John Kerry

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. It is two pages with two signature pages, and the joint explanatory statement of the committee--about five pages. I will show it to my colleague. I had no input on this explanatory statement and it is hard to explain, but it is just a small paragraph to describe the hundreds of pages mention on by reference in this report.

Mr. KERRY. My good friend from Nebraska asked a very important question. Let me, in defense of the Senator from New York, say that Senator Moynihan will be here soon. By agreement, he is going to be comanaging this report because of the tax provisions in this bill.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, with respect to the request, we would be happy to try to cooperate in terms of order and allowing people to speak. I am constrained on behalf of the minority leader not to agree at this point to some kind of limitation on time for our colleagues. If we could perhaps agree to this: I did want a couple of moments as manager to respond to the majority leader's comments. I will not take a long time at all. I know the Senator from Texas has been here and wants to speak. I think it would be fair to perhaps establish an order. If the Senator from Texas wants to live with the time, fine; I know the Senator from Oregon is not prepared to at this moment in time. We can at least establish an order.

Mr. KERRY. Just for clarification.

Mr. KERRY. Will the Senator yield for a question on that? Is the Senator saying that every one of those groups were presented with and have read the conference report and are supporting the conference report?

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

Mr. KERRY. Well, I may say to the Senator from California--and I know the majority leader is going to point this out to us--we have a rule here, rule XXVIII, and I am confident he is going to talk about that and he is going to say, well, the Senate created a situation whereby this rule was replaced by a precedent allowing an unfortunate process whereby a piece of legislation like this ``can happen.'' That goes to what the Senator from Nebraska was talking about--the legal authority versus the sense of conscience and the question of what is right and what is wrong. It also goes to the question of how one gets things done. I will readily acknowledge that there is a ``precedent'' that allows last minute things to happen in the context of a conference. But the precedent and the rectitude with which it might be legitimately used does nothing to wipe away the question of the sort of moral or political legitimacy within the context of this institution or our own politics. When the President of the United States sends a letter and says: Don't do this; I will veto it because it is fundamentally unfair, but nevertheless people go ahead and proceed to do it anyway, that really calls into question motive, purpose, outcome, and why we are here today in this situation. So I am going to readily acknowledge, sure, you can use some technicality of legitimacy to say it, but it is not legitimate in the larger context of what we are trying to get done. It is not legitimate when measured against the judgment of most Americans about what is fair and right. It is clear that we have a health care delivery system problem. We have millions of Americans who have no insurance whatsoever. The President offered a way, a far less expensive way than that which has been exploited by the majority party, to provide care to those citizens. In his letter--and I want to emphasize this--the President says very clearly, ``Our family care proposal would expand coverage to 4 million uninsured parents at a cost of slightly over $3,000 per person. Your proposal''--this is the proposal of the majority side-- ``would provide additional coverage to one-seventh the people at six times the cost.'' One-seventh of the people at six times the cost. That is what this fight is about. It is about uninsured people versus people who are insured. It is about unintended consequences, or maybe vague results. If you give a health care tax credit to people who already have coverage, you are giving an incentive to corporations that provide that coverage to turn to them and say we don't need to provide you with coverage anymore; you now have a handsome health care tax credit from the Federal Government; go buy your own. And you wind up reducing the number of those who are covered, not in fact encouraging further coverage. So there is a complete reversal of policy in a sense here, and I think it goes to the core of what this particular legislation is about. Now, I said earlier--and I want to complete the part of my statement about what is going in this bill and why I think we could find a common ground. It seems to me there is a common ground that could be found. First of all, the small business provisions are good. We worked at them, hard. I might also emphasize that the hard work is one of the reasons that they are good--and I congratulate the Senator from Missouri, Mr. Bond, and his staff for this--we worked together in order to try to accommodate people. We accommodated the Senator from Minnesota, Mr. Wellstone, on one component, which was a very important part of expanding the reach of programs into low-income communities, and that was how we came to a consensus agreement of bipartisanship within our committee. But, again, without my knowledge, without one Senate Democrat being there, that entire provision was thrown and traded away in the middle of the night, in a room that I still do not know where it was, with those people who met without even inviting us. The consensus that had been built for the small business bill was traded away in exchange for other items that are in this legislation. I say to my colleagues, respectfully, that is not the way to build consensus. That is not the way to