ought to change them rather than taking, in this case, action that might make it difficult for ATF to carry out the intent of the law. On those occasions when mistakes may have been made in the execution of laws, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has undergone extensive independent review by a diverse group of respected professionals. It has taken its fair share of justified criticism and its fair share of justified praise as well. Despite ATF's contributions to cases of great notoriety, ATF rarely receives their due credit. The World Trade Center bombing serves as the most recent example. While that investigation was a massive joint law enforcement effort, it was an ATF agent's determination and ingenuity that resulted in the discovery of one of the most significant pieces of evidence in that tedious investigation, the vehicle ID number. ATF's contributions to the investigations of over 1,600 arson cases last year were not realized by the majority of the American people. Again, ATF just did its job. Turning to the Secret Service, Mr. President, the White House complex symbolizes the executive branch of Government. More than 1 million American citizens a year tour the White House, and tens of thousands of White House complex appointments are processed during that same period of time. With the recent closing of Pennsylvania Avenue to vehicular traffic, pedestrian traffic will increase above and beyond the thousands of people who view the White House and surrounding areas. The White House carries with it both national security and symbolic value which must be protected. Publicized threats of the White House complex in the past several years have caused us to be not just concerned about the safety of the President and the President's family, but also concerned about the executive branch personnel that very often operate inside the White House, as well as other individuals operating and doing business at the White House. The April 19 Oklahoma City tragedy served to heighten the collective awareness and is, in part, the catalyst to which the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue is generally attributed. I know from personal experience that what many people saw with the Oklahoma City bombing is the idea that it would be relatively easy now to take a different approach if they had a desire to attack the White House, attack the President, or attack other personnel. Thus, the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue, though it is, in my judgment, an appropriate action, it is just one step in trying to make sure we do all we can to protect this symbol of the United States of America and protect the people who work and do business in it. Consistent with the recommendations from a recently completed review of White House security, the amendment I am offering will authorize security enhancements at the White House to help the Secret Service ensure that the White House and the First Family are not at risk. Press reports I have seen since the Oklahoma City bombing indicate threats to the President have increased by 100 percent. The amendment I am offering as well, Mr. President, authorizes funding for the hiring of 250 additional positions for the Presidential protection division, uniformed division officers, countersniper teams, foot and vehicular patrols, canine officers, and intelligence and physical security specialists. In addition, it authorizes the purchase of technical security equipment and devices and will permit physical security structural enhancements around the White House complex. The Secret Service is responsible as well for the protection of foreign heads of state and Presidential candidates. This October, the U.N. General Assembly is projected to have its largest gathering of heads of states, including a Papal visit. All these will require increased Secret Service personnel. In approximately 7 months, the Secret Service will begin the year- long task of protecting Presidential candidates. How can these challenges and responsibilities not be addressed in any discussion of terrorism? The Secret Service has for over 125 years been responsible for the integrity of our currency. Counterfeiting of U.S. currency has in recent years shifted dramatically from domestic to foreign production and trends point toward the distribution of high-quality counterfeit U.S. currency by terrorist organizations, as well as arms traffickers and drug dealers. Pursuing these investigations related to foreign production of counterfeit U.S. currency by such groups should also be a focus in counterterrorism legislation. The Secret Service possesses unique forensic capabilities relating to handwriting, fingerprinting, ink and paper, just to name a few. They have in the past and will continue in the future to provide these capabilities to assist the investigative efforts of other Federal, State, and local agencies. While I do not argue that the FBI holds much of the responsibility in combating terrorism, it seems to me the challenges and responsibility of Treasury law enforcement agencies have been overlooked. The bill we are considering is entitled the ``Comprehensive Terrorism Prevention Act of 1995,'' but I do not believe it can be comprehensive unless we include funding for both the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Secret Service. Mr. President, I appreciate the manager of the bill allowing me to offer the amendment at this particular time. I urge the adoption of this amendment.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Fifteen minutes.

Mr. KERREY. I thank the Senator from Nebraska. May I ask the senior Senator from Nebraska, does he intend, on the time he controls, to respond to the statement of the junior Senator from Minnesota just made earlier that there are no Democrats willing to participate in deficit reduction; that this whole problem was created by wasteful spending on the part of Democrats? I intended to come to the floor to talk about something else, to try to say some things that might forge a bipartisan consensus. But I find myself being provoked by the comments of the junior Senator from Minnesota. I am wondering if the Senator intends to respond.

Mr. KERREY. I will pleased to. I will confine my remarks to the amendment at hand, Mr. President. Mr. President, I must say, I have some difficulty with the amendment at hand because it seems to me what we are basically saying is we want to take the $170 billion that probably will not materialize. In order to get $170 billion in savings, this Congress would have to come together in a bipartisan fashion for 7 straight years, and each committee reconciling out and voting the savings. We would have to follow the 7-year blueprint before the money appears. I must say, I feel somewhat uncomfortable, to say the least, taking savings created from cuts that I do not like anyway to mitigate the impact of cuts that I do not like. So what I choose to do instead is talk again about one of the fundamental weaknesses that I see in this budget resolution, because it is nonbinding and because, as I see it--I have added a couple without the use of the calculator, so I may have this wrong--$519 billion of the reconciliation instructions go to the Finance Committee. So I will have, as well as others, the opportunity to go to the Finance Committee and challenge some of the underlying assumptions, not the least of which is that we are not going to do anything about retirement this year. I appreciate the difficulties that the Budget Committee had in putting together this set of nonbinding instructions. So those of us who, like Senator Simpson, believe that retirement should be on the table, that unless and until we have addressed that, it is going to be difficult for us to actually get our budget balanced, we will have that opportunity to do it at some later date. The Senator from Washington earlier made the point, when apparently the distinguished Senator from North Dakota was down on the floor earlier taking about this problem. I alert colleagues again: I think the effort on the part of both the chairman and the ranking member to produce this document is quite an extraordinary accomplishment. I point out, nonetheless, that inside the budget document, it calls for the deficit to go from $240 billion down to $114.9 billion, if I can read my own writing, in the year 2002. What we do is basically use what the law says. The law says we use the unified budget. The Social Security revenues are separate. But in terms of adding everything up, we bring Social Security into the equation. It is only because Social Security generates some $48 billion in surplus this year to a $114 billion surplus in the year 2002. Again, I have not run the numbers on this. But I guess since we go to 2013 and start paying out more than we are taking in, my guess is that may be the peak; that $114 billion may be the peak. It may start declining after that, which is going to put additional pressure on all domestic spending. I say to my colleagues that one of the things which has stayed constant in this town obviously is not political rhetoric. That blows hot and cold. But the one thing that stays constant in a very impressive fashion throughout all the imaginations about taxing is not enough, too much; that except for World War II and Vietnam, we have pulled from the United States economy about 19\1/2\ percent of GDP in the form of taxes. It stayed relatively constant over that period of time. The underlying thing on our budget, and driving larger and larger, are these mandated items. They include retirement, they include health care, they include both the means-tested programs, such as AFDC and food stamps, as well as the non-means-tested programs, such as the agriculture program which, I might point out, is a relatively small amount, Medicare, Social Security, and other kinds of retirement programs. The law says, as a consequence of either contribution or deciding that eligibility is deserved, you pay it out and you do not have to come to the floor of the Senate and vote on it. What is happening is that mandated account, plus that interest, is driving higher and higher. And, I regret, it may be that the Democrats were not as aggressive as we should have been. It may have been that it is too controversial. As we obviously see, it was retirement. But I regret that we do not see a change in that in the budget resolution. The budget resolution requires us to go to about 25 percent discretionary spending in the year 2002 down from 34 percent today. I note with interest that the senior Senator from Oregon has an amendment to come down and restore some costs and protect NIH. I notice the Senator from Iowa has an amendment to do the same in education. The problem is that little amendments to the budget resolution will not fix this problem. When the senior Senator from Oregon came to the U.S. Senate, 70 percent of the budget was controlled by the Appropriations Committee; 70 percent was appropriated, 30 percent was mandatory spending, and then interest. This year, as I indicated, it will be 34 percent. By the time a baby born this year is a senior in high school, it will be zero, even with this budget resolution passed. So I urge my colleagues, regardless of how this resolution shakes out, I hope that the alternative that a group of us will present, as I indicated in a previous speech, will be accepted because I think we are going to need a lot of bipartisan support not just this year but the next year and the year after to explain to the American people what needs to be done to bring the cost of these mandated programs in line. I heard it said that these cuts in Medicare are going to have a terrible impact. Indeed, I suspect they could, depending upon how the Finance Committee wrote the legislation. But I say to those who are really alarmed by the prospects of those cuts, according again to the document--I unfortunately have read Senate Concurrent Resolution 13, which is relatively small--we start with budget authority this year of $171.9 billion for HI, and $61.2 billion for supplemental medical. So I have $230 billion this year, growing to $370 billion. We will have $370 billion authorized in the year 2002. So, if anything, one has to, even with this budget resolution, take a look at overall health care spending and say, ``My gosh, yes.'' The Budget Committee has been very bold and very gutsy in putting this number out. But, if anything, Mr. President, we may not have gone far enough. I do not suggest that we need to necessarily cut any more, but I do think we have to ask ourselves the question, are we subsidizing people who do not need to be subsidized? We will have $230 billion this year in Medicare. We will have another $80 billion in Medicaid. That is $310 billion. We have $90 billion going out in the form of tax deductions. I notice that when people get really excited about going after tax entitlements and I come and say, let us look at the deductibility of health insurance, they get sort of pale and drop that off their list. With another $15 billion going out to the VA, another $15 billion going out to Army, Air Force, and Navy health care, a substantial amount of expenditures, well in excess of $400 billion, going out for health care, I do not think the problem here is that we are not spending enough. I think one of the biggest problems we have is whether or not we have the courage to say to those who do not need to be subsidized, you may need to pay some more. I noted earlier that one of my colleagues--I saw the dueling charts go on back here, and I saw in the Democratic Cloakroom the chart showing the comparative analysis between what Members of Congress get in the way of health care and what Medicare beneficiaries get in the way of health care, the suggestion being that Medicare beneficiaries already get less than what Members of Congress do. If somebody wants to bring an amendment striking Congress down to the level of Medicare, I would vote for it. But the problem is we have a lot of employees we have hired on and we are looking to try to provide them with health care benefits, and it is their health care benefits we are talking about here. If anybody wants to come and say that people ought to pay according to capacity to pay, I am ready to vote for that. I do think one of the most difficult things that we have going with health care today is that we may have 20 million or so people in the work force going to work, sometimes working two or three jobs, doing all they possibly can, but they are not generating enough output to get paid enough to be able to afford high-quality health care. We have subsidies in place for people who can afford it. So when the Finance Committee gets down to looking at the reconciliation of numbers, I think there will be plenty of opportunity even with the money allocated for us to do the right thing. The question is, are we going to have the capacity either politically or in our own guts to come to the American people and say that this is not going to be an easy thing; it is not a free lunch involved. I say in conclusion, I appreciate very much the leadership particularly of the senior Senator from Nebraska who over the years has been voting with Republicans, has been doing the right thing when it comes to deficit reduction. This has not been somebody who comes down with knee-jerk votes against every single spending cut. This is a man who has been down here for the entire 18 years that he has served the people of Nebraska, as the distinguished Senator from New Mexico has as well. I think we are fortunate to have them leading us on this budget debate. We have a lot of very difficult decisions to make if we are going to reduce the size of this deficit and get it in balance and get us to a point where we not only restore the confidence of the American people in us as an institution but do as we all say we want to do, which is to provide a better economic future for our children and for our grandchildren. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. KERREY. Eight minutes will be fine.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, first of all, let me begin this by saying that I believe that the Senator from New Mexico, Senator Domenici, chairman of the Budget Committee, has made a good-faith effort to produce a budget resolution that frankly few predicted was likely to occur. It reduces the deficit over the next seven years by $961 billion, reduces spending, and at the end of that 7-year period, if you exclude Social Security, you have a balanced budget. It results in a significantly smaller Government. It gives us the potential of having lower taxes as well. I must say, Mr. President, again, I believe this is a solid and a good-faith effort. I regret, as I have listened to the debate [[Page S6899]] today, that it has been considerably less than the sort of civil debate that I would have thought was possible given some discussions that are going on right now between a number of us on the Democratic side that would like to participate in supporting this budget resolution. And I say that because what has happened is the dynamic has really changed. We are engaged in looking at an alternative that we I hope can get consideration to, I suspect sometime next week by the time it is all done. And we begin with somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 billion of cuts over a 7-year period. That is a substantial shift. The President's budget, as has been commented on several times, contains no significant deficit reduction. Suddenly, you have under the leadership of the distinguished Senator from New Mexico and the distinguished Senator from Nebraska, the ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee, a big shift in the Senate and I think large numbers, well in excess of 60, who would vote for a budget resolution that got us to a point 7 years from now where the deficit would be zero. I have come here this evening to identify a couple of problems, and I hope I identify the problems in a constructive fashion because, as I said, I would like very much and hope very much that the Republican chairman and Republican leadership will favorably view, as I said, a significant number of us who would like to participate in voting for a resolution that does approximately what the distinguished Senator from New Mexico is attempting to accomplish. Let me say for those who doubt the power of deficit reduction, the most impressive number in all of the 7-year forecast is that net interest stays the same. Net interest has been the most rapidly growing line in our entire budget, and under the budget resolution before us net interest would flatten out. As an expenditure, Mr. President, it certainly benefits bond holders, but it does not benefit American taxpayers at all. It is a payment that goes out, that buys us nothing other than the capacity to service these bonds. It is the most impressive number and one that I think we should pay attention to as we look to try to develop some alternatives. I begin in describing some concerns that I have about this sort of evaluating its impact upon me. Earlier today, I heard the distinguished senior Senator from Iowa talking about the fact that this budget resolution freezes congressional salary over, I believe, a 7-year life of the budget. I am impressed that that is in this budget resolution, but, Mr. President, I do not really feel for someone in the $136,000 or whatever it is plus salary that is a comparable shared sacrifice. I am not one who comes to this floor and says that the problem in America is that rich people are somehow manipulating and abusing poor Americans. I do not believe that at all. But I do believe if we are going to have $1 trillion worth of deficit reduction over a 7-year period, it should be shared sacrifice, and it is reasonable to look at some alternatives, whether it is capping the deductions at 28 percent, which the Entitlement Commission recommended would get $80 billion or $90 billion over a 7-year period, or have me and others with incomes over $100,000 having to pay a little bit as a consequence. Some would come up and say, oh, gee, that is a big tax increase. I do not view it that way at all. It is just an attempt to say we ought to pay a little bit in order to get this thing to go away. It is not, Mr. President, just because there is a need for shared sacrifice, at least from my standpoint. It is also a consequence of coming and saying I am a little bit troubled, looking at some of the things that we are asking Americans to do because it seems to me, at least from my standpoint, I as one individual American am saying, well, gosh, now that I have mine, I want everybody else to do things that I did not have to do when I was in trouble or needed help. I have perhaps more than most kind of a schizophrenic attitude toward government. I have had it save my life. I have had it save my business. I have had it almost take my life and almost take my business. It can do both, Mr. President, but I have to say in the main, if I look at the 51 years of my lifetime the Government of the United States of America, though it can be a menace from time to time, has enable me to do an enormous amount. Yes, individual initiative is important and my family has been important and my friends have been important, but there are many key points along my lifetime, Mr. President, where I have been given a great deal of help and I have been given opportunity in education, been given opportunity in health care, been given opportunity in my own business, and I cannot in good conscience come to the floor and say that as a consequence of my own experience I feel that I am participating very much in the shared sacrifice needed, that we are all conscious of what is needed in order to get this deficit eliminated. So I begin with that, Mr. President. I hope again that the Republican leadership and the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee will look to those of us who intend, if we can, to reach agreement, which is not easy to do. If we get an alternative, I hope it is given good, solid consideration. I hope the chairman of the Budget Committee will say that this is a big victory; we started off the year, nobody believing we could get much in the way of deficit reduction, Democrats really not very enthusiastic about it, according to at least what you would read, and now all of a sudden we have Democrats moving a long ways in our direction willing to accept--I think we will end up with close to $700 billion over 7 years in real cuts, asking only that we look to ways for all of us to share a little bit in this thing over the course of the budget. There is a second problem, Mr. President. I do not know if it can be done in this budget resolution. I recognize the constraints of the Budget Committee and the Budget Enforcement Act really does not perhaps allow the Budget Committee to deal with these issues and maybe it has to be dealt with later on in the year. Earlier, the senior Senator from Wyoming [Mr. Simpson] commented upon it. But the Entitlement Commission--and I have heard a number of people talk about it--has identified what I think is a serious problem. I am actually borrowing a chart from Senator Bennett, the Senator from Utah, who had this chart up. But this really does describe the problem that the Entitlement Commission identified which is that mandatory spending and net interest are growing so rapidly that sometime around the year 2012, something like that, it is consuming all revenue that the Government of the United States is taking in. That revenue has stayed relatively flat. It is about the only thing that has stayed constant. We have collected about 19 percent of the GDP except in World War II and Vietnam; during those times it went higher. Most of the time it stayed about 19 percent. And unless we change that pattern of growth what happens is domestic discretionary continues to get squeezed down. I appreciate the fact that Social Security was not addressed or retirement not really addressed in this budget resolution. I think it needs to be, not because there is a short-term budget problem. I am not arguing that we ought to look at retirement because it contributes to deficit reduction in the short term. But it unquestionably contributes to deficit reduction in the long term. That is the problem we have. Some may say, gee, that will be good news, if we can get rid of all Government functions and turn the Federal Government into an ATM machine. I do not think that is good news. I believe not just in defense but as I hope I indicated earlier all of those things that have helped me have been in the domestic discretionary account. Everything I have received from the Government has come from domestic discretionary, unless you count the U.S. Navy, which was an enormous benefit to me as well. I leave out the world's largest and most powerful Navy. That was a wonderful experience, too. All of the rest I have benefited from have come from this domestic account. I am troubled by the budget resolution because it allows that mandatory account to continue to grow. It slows it down somewhat, but the mandatory accounts continue to grow and continue to take larger and larger percentages of domestic discretionary. It must be understood the budget resolution improves the current trend, makes it somewhat better, but I do not believe-- [[Page S6900]] and I must say honestly I have not extended it out beyond the 7 years, so I do not know exactly what it looks like out there 10, 15, 20, 30 years from now but looking at the 1996 and 2002 trend line, that appears to be the case. For