encourage the capacity to have agreement in the final results here. There are important provisions in this bill. Provisions which I worked to include and worked with other members to get included. There is a reauthorization of the National Women's Business Council at $1 million a year. That is important. We should be doing that together. It enhances the procurement opportunities for women-owned businesses. We built an important consensus on that. We should be doing that together. It reauthorizes the very small business concerns program. We worked hard for that. We should be doing that. It reauthorizes the Socially and Economically Disadvantaged Business Program, it extends the SBA's cosponsorship authority, and it has important provisions to increase veteran owned businesses. There were important changes to the Microloan Program, which I included, specifically provisions that increased the maximum loan amount from $25,000 to $35,000, and increasing the average loan size to $15,000. These are important provisions that we worked on together. Its not a perfect document, but it has the support of nearly all members, because we all had a stake in it and were a part of the process. There are good things in this bill. I regret the fact that I am put in the unfortunate position of having this sort of nonlegislative process crowd in on the legislative process and take away our ability to promptly pass important legislation for small businesses in this country. I regret that the Wellstone provision that would have created a 3-year $9 million pilot project to build the capacity of community development venture capital firms through research and training and management assistance was stripped out without our knowledge or consent. Again, without sort of our consent or participation whatsoever. But let me focus finally, if I may, on underscoring a couple of aspects about the bipartisanship here. I introduced legislation earlier this year, with my distinguished colleague from Maine, Senator Collins, to try to address the lack of adequate funding for one specific service on which seniors depend, and that is home health care. We both shared a belief--shared by almost all of our colleagues in the Senate--that the crisis in home health care is becoming so glaring that we ought to be able to build a bipartisan consensus here to do something about it. And we laid out a sense of how the Senate could do that. Unfortunately, in this legislation, we see a reluctance to try to properly address that home health care component, coupled with the nursing home care component--again, in favor of the HMOs themselves which have cut some 400,000 seniors from coverage in the course of the year. We laid out the picture for the Senate: Funding for home health care has plummeted since enactment of the BBA of 1997. The original cuts in home health care payments included in the BBA totaled $16 billion, but estimates now show that the industry will sustain a cut in Medicare reimbursement of more than 4 times that--$69 billion. According to CBO, Medicare spending on home health care dropped 45 percent in the last two fiscal years--from $17.5 billion in 1998 to $9.7 billion in 1999-- far beyond the original amount of savings sought by the BBA. The draconian cuts in home health care services mirror the cuts in funding for hospitals and nursing homes. These cuts have created a crisis in our country. And many of us worked across the aisles to do something about it. But we didn't have a seat at the table when the BBRA was put together. And I ask you, has the Majority responded adequately to this crisis? Have they provided, in the BBRA, sufficient funds to strengthen our local hospitals, nursing homes and home health agencies. No, they have not. What, then, in spite of the obvious needs for remedies, what do the Republicans, do with the $30 billion in funding that they provide in the BBRA? Who benefits from this restoration of funding? Would you believe that the primary recipients of the increased Medicare funds are HMOs? That's right, the same HMOs who have dropped, this year alone, 400,000 seniors from their health plans because they could not turn a profit caring for the aged. The same HMOs that fight tooth-and-nail against adopting a Patient Bill of Rights which would ensure Americans have basic rights to quality health care. The $30 billion in Medicare this add-back package is too heavily targeted at HMOs. Over the first 5 years, one-third of all of the relief in this bill goes to HMOs; over the second 5 years one-half of the relief goes to HMOs. It is unconscionable to bolster Medicare funds for HMOs at the expense of our community hospitals, nursing homes, and home health agencies--providers that do not pick-up and leave a community just because they are not making a profit. HMOs' treatment of seniors has been deplorable--having dropped 400,000 from their plans this year--and should not be rewarded. Yet that's all this bill does--and my hope is that after this bill is vetoed, when Congress returns, that we'll be able to do in home health care relief what we should have been doing all along--providing a meaningful lifeline to these home health care agencies which make such difference in the lives of our seniors. Vaccines for the New Millennium Act--Omitted from Final Tax Package. I want to also talk about an issue that I have worked on for 2 years, in one of the best bipartisan efforts I have been a part of in my 16 years here. Democrats and Republicans have negotiated together for the past 2 years to create a strong bipartisan bill to provide assistance with the development and purchase of vaccines for AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. I sat down with Bill Frist, with the distinguished Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, and with numerous colleagues on the Democratic side who wanted to address a global crisis having an