emphasis, the one big change that has occurred is that net interest has flattened out, and that is a huge benefit to us. So to solve this problem of mandatory spending, we have to look at the long-term situation, not the short term. That is why I say it maybe that the Budget Committee, in looking at a budget resolution that deals with a 7-year period of time, may not have been able to address this mandatory problem. Senator Simpson and I today introduced a piece of legislation that would complement the Budget Committees work. Maybe it cannot be considered as a part of this resolution, but it certainly, I hope, gets consideration. And I suspect, whether it is 54 Republican votes or whether the Republicans accept the alternative and we end up with Republican and Democratic votes, I do not know, one way or the other, we are going to get a resolution that requires committees to do a lot of reconciliation. There are two things that I hope get considered. The first is one that Senator Simpson and I introduced today. What we say with Social Security, again, is that we have a long-term problem. The Social Security trust fund builds to 2012, then it goes down to about 2029 when it is completely depleted. You may say, what is the big deal? Well, the big deal is our generation, the baby boomer generation, starts to retire around 2008, the largest generation in the history of the country, reducing the number of workers per retiree from about five down to about three. And we have big problems out there. The adjustments we would have to make are rather substantial if we postpone it, unlike what would have happened in 1983. What Senator Simpson and I do is we change, for the most part, future benefits. We make some adjustments to CPI minus 5. I think the budget resolution is CPI minus 2. In the House resolution, we adjust it by .6 on the House side. We make the COLA more progressive with the cap reduction. We do some other things in our proposal that are short term. But most of them, including the extension of the normal eligibility age and the early eligibility age, most of those are pushed off into approximately the year 2030. Those changes strengthen Social Security, Mr. President, because what it does, it says to all generations, every living American--every living American is a Social Security beneficiary at some time; they may not be eligible today, but they will be at some time. So you have a 20-year-old and they look at the current situation. They scratch their head and say, ``Gee, I don't think there is going to be anything there for me.'' Under the legislation Senator Simpson and I introduced today, they would look at the thing and say, ``There will be something there for me,'' because we bring the Social Security balance up to 350 percent of the annual payment and stabilize it there for 75 years. So every generation, every American would say, ``OK, we now know that Social Security is going to be there for us.'' The second thing that we do--and it has a big impact, I think, on this whole debate. One of the things we very often forget is that the deficit reduction action, one of the most powerful things about it is that it increases national savings. Deficit financing is an act of dissavings. Deficit reduction is an act of savings. It is a fair argument to make that the distribution of it may not be terribly equitable. That is one of the reasons I am concerned about, as I said, what I am having to pay in this budget resolution and what I am required to contribute, because there is great inequity when you do deficit reduction. It does not necessarily benefit all Americans equally. You have to understand that. If I own stocks and bonds, the deficit reduction looks pretty good to me. But if you do not own stocks and bonds, you may say, ``Gosh, in the sort short term, there is not a lot of good there for me.'' The second part of the Social Security proposal that we made today would also increase national savings, as does the Deficit Reduction Act, by establishing a 2-percent account for all Americans. It reduces the employee payroll tax by 2 percent, a $40 billion a year tax cut, Mr. President. But not just a tax cut, a tax cut with the purpose of establishing for all 137 million American workers a real personal investment plan, similar to what we have in the thrift savings plan for Federal employees. It would increase saving over a 9-year period in excess of $1 trillion, matching this deficit reduction. This Deficit Reduction Act increases savings by almost $1 trillion over 7 years. Our proposal would add another trillion to that, but not just add a trillion, it would add a trillion in savings spread across 100 million American households. So the next thing that must be done, in addition to addressing retirement, if you want to control the cost of mandatory spending, if you are not troubled by the fact that we are squeezing domestic discretionary--Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 5 additional minutes.

Mr. KERREY. The next thing you have got to do--and this gets, I know, right back into last year's argument --you have to reform health care. Now the budget resolution addresses Medicare and attempts to begin the process of health care reform but, Mr. President, I do not believe it does enough. In particular, it does not get at that long-term structural problem that will continue to plague us even if we were to bite the--I would not call it a bullet. I would call it more of a howitzer round of this budget reduction. But even if you bite this howitzer round, you are still going to be left with pretty substantial increases in health care costs when the baby boomers retire. So there is still going to be a need for us, if you want to control the cost of entitlements and stop this rapid increase, there is still going to be a need to get at health care reform and do more than this budget resolution would allow. Again, I hope very much that it is possible for those of us on the Democratic side that would like to vote for a budget resolution to get full consideration by Republicans to have shifted the argument of full consideration to two facts. One, we are not really sharing the burden. It really is not an equitable sharing of the burden. All you have to do is ask yourself, as a Member of Congress at $136,500, or whatever the number is, ``Gee, what is it going to do to me over the next 7 years?'' The only thing you can really say is it has frozen your salary for 7 years. And I do not think you would really get an audience out there paying more for Medicare, getting less for Medicaid, having college loan restrictions, and many other things going in this budget, I do not think you will get a lot of sympathy from Americans saying, ``That's right. You guys have really put your shoulder to the wheel here and shared the burden of sacrifice.'' That is No. 1. I think that there are ways for us to make it much more equitable, much more fair, if you do not mind using that word. And, second, Mr. President, I believe whether we do it in this budget resolution or we do it after the budget resolution, we still have a problem of mandating spending. We still have a problem of mandating spending, that if you do not want to convert the Federal Government into an ATM machine, you have to address retirement and you have to address health care and you have to do more than just reduce the size of the deficit and increase national savings, as a consequence. Mr. President, as I indicated, I watched the early part of this debate and it seemed to me to be going in the wrong direction. It was very uncivil and very partisan and very unfortunate. I do not mean that about the distinguished Senator from New Mexico or the distinguished Senator from Nebraska. I thought their opening comments were, you know, quite calm and quite reasoned. But it deteriorated in a hurry into accusations from that side of the aisle, from some who say, ``Gee, you Democrats don't want to do anything.'' Not true. There are a lot of us who are willing to do an awful lot. And I heard on this side, as well, some accusations that Republicans are heartless and they are trying to cut the heart out of the American family, on and on and on. I think, in fact, our rhetoric was in excess as well. I do not know, Mr. President, if we are going to be able to reach a point where we have a Republican and a Democratic resolution here. I sincerely hope that we are able to do it, because I will predict to my Republican friends on the other side of the aisle, once we get to the tough task of reconciling these numbers, you are going to say, ``Oh, my gosh, will you guys help us? Will you stand with us and lead this country in the right direction?'' Because it will not just be a vote, Mr. President. We have got a lot of leadership to exert if we are going to take this country in a different direction than the one that it is currently headed. So, again, I thank both the Senator from New Mexico and the Senator from Nebraska, who I think have made a good-faith effort. Both of them I know are deeply troubled by the deficit financing this country is doing. I sincerely hope that between now and Wednesday or whenever it is that we vote on final passage that we are able to reconcile the obvious differences that we have between our two parties and put together a bipartisan budget resolution. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Mr. FRIST addressed the Chair.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, there are, to my knowledge, no other Senators who wish to speak on this nomination. I will offer a couple of closing comments and then yield time, alerting colleagues who are watching of the possibility that we may be yielding back, and they have not told us they wanted to speak. They could rush over here and say a few words. In my statement, I indicated, and it is correct, that one of the problems we have with our intelligence effort is that as a consequence of needing to protect security, we are unable--the intelligence people are unable--to brag about successes, and thus not only is it difficult for us to give credit, but increasingly citizens are needing and asking for information that will enable them to judge whether or not their tax dollars are being well spent. I would argue that this condition of being unable to disclose sometimes puts us in a position of not being able to give citizens information or having them say, ``Now I understand why we are doing this, and I believe we are in fact getting our money's worth.'' I would like as a consequence to identify for citizens two recent events that were publicly disclosed. And for the information of citizens, it is the President of the United States who has the controlling authority both to make a classification decision and to make a declassification decision. That decision is spelled out in statute. It is not a decision that can be made by either the Congress, in the absence of changing the law, or an individual Member of Congress. But two recent disclosures, probably, I suspect, disclosed by a decision made by the President to make the disclosure, underscore the importance of this intelligence effort. The first was that the United States of America presented to the U.N. Security Council clear and present evidence that North Koreans were engaged in a policy, a strategy, an active effort to acquire nuclear capacity. We could say that they were, and people did or did not believe it. They mostly said, ``Well, maybe that is just the United States just sort of hung up again.'' Because we had the intelligence capacity, we presented information--in this case, images--to the Security Council, and the Security Council sees clearly North Korea is building nuclear capability and the Security Council takes actions supportive of the United States' effort to make certain that North Korea does not become a nuclear nation. Again, with the use of images disclosed to the public, our Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, at the direction of the President of the United States, at the time when the French and the Russians were weakening in their resolve in regard to sanctions on Iraq, buying into the Iraqis' assertions that, ``We are impoverished now; we don't have very much money; and, no, we are not building any chemical or biological chemical capability, and we are not really a militaristic nation. You need not worry about us any longer.'' Our Ambassador presents, in a week-long trip to I think 10 or 12 nations, again, images that are our intelligence images to these world leaders on the Security Council, information clearly indicating that the Iraqi leader had built a $1.2 billion palace, hardly the sort of action taken by a nation that was impoverished; second, that chemical and biological capability continued to be a problem; and that the acquisition of Kuwaiti military equipment during their occupation of Kuwait was being integrated into the Iraqi forces, giving lie to all three of the statements made by the Iraqi leader and giving the United States the capacity, the President the capacity, through his United Nations, our U.N. Ambassador, the ability to make the argument to keep the sanctions still tightening around the nation of Iraq. In both cases, the United States of America received benefit. Who knows what the cost to the world would have been had North Korea been permitted to continue building its nuclear capability or had the sanctions been dropped from Iraq, a nation that continues to exhibit dangerous tendencies, indeed dangerous actions. I cite those two amongst the latest that have been disclosed publicly because citizens deserve to get enough information upon which they can make a decision about whether or not we are either sort of captive to the intelligence community, as is very often suspected by many who are not on this Intelligence Committee, and perhaps other citizens as well, that we in fact are looking at these successes, insisting upon accountability, trying to assess the threats in the world and organize our intelligence efforts to meet those threats, to maintain the capability to keep the United States of America as safe as is humanly possible. Let me, in addition, Mr. President, point out that there are two things Mr. Deutch is going to be addressing which in some ways are a consequence of both our successes and at times our failures of the past. The first is, many of the threats that we are now dealing with are threats that are a consequence, sort of a residual, of the cold war. The proliferation threat on the nuclear, biological, and chemical is a threat that came as a consequence of our building capacity and the Soviets' building capacity. This proliferation threat is a very real threat, and we are having to now take the sort of residual problem of the cold war and move it to the top of the list knowing that the bombing in Oklahoma City would be magnified several thousand times over were either chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons to be used in a terrorist effort. This is a very real and present problem. It requires the United States of America to lead. No other nation is going to do it. We saw recently, when the President put sanctions on Iran, our friends in Europe said, ``Well, we think that's a bad idea. We want to continue to engage with a country that's involved with terrorism.'' I do not know what they are going to do; I suspect wait until something terrible were to happen. Only the United States of America can lead on that issue, lead trying to get Russia not to sell nuclear technology to Iran. Only the United States of America, I believe, is willing to make the kind of diplomatic and financial effort necessary to make this world safe in the area of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the terrorism that comes from that. There is a second problem, Mr. President, that our new, hopefully new Director of Central Intelligence is going to have to be dealing with. The distinguished Senator from New York in his comments referenced that, and that is not just a cynicism toward Government but a precise suspicion that the CIA is involved in all sorts of things that are bad. That the CIA is possibly responsible for the assassination of John Kennedy is something that is actually honestly believed by some Americans who see a conspiracy in which the Central Intelligence Agency perhaps played some central role. We are going to have to face an awful lot of that, Mr. President, and we are going to have to face it very squarely and very honestly. As I said earlier, I am very excited watching the accounts of the celebration of the victory in Europe 50 years ago, watching old men recall the stories of bravery and heroism and sacrifice. I say, with no interest in disparaging that success--I thrilled in that success and am unable to measure truly the sacrifice and heroic behavior that was necessary, but it stands in stark contrast to an event that occurred, oh, I guess about a month or so ago when former Secretary of Defense McNamara published a mea culpa book saying that in 1966 the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America, with all the intelligence effort at its disposal, had actually concluded that the war in Vietnam was unwinable. Well, I was there in 1969. I do not remember McNamara saying anything about it then. And that kind of a statement is the example of the sort of thing, unfortunately, that feeds this cynicism and this conspiracy theory and causes people to say that the Government really is against rather than trying to be on their side in making their lives not only safe but their lives secure as well. It means that we are going to have to press the envelope a bit on secrecy. By that I mean we are going to have to take great care that a secret is, indeed, necessary to protect the American people rather than protecting those who are operating, either the Director of Operations or other sorts of entities. It cannot be that we keep a secret from the American people because we are afraid of what they will do to us if we tell them the truth. It must be that a secret is being maintained because we are concerned about our inability to carry out an important security mission if full disclosure were to occur. As I indicated, there is a tremendous capacity in the intelligence community to help citizens in a very difficult time acquire the information needed to become informed. When you are born in the United States of America, you are given enormous freedoms at birth and should have been told at some point during your public education or upbringing by your parents or upbringing by others, you should have been told that freedom is not free; that a contribution has to be made back of some kind. And our citizens are increasingly aware of the contribution of time and effort that they have to make to become informed about what is going on in Chechnya, what is going on in the former Yugoslavia, what is going on in Mexico, what is going on in places where they have a difficult time pronouncing the name let alone making decisions about what our foreign policy ought to be. I believe the technologies that we have at our disposal, if we press the envelope judiciously and not in a reckless fashion, can, indeed, help our citizens make decisions and make it more likely that government of, by, and for the people works both in foreign as well as domestic policy. Mr. President, no one has traipsed over to the floor to provide additional testimony, and I am prepared to yield back what time is remaining and yield the floor. Mrs. HUTCHISON addressed the Chair.

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I rise in enthusiastic support of the nomination of John M. Deutch to be Director of Central Intelligence. While I cannot predict a length in time that he will be in service to his country in this capacity, I can predict with confidence, should he be confirmed, he will turn out to be one of the most effective and influential DCI's in the history of this Agency. The President of the United States, with John Deutch, is making a statement that he intends to send a man to take charge of Langley during what is obviously one of the most tumultuous periods ever experienced by Central Intelligence. The Aldrich Ames case and recent Guatemala revelations portray a troubled corporate culture at CIA. In addition, many question whether the intelligence community has come to grips with the post-cold-war world and whether new collection methods and technologies are required to target the new threats that have emerged. The twin threats of international and domestic terrorism lead many to question the intelligence community's proper role in supporting law enforcement. The very structure of the community is in question, as a joint Presidential-congressional commission and several private study groups ask whether intelligence is necessary at all. Mr. President, we have been watching, once again, another 50-year celebration in the last couple of days. This time the celebration is the 50th anniversary of the day that victory in Europe was declared over Nazi forces. That victory is being celebrated in part because we are also celebrating the fact that over the last 47 or so years, we have avoided, with significant efforts, a third world war. For a 75- year period, roughly from 1914, when the guns of August started World War I, until the fall of 1989 when the Berlin Wall itself collapsed and Eastern Europe began to liberate itself, during that 75-year period, it is, I believe, accurate to say we experienced the bloodiest 75 years in the history of mankind. During that 75-year period, Mr. President, many things occurred, including the institution of a policy that had the United States of America leading an effort against a clearly identified enemy, and the celebration that takes place this year is not just a celebration of a victory over that enemy, but a sense that we have survived, as a human people, the forecast that we may annihilate ourselves through the use of nuclear weapons. It is a remarkable victory, and I dare not on this floor take a great deal of time describing it, but it is a profound change that the new Director of Central Intelligence must factor in as that individual, hopefully John Deutch, begins to shape the agencies under his control to meet the new challenges that this country faces. You might expect that only somebody who was a glutton for punishment would willingly volunteer and walk into the set of problems that John Deutch will face. But I can assure my colleagues, as the distinguished chairman of the Committee has already said, that John Deutch knows better than this. He knows, as many of us on the Intelligence Committee know, we have a superb intelligence instrument in this country staffed by brave and intelligent people who take risks every single day and make sacrifices for their country. They provide the President, the military, the Cabinet, our diplomats and intelligence analysts a capability no other country can rival: the capability to know most about threats to our country's freedom and independence, and threats to the lives and livelihoods of Americans. Unlike the domestic agencies, our intelligence professionals cannot brag about their competence. To brag would lose the all-important source of information. So they are generally silent, but they are of immense value. They need guidance, they need leadership, they need a visionary who can help focus their talent on the Nation's pressing needs, and John Deutch is the person to do it. Adm. Bill Studeman has rendered a vital service as Acting Director. He has kept a complex enterprise on track during a difficult period, and the Nation owes him its thanks. He would be the first to agree that the intelligence community needs a Presidentially appointed, senatorially confirmed director. Even if John Deutch's service in the Defense Department were his own accomplishment, he would be a strong candidate to be DCI. Most intelligence funding is in defense, the military continues to be the leading customer for intelligence, and his knowledge of defense intelligence is matched by few in and out of our Government. But another part of John Deutch's resume appeals to me. John Deutch is a scientist of national renown and a distinguished science professor. Technical intelligence collection is mainly a science problem. The scientific decision of which system to buy or develop to best collect against a certain threat is typically made by lawyers advised by scientists. In this administration, however, the scientists have come to the fore. I, for one, feel very comfortable knowing that the scientific judgment of Bill Perry is making the ultimate acquisition decisions in defense, and I will feel equal comfort with John Deutch's scientific judgment on intelligence acquisitions. The fact that he is a teacher and can explain these complex systems to those of us nonscientists, who are charged with intelligence oversight, is that much better for the American people. We will get the benefit of Dr. Deutch's scientific expertise not a moment too soon. New threats, new collection priorities, and a rapidly changing collection environment mean that [[Page S6267]] we cannot stand pat on our collection technologies. Just to maintain the edge we have now, we must fund research and development on new technologies and make hard decisions about which road we will go down. We also have to maintain the health of our intelligence industrial base, the private companies that produce these remarkable systems. There are uniquely talented people working for these companies, engineers and technicians who turn the requirements statement into reality. If we do not