extraordinary impact particularly on sub-Saharan Africa. The Administration was strongly supportive of our efforts--as were our colleagues in the House. And yet the Vaccines for the New Millennium Act was dropped from this conference report. Let me just share with you what our legislation would have done-- legislation dropped in favor of poison pill measures opposed by many members on both sides of the aisle: We aimed to provide a 30 percent tax credit on R&D into vaccines against malaria, TB, AIDS and any other disease which kills more than one million people per year. This provision expanded and targeted the existing R&E tax credit. It would also provide a tax credit on the sales of vaccines against malaria, TB and AIDS. Vaccine manufacturers would receive a 100 percent credit on the value of their sale of vaccine to qualified international health organizations, like UNICEF, for distribution to developing countries. Let me emphasize again why we believed it was so critical to act now. There is great need for further vaccine research. Every year, malaria, TB and AIDS kill more than 7 million people. Preventive vaccines are our best hope to bring these destructive worldwide epidemics under control. The NIH is conducting vital research at the basic science level, but private sector pharmaceutical companies have the lion's share of expertise in bringing vaccines to the market place. But the market fails in the case of vaccines against diseases which strike primarily the developing world. This measure would have addressed this market failure by reducing the high cost of R&D as well as by creating a market for the vaccines once they are developed. The American Public Health Association, the Global Health Council, AIDS Action, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the Alliance for Microbicide Development and the President's Advisory on HIV/AIDS all support the measure. And yet it is nowhere to be found in a tax package that found room for all sorts of complicated tax cuts for those who need them the least in our society--while ignoring the needs of an entire continent teetering on the brink of being entirely wiped out. Our politics can be better than this. We can address the real needs of a country in Medicare, in the health care crisis of our nation, in the global pandemic of AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria--or we can play politics. This bill is headed for a veto. And it deserves it. The American people deserve better than this.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I am pleased that the controversy surrounding Section 12 of this bill, Section 1012 of Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary Appropriations conference report, has been resolved. Although I believe the new provision is unnecessary, I hope that requiring a technical demonstration to resolve harmful interference questions in the 12.2 GHz band will put this issue to rest. However, let me be clear that I support Section 12 with the understanding that it does not supercede or otherwise impact relevant provisions in the Satellite Home Viewers Improvement Act (Public Law 106-113, 113 Stat 1501)) which require the FCC to complete by November 29, 2000, the processing of applications and other authorizations for local facilities that can provide local television and broadband services to rural and underserved areas. Northpoint Technology and its 69 Broadwave affiliates applied on January 8, 1999, to provide lower cost multi-channel video and data services in every television market in the United States. Northpoint's technology is particularly innovative and accomplishes something that is unique in telecommunications history. Using Northpoint's patented system, the Broadwave affiliates will be able to re-use the 12.2-12.7 band without the need to relocate existing users DirecTV and Echostar. Northpoint Technology through its Broadwave affiliates will offer consumers in Boston and several other markets the benefits of true competition in the marketplace for multichannel video programming and data services. In the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress established March 1999 as the sunset on the FCC's authority to regulate the price of basic cable service. Congress took this action with the anticipation that competition would replace regulation in restraining prices and improving quality in the video programming marketplace. The rapid introduction of Broadwave service to communities across America will go a long way toward achieving the goals of the 1996 Act and ensuring that consumers enjoy the fruits of competition including greater choice, lower prices and quality service.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, I will be very brief. I simply want to respond very quickly to the comments made by the distinguished majority leader who appropriately cited many items within the legislation that we all ought to support. Indeed, that is precisely what I said in the course of my comments. We do support a great deal of what is in the legislation. But what the majority leader never did, in the course of his comments, was address any of the issues we raised with respect to the health care system, the fundamental fairness, and the issues of contention raised by the President of the United States. He dismissed that rather quickly and cavalierly, suggesting that the President got a lot of what he wanted. Let me be very precise. Of 119 individual tax provisions in this bill, 35 of them are from the President's budget; that is 30 percent of the provisions, not the 80 percent that the majority leader talked about. Mr. President, and of the $240+ billion in tax cuts in this package, only $48 billion, or 20 percent of the total, is from the President's proposals. No one should be misled by the comments of the majority leader to believe that this is somehow a fair division, and that