keep these people at work in profitable undertakings, the Government will never be able to afford new systems. That is why Senator Warner and I, last year, urged the administration to permit U.S. companies to sell 1-meter space imagery and imaging equipment. We did not want to see remote sensing, a technology in which we lead the world, go the way of the space launch. We also wanted America to dominate this growing industry. The administration saw it the same way, and John Deutch is a firm supporter of the administration policy. He knows that our industrial base is our true national treasure, and he will continue to watch over its health. Intelligence technology routinely saves American lives, but we should be alert to opportunities to make it useful to Americans in other ways. For example, the National Information Display Laboratory in Princeton, NJ, noticed that the technology that helped imagery analysts understand images better could also be helpful to radiologists scanning a mammogram for early signs of breast cancer. NIDL teamed with Massachusetts General Hospital to adapt the technology, and the outcome could be as many as 15,000 American lives saved each year. Other opportunities abound for the dual-use intelligence technology. We have just begun to make public use of space images and other intelligence collected during the cold war. The declassification process has begun and we must push the process until we can fairly say that intelligence technology serves not just a handful of decisionmakers in Washington but the 250 million decisionmakers across our country. Mr. President, when I was a young man operating in the U.S. Navy Seal team, we had a piece of advice we tried to follow all of the time, which was that unless you had a need to know something, you did not press the bet and try to acquire it. We did not disseminate intelligence to people who did not have a need to know. Mr. President, there are 250 million citizens of the United States of America who need to know increasingly a set of complex facts in order to make decisions about our foreign policy, in order to make decisions about our domestic policy, in order to make decisions about all sorts of things that are increasingly confusing our citizens. Democracy cannot function unless citizens make the effort to understand those complexities and come to the table at election time and come to the table when it is time to influence their Senator or Representative or President with all of the facts and information. The Director of Central Intelligence is the President's national intelligence officer. John Deutch's Government background is in defense, and his testimony before the Committee made clear that he understands the priority of intelligence support to the military. But he also understands the role of national intelligence, and he understands that not every problem facing the country is a military problem. He is aware, for example, of the intelligence community's contributions against international terrorism, against drug trafficking, against illegal trade practices. He knows how important intelligence is to this administration's international economic decisionmaking, and he knows that warning the President about the economic crisis in Mexico last year was at least as important as warning about a military crisis in some less important region of the world. It is ironic that, with the end of the cold war, the Director of Central Intelligence has a broader national charter than ever. It is an irony which John Deutch understands. The intelligence community includes much more than the CIA. The National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, FBI, and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research all play their largely unique roles. But no question, CIA, unfortunately, lately has been at the center of controversy and likely will continue to be. At least initially, the heart of John Deutch's task will be to make the CIA more efficient and accountable to the American people. I am greatly encouraged, as the chairman indicated earlier, by his testimony on the sense of accountability and responsibility that he intends to bring to CIA's Directorate of Operations. I have visited CIA officers in the field, and I know the high quality of the people John Deutch will lead. These are clear-headed, positive, enthusiastic Americans. The current senior managers should get credit for recruiting and training and motivating a fine crop of younger officers. Now it is time, as Mr. Deutch put it in his own testimony, for the seniors to let the younger officers take the reins. As they take over, they must recruit and retain more women and minorities, and they must be alert to gender discrimination in assignments and promotions. The Directorate of Operations has never been an easy place for women to get a fair opportunity to make their mark. Not only is gender discrimination illegal, it is also stupid because it denies the American people the brain power of more than 50 percent of our people. It also creates resentments which can dangerously weaken the agency. I have heard all the excuses for discrimination, and none of them wash. I am confident that John Deutch will not permit it. CIA's human intelligence activities, which consist mainly in getting foreigners to secretly provide information, will always take place in the shadows. Human sources will have to be protected, so the activities will not be able to be publicly discussed. But CIA, no less than any other agency of Government, must operate in accordance with American law and American values. One purpose of congressional oversight of intelligence is to ensure that this is so. Oversight cannot work if CIA does not inform Congress, or answer Congress' questions. Failure to promptly inform is one of the most troubling aspects of both the Ames case and the Guatemala case. Bad news does not improve with age. The withholding of bad news--withholding information on an intelligence failure--jeopardizes the oversight system without which the United States cannot conduct foreign intelligence operations. John Deutch clearly understands his reporting responsibilities, and I believe Directors Gates and Woolsey and Studeman also understood. The challenge for John Deutch is to know what is happening inside his organization, so the bad news gets to him first. That is the mark of a tight, confident, organization. John Deutch has some great material to work with, but it is up to him to forge that kind of organization. If anybody in this great country of ours is up to that job, John Deutch is the person to get the job done. I yield the floor. Mr. MOYNIHAN addressed the Chair.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Senate Resolution 116, a resolution to recognize and commend the Lakota and Dakota code talkers submitted earlier today by Senator Daschle and Senator Pressler.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I come to the floor--and I listened with great interest earlier to the majority leader, the distinguished Senator from Kansas, talking about a letter that he and the Speaker of the House have written to the President asking for some bipartisan cooperation having to do with Medicare. Mr. President, for 12 years when we had a Republican President, any time anyone would say, gee, how come Ronald Reagan does not submit a balanced budget, or George Bush does not, the standard response that would come is--mostly, I must say, from Republicans in defense of their Republican President--they would say, ``Gee, the President does not spend any money, Congress spends the money.'' I must say, the Republican defense is accurate. Congress does spend the money. For us to say, gee, the President has the responsibility for spending the money is inaccurate. It is the Congress of the United States of America that passes laws that determine how much money we are going to collect and in what manner we are going to collect it from the American people and how we are going to allocate that money across a whole range of programs. In fact, the Budget Enforcement Act requires the Congress to produce a budget resolution by the 15th of April, which is several weeks past. Mr. President, if the majority leader wants to get a bipartisan movement to do something about deficit reduction, there are a number of us on this side of the aisle who are all too willing to do exactly that. It seems to me that is what we need. If we are going to get movement, it ought to be movement inside of the U.S. Congress. There is a ferocious debate. There are ideological differences. The biggest task that faces us is that deficit reduction is tough. The problem with Medicare is not caused by mean and nasty Republicans or mean and liberal Democrats; it is caused by demographics and technology. The good news is that we are living longer. The bad news is that it is getting more and more expensive for us to pay for the health care for those where we have made a commitment. If you think it is bad over the next 4, 5 years, you ought to see what the entitlement commission says this looks like when my generation begins to retire. This thing goes clear off the charts after the by the trustees is only the tip of the iceberg, Mr. President. Deficit reduction is difficult precisely because it forces us to make tough choices. This Congress needs to get about the business of doing that. I was disappointed when the President's budget did not address the issue of entitlements. Our Presidential commission worked for an entire year. We made recommendations to the President to try to do something. But I think the President made a calculated judgment. He has to say, I have a Republican Congress and I had a 1993 deficit reduction act and did not get a single Republican to vote for it. In fact, part of the Contract With America promises to take the increase in taxes on a small number of Social Security beneficiaries, about 15 percent, reduce that tax which reduces the flow in Medicare and makes the problem worse. For that and other reasons, perhaps the President decided not to address the issue of entitlements. We know what we need to do in this Congress. I am very much concerned that this thing is going to degenerate into merely an attempt by Republicans to say, ``No, we are right and the Democrats are wrong,'' or the Democrats saying, ``No, we are right and the Republicans are wrong.'' For Members to do that for very much longer, Mr. President, maybe we can survive for a week or two or three with partisan blasts back and forth across the bow, but at some point we have a lot of educating, a lot of explaining, and a lot of leading to do. I spoke last week to the National Press Club and unfortunately the answers that I gave to some questions afterwards got most of the attention. But at the heart of my message is that in deficit reduction, there is not a free lunch. Deficit reduction is not something that we are doing just to seek political advantage or curry favor with the voters, because the voters want deficit reduction. Deficit reduction has a positive effect upon our economy because it increases savings. The majority leader indicated we do not need to do anything with Social Security. With great respect, I disagree. I believe Social Security also needs to be reformed, because unlike the common perception of Social Security, Social Security itself is not a savings program. I inform anyone who might be listening to this right now that Social Security is a commitment on the part of those generations that are in the work force to allow themselves to be taxed at a fixed percentage of their wages, the money going to those generations that are out of the work force, who are retired. The program started off as a 1-percent tax on wages. The retirement age was 6 years after normal life expectancy when the program started. Today, it is 12 percent of our wages. And 12 percent of our wages, promised to pay beginning in the year 65, which is 11 years this side of normal life expectancy. It is a demographic problem, Mr. President. I appreciate the majority leader saying we do not need to address it because we have enough money coming in, but do not tell that to a 20-year-old, a 30-year-old, or a 40-year-old. We had Director Rivlin before the Treasury Postal Subcommittee on Appropriations this afternoon, and I asked her about the deletion of intergenerational accounting in last year's budget. She expects the report to come out. My effective tax rate over the course of my lifetime is about 34 percent--my generation. But the generation right behind, if we do not take action with Social Security and with Medicare relatively quickly, they are looking at an effective tax rates in excess of 80 percent--in excess of 80 percent--in an economic environment where their lives are apt to be more difficult to begin with. I believe what is needed is for Members of Congress to come and say, OK, we will fire a few shots across the bow here at Democrats, pointing out that Republicans, for 12 years when a Republican President was in the White House, said it was Congress' responsibility. Now that we have a Democrat in the White House they are not looking across the aisle and saying, as Congress we should fix it. They sent a letter to the President and said, ``How come you are not doing something about this?'' I believe it is our responsibility under the Budget Enforcement Act to deal with this budget problem, and it is going to be tough. I note with great alarm a poll--in fact it has been distributed not just to Democrats but to Republicans as well, and may, in fact, have contributed not just to the President's address to his Conference on Aging, but to a remarkable address on the part of the Speaker of the House, going to the seniors coalition. He got several standing ovations, I might point out. Why would he not? He made it sound like the Medicare solution is easy. ``We will give seniors choices. We will let you keep the savings of 10 percent. If you find waste, fraud and abuse, it will be easy. We do not have it get Medicare all tied up in that nasty old budget deficit debate, we will move it aside, and it is all going to get real easy.'' It is not easy. We either ask Americans to pay more or we give them less, or some combination of the two. Or we turn and honestly say to our kids that their effective tax rates will be higher. It will not be 15 percent of wages. That is what it is today. But if we do not take action in the next couple of years, that tax rate will be 20 percent. Or they will have to look to their parents and cut their benefits enormously. Time is on our side right now, Mr. President, but it is not going to be on our side for very much longer. I genuinely hope that after we fired our few little political rounds here that the Democrats and the Republicans can, in fact, get together. We are the ones that by law have the responsibility for passing not only authorizing legislation but appropriation legislation and we have to change our laws. I was very alarmed to read in the newspaper this polling data that shows that 45 percent of the American people would not vote for any representative who voted to reduce the increases in Medicare. Fifteen percent would vote for them, if they did. I note again in Gerald Seib's piece in the Wall Street Journal, I believe yesterday, saying that a full 48 percent of the American people think that we are not spending enough on seniors, 48 percent. If we think that is greedy seniors, it is not. Only 34 percent of the people over 65 say we are not spending enough. It is people 18 to 34, by over 50 percent. Less than 5 percent say we spend too much. That is not what our budget shows, Mr. President, whether it is at the State or Federal level. No one who seriously examines our budget believes that the problem is we are not spending enough on people over the age of 65. That is not the problem we face. I sincerely hope--I must say it may require me to do more than hope. I may have to raise my voice and do a lot of praying before we can bridge the rhetorical gap that divides the Republicans and Democrats on the Senate floor. I think there is a bipartisan group that is willing to come to the American people and begin by simply saying ``This is the truth,'' not hyperventilate and say things that sound like we are on the side of the angels and the other side is on the side of devil, but just say, ``This is the truth.'' Look at the numbers. We do not fix this thing by getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse. We will not fix this thing by sort of tinkering at the edge and say, ``I will give you choice. We will put it off into managed care.'' That is not going to work. We either accept responsibilities that we have as citizens to say that if we ask for something we will pay for it. And we are not going to ask for any subsidy that we neither need or deserve. That is part of the problem now. We have an awful lot of people in America, whether corporations or individuals, that do not need subsidies and we are giving them subsidies. They make a good case for it for social or economic reasons, and we shovel the money out and find ourselves when it comes time to taking care of people who need it, we are woefully short of either the resources of trying to do anything. I am down here right now to offer a constructive engagement to the majority leader saying that this is not the President's problem. This is not his budget. I was critical of it for leaving entitlements out and not doing the intergenerational accounting, but by law it is the Congress of the United States of America that must make these decisions. We are now almost 4 weeks late, according to the Budget Enforcement Act, of coming up with a budget resolution. I trust that when the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee, the Senator from New Mexico comes up with a budget, that he will need Democrats on this Senate floor to come with him and say, ``We will join to make an effort to go out and explain it to the American people.'' I will say what my price is, Mr. President, so it can be clear. I do not want anybody saying, ``I wonder what Kerrey wants?'' We will not do a $300 billion, 7-year tax cut. That is for openers. That is my price. Want to negotiate a bipartisan fashion? Have to give the $300 billion tax cut? That is nonsense. What kind of nonsense is that? Give up $300 billion? Only yourself to blame when people get up and say, ``Gee, $300 billion tax cut and $300 billion Medicare cut. Aren't you paying with Medicare for the tax breaks to individuals?'' It looks that way. We do not have to do much in the way of pumping hot air into that argument. It looks like that is what is going on. Republicans have to take that $300 billion tax cut and forget it. Democrats on the other hand, will have to say we will give on entitlements. We will tell the truth on entitlements. We will inform the American people. I believe Republicans as well will have to say, OK, maybe we scored some great political point in last year's election by alleging that when Democrats voted for the 1993 Deficit Reduction Act without a single Republican voting for it in the House or the Senate, we took a little political advantage by saying that every Social Security beneficiary had a tax increase. Do not tell me that Republicans were not saying that. I have heard it. I have seen it in advertisements. It worked. If I was a Republican and I had not voted for that, I would have done the same thing. It is an effective way to score political points. For gosh sakes, we cannot take that tax, I think, fairly applied at 85 percent of income, reduce it to 50 percent, that takes money out of the Medicare part A fund. That makes the problem worse, not better. That is my two opening steps. I also think, by the way, that those of us who worked in the mainstream group last year, Republicans and Democrats, led by the distinguished Senator from Rhode Island--who worked so very hard to hold that mainstream group together--were pretty close to being on target when it came to health care. We did ask people to pay the full bill. We did ask people to share the cost of health care. We did not say there is a free lunch here. We had a reasonable plan, it seems to me, that was in the middle. Today, of course, health care reform is not very fashionable. But we had a bipartisan group of Republicans and Democrats who worked long and hard and got very close to a piece of legislation that I think, frankly, had we had a little more time, we might have been able to pass and we might not be in this fix we are in right now, trying to figure out what we are going to do about Medicare. If we treat Medicare only as a budget issue and not as a health care issue, we are going to find ourselves doing what none of us wants to do, in my judgment, and that is taking that couple out there who is working really hard, that American couple out there, where you have both the husband and wife--and we all know who we are talking about here--working for $5 and $6 and $7 an hour each and by the time they pay their payroll taxes and income taxes they have precious little money left; those individuals are, right now, if we treat Medicare only as a budget issue, going to find themselves paying a lot more money than they already are for health insurance. We are going to make their lives more miserable. Those Americans who say: I do not want to be on welfare; who say I do not want the Government of the United States of America to give me food stamps; I do not want to be on AFDC; I am willing to work at McDonald's; I am willing to work at Radio Shack; I am willing to work wherever I have to, but I am going to earn my own way-- those are the individuals in the United States of America today that are in the greatest amount of trouble, the ones who are not asking us for anything. Those individuals are going to suffer, in my judgment, if we treat Medicare only as a budget issue. So I say, here is one Democrat who is willing to work with Republicans. I have worked with the Senator from New Mexico on budget issues before and was pleased to be able to join with him on his U.S.A. Tax, an item that I believe in fact will generate more money for the U.S. Treasury by allowing people not to pay taxes on their savings and businesses expense off their investments that they made. We have to look not just at how much money we are generating, we have to look at ways to generate tax money that encourage economic growth, because in the end that is going to determine whether or not we are able to pay for anything, whether it is defense, or Medicare, or Social Security, or whatever it is. So I hope in the end of perhaps the next 3 weeks, after we have all had a little political fun here and scored our political points, that Democrats come and say: Here are our values. I am a Democrat and I believe the laws of the United States of America ought to say every single American has an opportunity to move up the economic ladder. I am willing to say you have to make an effort. There is no free lunch here. You have to work hard to do it. But I understand, if you are making $5, $6, $7 an hour, you have a tough time paying for health insurance; that retirement does not mean much for you; you are having a difficult time with child care because it is $500 or $600 a month for a couple of kids. I understand you are frustrated because you read in the newspaper and see there is an 80- percent differential between what you can earn with a college degree and what you can earn with a high school degree, and yet you are not setting enough money aside for your kids. Then, when it comes time for you to get a college loan, you are told you are maybe making too much money; you are no longer eligible. So I am prepared to come and say: Here are my Democratic values. Here is what I believe in as a Democrat. I will bring those arguments to the table. But when it comes to deficit reduction, we are going to have to act like Americans. At some point, I am going to have to be willing to give. I am willing to give on entitlements. I am willing to go out on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and say to the American people: Here is the truth. This is not the time, it seems to me, for us merely to hope we can score political points over the other party. This is the time for us to surprise the marketplace--and it would be a surprise if the Congress of the United States of America, in spite of the fact that we have a budget recommendation that calls for $200 billion deficits and no action on entitlements, can somehow manage to get together, Republicans and Democrats who care about deficit reduction, and surprise the marketplace and enact this year a 5- or 6- or 7-year deficit reduction plan that would get us to a balanced budget. I think the American people would not only be pleased--they may not like some of the cuts we put in place--but I think they would be pleased because the economy of the United States of America would grow, long-term interest rates would go down, the dollar would strengthen, and we would be creating more jobs again. I hope and pray in fact that this Congress does what the laws and the Constitution say we are supposed to do, and that is do the hard work of budgeting; make the hard choices that are required in budgeting. Then, once we have produced a budget resolution with both Republicans and Democrats on board, then it is time for us to challenge the executive branch, the President, to pony up and share some responsibility by going to the American people and saying he believes Congress has finally got it right. Mr. President, I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Ten minutes.