the President, in offering to veto, is not vetoing it on substantive, clear, and distinct differences of policy. Secondly, the majority leader suggested that much was included in this, and this is sort of mostly a bill that is somehow beneficial. What he neglected to address was the issue that we raised about how this bill came together and what is in it as a total. As a total, it represents, in a sense, a consensus of what the majority wanted to put in. But it was arrived at without discussion with the minority, and so there are whole bills in here that raise very significant issues. One of them is the issue to which the Senator from Oregon is going to talk. I just want to take about 2 minutes to say something about it. There is, in this tax bill, a whole piece of legislation called the Pain Relief Promotion Act. My colleagues ought to listen to that title very carefully: Pain Relief Promotion Act. That title is an extraordinary, almost cynical, play on words. It completely distorts the notion of what happens in this legislation. First of all, this Pain Relief Promotion Act completely preempts State law with respect to the definition of a legitimate medical purpose with respect to State medical regulations. The implications of that with respect to this are to require the Drug Enforcement Agency's agents to determine whether a physician's prescription of a controlled substance for pain relief medication was intended to relieve pain or to assist in suicide. I hope my colleagues focus on that. The Pain Relief Promotion Act is asking DEA agents to make a judgment of intent about what a doctor intended to do in prescribing a prescription drug to a patient who is terminally ill in a hospital. Are we seriously going to go down that road and DEA agents to have the potential to provide a 20-year prison sentence for a doctor for making a judgment about pain medication to an ill patient in a hospital? I find that extraordinary. Yet the majority leader tried to suggest on the floor that this is just some innocuous conglomeration of legislation that has no major impact on the lives of Americans, except 80 percent of it is good and what the President wanted. That is a fight worth fighting on the floor of the Senate today. I am not going to go into all the details. I just went through a long hospitalization issue with a parent. I know what that pain medication meant for cancer. I know how difficult it was in the hospital to get the proper pain medication, to have people comfortable with what was being dealt. If we suddenly layer that kind of legal structure over the delivery of medical care in America, we are taking an extraordinary step that at least ought to be properly debated on the floor of the Senate in the context of hearings, the process, and so forth. A recent New England Journal of Medicine article said the following: If the Pain Relief Promotion Act becomes law, it will almost certainly discourage doctors from providing adequate doses of medicine to relieve the symptoms of dying patients. That does not belong in a tax bill, conglomerated in a room without the consent of Democrats. That is why we are here. That is why we are fighting about this legislation. My final comment is, with respect to the tax components of this, major components of fairness were stripped out of this bill. The majority leader talked about how important it is to provide savings for Americans. Yes, it is important. There is not one of us on this side of the aisle who won't vote to encourage Americans to save money. There is not one of us who does not support a 401(k) program. But when we are making a choice about how much money we can allocate to people based on the overall amounts of money available and that choice was made by the Republicans alone to encourage 401(k)s to the exclusion of middle- and low-income Americans to be able to save, that is a fight worth fighting. That is a question of fundamental fairness. The 401(k)s are terrific for lawyers and doctors and high-income people, but the kind of Americans we were trying to reach--at the $30,000, $25,000, $20,000 income level--have a lot harder time gaining benefit from a 401(k). What the President had in his proposals was a credit that would have gone directly to those hard-working Americans. That was stripped out. That is why we are here now raising these issues regarding this legislation. It is a question of fundamental fairness. I regret that in all of his comments this morning, the majority leader did not address the fundamental issue of fairness that we are raising and over which the President has threatened a veto. My absolute last comment: The President made clear that he would veto this. So the majority leader comes to the floor and says, well, we will come back, and we will work this out down the road. Why? Why work it out down the road? Why not work it out now? Why not work it out in the last month before we came to the floor knowing it would be vetoed? If we can work out these other issues, if we weren't seeking a political advantage, we could certainly work that out. People may not like the fact that the President of the United States is who he is and is of the party that he is, but he has the veto. We have been through this since 1995, when the Government of the United States was shut down for the first time in American history over this very same challenge. And here we are again, in the year 2000, with the same sort of sense of frustration over the fact that he has the veto pen that brings us to this point of confrontation. The fact is, he does have that pen. He has the constitutional right. He made it clear he would do it. And the reasons he has chosen to do it are substantive and important to the American people. That is what this debate is about. I thank my colleague for his courtesy. I yield such time, up to the 30 minutes, as he might consume to the Senator from Oregon.