Mr. KERREY. I thank the Chair. (The remarks of Mr. Kerrey pertaining to the introduction of S. 722 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be added as an original cosponsor to this legislation.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, it is awfully difficult to estimate the economic impact of tax law. I must say, it is a lot easier for us to estimate the political impact of tax laws because we hear from a whole range of interest groups constantly that are concerned about preserving some deduction or perhaps expanding some deduction. So it is genuinely difficult to estimate what the economic impact is going to be, is going to be, of various changes in the law. What is not difficult with this particular piece of legislation is to estimate what the impact is going to be upon American families who desire to save and on American businesses who are willing to make job- creating investments. Mr. President, this piece of legislation, though I am quite certain there will be critics who will point out defects in it--indeed, there may be plenty of room for improvement of this legislation--there is no question that this tax law change is allowed, in my judgment, by the rather dramatic change in the political situation last November, which has permitted us, the Congress, to begin to consider things that had previously been off limits. There is no question, in my judgment, that this piece of legislation would have the impact of simultaneously allowing American families to save more by providing a powerful incentive for them to save, and it would enable American businesses to make job-creating investments by enabling them to expense off the cost of those investments. Let me say, Mr. President, as a part of this debate, that I am continuing to be one of the diminishing numbers of the Senate that is a Member of the Democratic Party and should assert that as a Member of the Democratic Party, I do believe that labor is superior to capital. By that, I mean you must have people who are willing to work before the capital is worth anything; capital without labor is worthless. So I believe in the superiority of labor, and I believe in the training of labor, and I believe in universal education and the preparation of people so that they have the skills needed to compete, so they have the skills needed to earn the living that they desire. But I do not believe in declaring war on capital, nor do I believe in declaring war on the wealthy. Indeed, it seems to me that the heart of the Democratic message ought to be that equal opportunity means providing every single American, regardless of their status in life, an opportunity to become wealthy in this country. Unfortunately and regrettably, Mr. President, there is no shortcut to becoming wealthy. There is no easy way, no free lunch to do it. In order to become wealthy, one must acquire wealth. And in order to do that, one must save. Occasionally, there are people who hit the lottery or some bonanza of some sort. But, generally speaking, the acquisition of wealth occurs as a consequence of people being willing to defer gratification to set aside something they would like to purchase today in favor of the desire to purchase something later. I remember, Mr. President, in 1988, during my first campaign for the U.S. Senate--I will not tell the gentlemen's name--standing at a farm site at an event thrown in my behalf, standing next to a farmer approximately a generation older than I, along with a friend of mine who is a salesman. He was talking to this farmer and he said, ``It is well known that you are one of the wealthiest men in the country. How did you get so wealthy?'' He said, ``It is real simple. I do not spend my money.'' And in making an observation about this gentleman who was a salesman, he said ``You are wearing very nice clothes that cost you a lot of money.'' The salesman said, ``I have to in order to do my work.'' The farmer said, ``You will notice that I am wearing a very attractive shirt that I bought for a dollar at your garage sale last fall.'' Mr. President, in order to acquire wealth, individuals must be willing to save. There is no short cut to it. Senator Simpson and I will, in the next few days, I hope, if we can get the bill language put together, present legislation that will reform a program that is supposed to be a savings program but it is not, and that is our Social Security system. One of the things I will do in the process of describing the legislation is describe the magic of compounding interest rates. Mr. President, there are three variables that will determine the impact of your savings and your acquisition of wealth. Variable number one is the length of time that you contribute to that savings account. Variable number two is the amount of money you contribute. Variable number three is the rate of return. The most important variable is number one, the length of time that you contribute. An individual that contributes $75 a year starting at age 20, over a 50-year period, will have more at the end of that 50- year period than somebody who contributes $1,500 a year if they wait until they are age 50 to start. I am 51 and, generally, it occurs to you when you are about 50 that, Oh, my gosh, I am going to retire in 15 years, I have to start saving money. The dilemma is that if you wait until you are 50, you are giving up the significant impact of compounding rates. Let me give a little mathematics for the listening audience. Mr. President, if you got a 10-percent real rate of return by investing in equities, which is not that difficult to do, that would mean that you would have a compound every 7.2 years. Thus, if your parents took $1,000 and opened a savings account for you when you were born, you would get 10 compounds on that thousand dollars that would be worth a million dollars by the time you reach age 70. This piece of legislation, in my judgment, Mr. President, would change the culture and attitude of savings in the United States of America. Mr. President, to be clear, there are not very many situations where the interest of the individual and the interest of the Nation intersect, where they are the same. As much as we talk about it being the same, there are very few situations where that is the case. With savings, there is an intersection. It is in the interest of American families to acquire and accumulate wealth. It is in the interest of the Nation to do the same. Unless both the individual has an incentive to save and the Nation has the discipline to save, then the standard of living of the United States of America simply will not rise. Mr. President, I will identify four features that I think unquestionably will have a dramatic and powerful and positive impact on the United States of America. First, this piece of legislation permits a full and unlimited deferral of the taxation of savings. A clear signal, unequivocal. There would be no need to consult with an accountant. You would know precisely that if you save money, you can defer taxation on that savings. Second, it allows wage earners an offset for the employee portion of the payroll tax. That is a very powerful incentive. The payroll tax is extremely regressive and very often uncalculated when people are politicians and are looking at the overall rates of taxation. It is an extremely regressive tax, difficult for individuals, and very often a barrier for businesses to hire new employees. Third, Mr. President, it allows those individuals who are willing to roll the dice, to sign their name on the dotted line to put some savings into land, building, equipment, which will hire and employ Americans. It allows them, in the operation of their business--a risky venture in the 1990's--to expense every single one of their real investments. Fourth, Mr. President, it enables the United States of America to exclude export sales from taxation imposed, as well a tax on imports. Every single one of our industrial competitors does precisely the same thing. They have to be laughing under their breath as they look at the taxation system of the United States of America that puts our workers at a competitive disadvantage, and puts our businesses at a competitive disadvantage as well. Mr. President, I am pleased to join the distinguished Senator from New Mexico and the distinguished Senator from Georgia as an original cosponsor. This is a piece of legislation that has been several years in the making. It is a very thoughtful piece of legislation. It has been well thought through. I attended a number of these meetings long before the issue was popular. The Senator from New Mexico and the Senator from Georgia were leading this effort. I hope that, with the new permission granted in this new Congress, this kind of legislation, serious legislation, will not only be considered but will be enacted as soon as possible. Mr. President, it will be good for American families and good for American workers, and it will be good for American businesses and, as a consequence of all three, good for our country.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Madam President, I rise to issue a challenge that I hope will be answered with the creation of a stimulating partnership between business, medicine, and the Government, in this case the Federal Government. An important relationship is developing today between U.S. intelligence and the medical communities. Technology to support intelligence analysis is being adapted to improve significantly a doctor's ability to detect breast cancer in its earliest stages. Over 46,000 women die each year. The early estimates are, with this technology, that up to one-third of these women could be saved as a consequence of this technology conversion. The technology being developed is simple to describe but very difficult to achieve. Daily, intelligence analysts deal with the problem of detecting changes in photographic images they are reviewing. As they watch foreign airfields, they want to know arrivals, bed-down, and departures of aircraft. As they watch foreign seaports, they want to know the arrivals, unloading, and departures of ships carrying cargo of interest. Computer software can be of great assistance in automatically detecting these sorts of changes at airfields and at seaports. It is this intelligence technology that is being adapted for the medical community. Early detection of breast cancer currently relies heavily on the judgment and professional experience of doctors who review mammograms and magnetic resonance images. A significant part of their judgment is based on comparing previous images with the current image of a woman's breast. As in the intelligence world, detecting change is fundamental to understanding what is going on. Through some exciting developments managed by the National Information Display Lab at the David Sarnoff Labs in Princeton, NJ, computer analytical techniques are being developed for the medical community. Relying on the technology developed for intelligence, they are adapting the technology to combat a dreaded disease that attacks 1 in 8 women in America today. Madam President, I want to emphasize that the tens of thousands of lives that already have been saved as a result of intelligence technology by providing more effective national defense will be complemented by the thousands of lives that will be saved through the earlier detection of breast cancer. This is an excellent example of the sound investment of taxpayers' dollars being paid off by saving thousands of lives in both national defense and medicine. The National Information Display Lab, or NIDL, is an inspiring arrangement that needs to be duplicated by other Government/private- sector relationships. NIDL provides the bridge between Government/ civilian-sector requirements and Government/civilian-sector technology. By understanding both requirements and technologies, NIDL is able to help close the gap between the Government and the private sector. Perhaps the most significant part of NIDL's story is their funding. NIDL relies on Government funding to begin to develop technology, which is then spun off to the commercial world for civilian and Government applications. On Tuesday of this week, Madam President, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Arlen Specter, and I announced intelligence community funding to begin the technology transfer for breast cancer research. The community is providing $375,000 to the NIDL to push the technology ahead. We are all aware of the intelligence community's keen sense of urgency, great technical expertise, and excellent planning skills which will ensure that the push forward has an effective start. I also want to personally thank President Clinton for making all of this happen. His commitment to breaking down the walls between defense technology and commercial technology, and his passion to attack the Nation's health problems with every weapon in our arsenal are the reasons this project is going forward. Once he knew that intelligence systems could bring earlier detection of breast cancer, this Government acted with determination and dispatch. I began, Madam President, by saying that I was issuing a challenge. The challenge is this: Will all the interested parties--Government, medical, and commercial--now pick up the ball that has been put into play and carry it forward so that within 12 to 24 months--I emphasize this, Madam President, because this start will not come to completion unless we set a deadline and say that within 12 to 24 months, we are going to carry this technology forward into the clinical labs and clinics of this country, so that within this period of time, more women's lives will be saved through the earlier detection of breast cancer. The National Information Display Lab must be put on a sound financial basis, and everyone must help. I hope the challenge will be met. I yield the floor.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, earlier this week I came to the floor of the Senate to discuss my concerns relating to the pending Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act of 1995, S.652. I have been concerned that this bill does not do enough to promote competition and consumer choice. As we on Capitol Hill work to revamp the regulatory regimes governing the telephone and cable television companies of today, a much larger dynamic is taking hold in our country. The digital age is upon us, and we must try to take this larger picture into view if we are to be truly effective in our efforts to pass telecommunications reform that will serve our country, not only today, but tomorrow, and for the years to come. We need to take this opportunity, not only to address the regulatory issues currently being discussed, but to think about what kind of world we want this digital age to create. Today, I am introducing legislation, the Communications Interoperability Act of 1995, that I hope will stimulate a vigorous public debate on how we can best achieve a truly ubiquitous National Information Superhighway. I am [[Page S5451]] introducing this bill as a discussion vehicle, and welcome reactions or comments on this legislation from interested parties. The National Information Superhighway, or National Information Infrastructure (NII) as it is called, is evolving as we speak. This new digital age brings with a convergence of technology and vast new opportunities for Americans to gather and disseminate information. This NII pays no mind to the lines between industry sectors that have existed in the past. The NII is a conglomeration of pieces, including, various high-speed, interactive, narrow and broadband networks that exist today and will emerge tomorrow. It is the satellite, terrestrial, and wireless technologies that deliver content to homes, businesses, and other public and private institutions. The NII is a term that encompasses all the pieces and conveys a vision for a nationwide, invisible, seamless, dynamic web of transmission mechanisms, information appliances, content and people. This ubiquitous network of networks has the potential to improve the quality of life for all Americans--regardless of location, age, economic status, or physical handicap. However, this potential will only be realized if we have interoperability in our information infrastructure. Interoperability is the ability of two or more systems to interact with one another. Interoperability allows diverse systems made by different vendors to communicate with each other so users do not have to make major adjustments to account for differences in products and services. Open interfaces at critical points of connection will allow interoperability to occur. Interoperability will allow components of the NII to work together easily and transparently. A high school student in Nebraska will be able to use research resources located anywhere in the country, and discuss that research with students at distant schools. It will allow teachers in Nebraska to share information about experiences with other teachers around the country. If, while on vacation, a person becomes ill, a doctor in another State will be able to easily reach the family physician in Nebraska to consult and access complete medical records online. Interoperability will make the NII accessible to the broadest number of people--both users and vendors. Users will not be limited to a particular vendor's products. Vendors will be able to make their services available to anyone who wants to use them. A small business or entrepreneur in Nebraska will be able to fully realize their potential because from their home office they will have the ability to easily reach customers across the Nation and around the world. Interoperability allows all Americans to be both information consumers and information providers. This means that a citizen in Lincoln, NE, will not only be able to access the vast amount of information using an information appliance of her choice, at the same time, she will also be able to publish her newsletter on fishing in Nebraska to interested readers wherever they reside. Interoperability promotes competition among technologies, providers, and media, leading to the greatest number of choices, the lowest prices, and maximum innovation. Interoperability based on open interfaces, will help promote a level playing field for the future of communications. Rather than attempting to create or adapt regulations to ever changing technologies, open interfaces, and interoperability will help ensure access and competition by allowing new entrants into the marketplace. Interoperability must be led by industry, but Congress can help by promoting the vision of an interoperable information infrastructure. I am not suggesting that Government get involved setting standards or dictating what technologies the private sector should use. What I am suggesting is that we all have an interest in monitoring the private sector process and facilitating the development of a system that will best serve American business, and American citizens. Without interoperability, we will simply have pockets of information and services that will not be nearly as valuable because they will not be easily linked to other parts of the infrastructure. Interoperability will allow information to be transmitted between different technologies, allowing for the most efficient distribution of services. In some areas, wire lines or fiber optic cable may be dominant, while in other more rural areas we may need to rely on satellite and wireless technologies. Unless all these divergent parts of the system are interoperable, the digital age will divide us into information haves and have nots. I am concerned about the potential for rural States like mine to be left behind as the digital age charges forward. The distinguished Senator from Maine introduced legislation earlier this week to promote competition and consumer choice in consumer electronics used in conjunction with the current cable system. Certainly an important piece of the overall infrastructure, but as the distinguished Senator pointed out in his introductory statement, this bill is only focused on one particular area of telecommunications. The legislation I am introducing today focuses on the bigger picture, providing a broader, over-arching vision for our digital information age. By looking ahead, and providing some policy objectives we can use this opportunity to address not only past and current regulatory issues, but to project some expectations for the future of communications. Expectations which include an information infrastructure that strengthens our educational system, expands commerce, improves the delivery of health care, and enhances participatory democracy. I hope we will embrace this opportunity to herald the future. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I have, as well as the Senator from Wyoming, come to the floor to comment on the Social Security trustees' report, which is one more piece of evidence that this Congress needs to act sooner rather than later to change our entitlement programs, specifically our retirement programs and our health care programs. The longer we wait, the more likely it is that we will face very, very difficult choices and it will unfairly punish people for our delay. While it is not a crisis in 1995, that should not be justification for our not taking action as, unfortunately, is often the case. One additional point, Mr. President. I believe the trustees' report itself makes a very strong case for changing the law so that we have a different kind of trustee relationship. Four of the six trustees are members of the executive branch, the administration. And while I trust each one of them, I do not believe they have the kind of independence that the American people need in order to have a recommendation upon which we can act. They say in their recommendation there is no real urgency; let us wait until the clock ticks a little further. I believe an independent board is needed, Mr. President. Otherwise, the American people are not going to acquire the sense of urgency to act. As a consequence, this Congress may be encouraged to delay longer than is wise. I thank the distinguished Senator from Wyoming for yielding time.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, on the same subject which the Senator from Vermont discussed, the Senator from South Dakota, the chairman of the Commerce Committee, earlier came to the floor and indicated that S. 652, the Telecommunications Act of 1995, would not be able to be considered on the floor before the Easter recess as a consequence of the administration, namely the Vice President, as someone who had indicated that the bill was going to be vetoed. Mr. President, to be clear, while I did not put a hold on this bill, I agreed to allow the debate to proceed. I was tempted to put a hold on the bill and not allow it to proceed. I will not, and would not allow the debate to proceed and at the same time give unanimous consent to limit the debate. That made it difficult to consider this piece of legislation and enact it, pass it by the Senate, before the Easter recess. So if the chairman of the Commerce Committee is looking for the person to identify as the individual who made it impossible to move this before Easter, he has no further to look than the junior Senator from the State just to his south. This is a very important piece of legislation. I am by no means hostile to the idea that we should reform the 1934 Communications Act. I am not hostile to that idea. I believe that reform can be of enormous benefit to our people. It can create new jobs. It can improve the quality of our education and make it more likely that our citizens can become informed. But, Mr. President, this is a piece of legislation that is unique in many ways. Indeed, the distinguished Senator from South Dakota, the chairman of the committee, said on this floor earlier that it has broad national support, or something to that effect. Yesterday, he said much more accurately that this is not really on the people's minds at the moment. That is a more accurate statement, Mr. President. I have maybe 2 million household lines in the State, a million households total, so there is probably a million times two residential lines in the State. I just finished a campaign for reelection where very few people came to me and said: Gee, I am going to vote for you, but I need to know your position on the deregulation of telecommunications. I need to know where you stand on this, Senator, because I am unhappy with my service. I do not like my long distance service or I do not like my local telephone service or I do not like my cable service or I do not like what is going on. They may have some concern at the margin, but no call for a radical restructuring of the regulatory environment which this piece of legislation represents. Again to be clear, I think it is appropriate for us to consider some rather dramatic changes in the law to permit in particular much more competition at the local level. I would love to see an environment where the entrepreneur, that small business person that starts off in business, can come knocking on my door or call me up or write and say I want to sell you information services; I want to sell you voice; I wish to sell you video; I am going to sell you text. I would love for them to be able to sell them in an unrestricted environment. This legislation, in my opinion, does not permit that. It pretends to but in my judgment it does not permit it. In many ways, it combines the worst of both worlds, a regulatory environment without the kind of competition that I think is needed. So I thank the chairman of the committee, who has been very generous in allowing one of my staff people, though I am not on the the Commerce Committee, to participate in the deliberation of the determination of what this bill is going to look like along with the ranking member, Senator Hollings of South Carolina. I hope they do not view me as being hostile to this piece of legislation, but I object to the identification of the administration being the problem. As far as this piece of legislation not moving prior to recess, I am, I suspect, as responsible as anybody around here because I want this to have a full and open debate. I want us to evaluate title I, title II, title III, title IV. I want us to think about what we are doing and make sure the public is informed. We are about to give them, I think, substantial change. I think they can, if it is done right, be pleased with the results. But just as great a risk, Mr. President, is that we could get in a hurry around here and pass something, think that we are deregulating, think that we are creating competition but, in fact, we accomplish neither of those two rather worthy objectives. So I look forward to the debate. I hope that when we come back after the recess there is an opportunity for S. 652 to be brought to the floor, and I look forward to the opportunity of bringing up amendments and getting a full and open debate on this very important piece of legislation. Mr. DeWINE addressed the Chair.

Mr. KERREY

Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.