Mr. KERRY. It comes equally divided from both sides.

Mr. KERRY. No. But I was recognized and therefore I do not want this entire colloquy to come from my time. I am asking that the time commence for division.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time consumed to this point not count as equally divided.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President. I think this is not as complicated as we are making it. If I could try to simplify it, the unanimous consent request requires us to alternate to each side. We will go, immediately following my comments, to the Senator from Oregon, and then back to the majority side, Senator Nickles, and then back to our side to a person to be yet named, and then back to the Republican side to the Senator from New Mexico, and then back to our side, which follows Senator Gramm. And that is the order with the time to be determined by the managers on each side.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for that request.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, the Senator from Oregon has requested 30 minutes. I am prepared to yield him 30 minutes from our time. I think we should each control our time.

Mr. KERRY. You control it.

Mr. KERRY. Afterwards it would come back to this side, and then the Senator from New Mexico.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, could I suggest the following? And I think it will meet everybody's needs. At the conclusion of my brief remarks, the Senator from Oregon be recognized, following him, Senator Nickles to be recognized, with the time to be selected by the managers for how much time they allocate, and subsequent to that, someone on our side, to be named, to be recognized, and then the Senator from Texas.

Mr. KERRY. I yield for the purpose of clarification only.

Mr. KERRY. I am willing to yield for a question, but I am trying to proceed here, if we can.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, would the Senator agree that the Senator from Texas was, in fact, going to precede him?

Mr. KERRY. I will yield only for the purpose of asking a question.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, if I may respond, I am confident the leader on our side wants to be as reasonable as possible. The issue on our side has been, as we said earlier, the level of progress, No. 1, and No. 2, the question of inclusivity. What the chairman just said suggests there is a lot more inclusivity, and I presume reasonable minds will prevail at an appropriate time. A judgment has to be made by the administration and the minority leader with the level of progress. I am confident that will happen. If I may continue, Mr. President, for a moment. Would it be appropriate at this point in time--Senator Wyden has been waiting for a long time; I know the Senator from Texas has been waiting. I want to make a few comments yielding myself time off our time for a brief moment--I will be brief--at which point, may we have a unanimous consent agreement? Mr. WYDEN addressed the Chair.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, no objection.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, on behalf of the leader, at this time I have to object.