John Kerry

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I would simply ask to get a sense of how long the Senator thinks he might speak. We might line up the next speaker.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senator from Louisiana is finished, the Senator from Florida, Mr. Nelson, be recognized for 5 minutes.

Mr. KERRY. I thank my colleague.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, we are awaiting the Senator from Arizona who, I know, is working on a couple of things right now. We need to clear a couple of things with the Senator, and we are working on the possibility of accepting his amendment. We just need to tie up those loose ends. So I think the Senator from Wyoming may have had a request he wanted to make. We can do that now, and then we will see where we are. I yield the floor.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, as the Senator knows, we had a discussion about this, and I am constrained to object. I think he understands why. I welcome further debate if he would like, but I must object.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, if we could begin the consideration, as I mentioned, we are working on that language. I do not want to agree to the modification yet until we have had a chance to talk with the Senator about it. I am not saying we will not agree to it. I want to see if we can get that done. If we can begin on the amendment as originally filed, we can interrupt to do it with the modification. I want a chance to clear it.

Mr. KERRY. I have no objection to the as modified to consider it.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator very much for his participation and contribution to this effort. I am trying to work to see if--as I have said, there are certain components of this that make it difficult to accept, that multiyear piece and so forth. But the notion of reaffirming the commitment the President has made is not difficult to make. From our judgment, the President has really addressed this as significantly as one can by putting the $85 billion there, by making it clear they are moving forward, they are going to fully fund it, and by helping the Appropriations Committee members to provide the letter which speaks to their good faith going forward. All of those steps have taken place. We just don't want to get into a situation where we are creating another hurdle to get over before the treaty goes into effect. If we could find a way as a declaration or some way to reframe this condition--I am working with the administration to see if we can do that--we would be happy to try to restate it.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Mexico very much. I do not intend to use that much time, but we will see what develops here. Let me speak quickly to this amendment. I want to begin by saying everyone in this Senate is respectful of how hard the Senator from Arizona has worked to bring attention, appropriate attention, to the effort to keep up our nuclear deterrent. He has pushed to correct what this administration saw as too many years of neglect for the work of the nuclear weapons complex. I am glad to say this administration has not only heard him, but many other Members of the Senate, from both sides of the aisle, have joined in this effort to call attention to the modernization needs of our nuclear deterrent. The administration has appropriately pushed hard for an unprecedented level of funding for this work. In these difficult budgetary times, I do not think anybody here would argue that moving a 10-year budget from $70 billion to over $85 billion, which they have done, what President Obama has done, shows an extraordinary commitment to this enterprise by this administration. That is why the three directors of the nuclear laboratories told Senator Lugar and me, ``The proposed budgets provide adequate support to sustain the safety, security, reliability and effectiveness of America's nuclear deterrent within the limit of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads established by the New START treaty, with adequate confidence and acceptable risk.'' That is also why Tom D'Agostino, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, could say a few days ago, ``Having been appointed to my position by President George W. Bush, and reappointed by President Barack Obama, I can say with certainty that our nuclear infrastructure has never received the level of support that we have today.'' Given all that has happened in the past year, all that has been certified and pledged, and all that we know the administration absolutely plans to do, it is hard to understand why anyone has a question about the nuclear stockpile provision at this point in time. This particular amendment, unnecessary therefore in the light of what I have just said, does not present fundamental problems in terms of the words ``to the extent possible we should accelerate.'' That is exactly what they are doing. They are accelerating, to the extent possible. But paragraph B presents a number of different issues. Most importantly, the amendment itself requires that the treaty not go into force until all of the these additional certifications are made. The administration has made it crystal clear that it is committed to funding these facilities. If you read the update section of the 1251 report that the administration provided, at Senator Kyl's request, and they provided that in November, here is what they say: The administration is committed to fully fund the construction of the uranium processing facility and the chemistry-metallurgy research replacement, and is doing so in a manner that does not redirect funding from the core mission of managing the stockpile and sustaining the science, technology, and engineering foundation. So before we come to this moment, Senators were concerned about whether the administration was committed to the facilities. Then the administration made it very clear they are committed. The President made that commitment as clear as could be in 1251. Now the concern is, they are not building the facilities fast enough. Well, that runs completely contrary to what the people designing it think is happening and want to do. And, incidentally, if you put additional funding into hiring additional people, by the time you find them and get them, and they are qualified and they come, they are going to be finished with the job of the additional design and early construction planning. If this were a post office we were trying to think about building, maybe you could be a little more sanguine about saying, go ahead and accelerate it. But we are talking about multibillion-dollar, complicated facilities that require very significant, sensitive, difficult substances management. They are going to take a certain number of years to build. That is a reality. That is how complex and challenging the task is. The early cost and design estimates are that the uranium facility is going to cost somewhere between $4 billion and $6 billion, and the plutonium facility is going to cost about the same. So we all remember the old saying around here, we have got a lot of Senators who are talking about waste in the process of governance. The last thing we want to do in this budget, in my judgment, is create an environment of haste that does not measure properly what we are doing. We ought to listen to the experts on this a little bit, the people who are doing the design and the engineering, who tell us it is no simple matter in the world of nuclear weapons production. It involves hundreds of scientists and engineers working on every single aspect of the plant, in order to make sure it is going to work, that it is going to be secure, and it is going to be as safe as humanly possible. You cannot just throw money at an ongoing design and engineering effort and then automatically expect it can accelerate beyond an already significant increase. We have gone up $15 billion. If you hire a whole bunch of engineers who are new to the project, they do not know what they are doing yet. That is a recipe for both inefficiency and possibly even the increase of design risks or other kinds of issues. The truth is, if you cram all of these billions into a very short fiscal period, in addition to that, as this amendment seeks to try to force, you could unnecessarily create competition within other nuclear weapons activities, such as the ongoing warhead life extension programs, and our critical warhead surveillance efforts. The bottom line here is there is a place and a way to do this. We have an authorizing committee. The Armed Services Committee is the committee that ought to be doing this, not some amendment that comes in attached to the treaty, and linking the treaty going into force to all of these other things being certified. I think the Appropriations Committee, as well as the Armed Services Committee, would powerfully endorse that notion here on the floor at this point in time. We can compel the President to ask for upfront funding. But that does not guarantee that the President is necessarily going to receive it. And this links it to the notion he can certify that he has. So I agree with my colleague, the last administration took way too long to focus on this issue, and Senator Kyl has done an important service to the Senate, to the country, and to this process, to help to focus on it. But it makes no sense to use a resolution on a treaty to lock the President into doing something he cannot necessarily do because of the Congress and other things that are tied to it. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator for the issue, as it is important. I understand its importance to the part of the country where those particular weapons are housed today. I am confident--and I know this--that the administration, because we have talked about it, has a plan that I think will meet with the consent and approval of the Senators' concern, but they need to go through the further evaluation and analysis of all of these decisions. Decisions have not yet been made, and it would be inappropriate at this time to constrain the latitude they need in order to be able to make those judgments. It is an important issue, but I think it is inappropriate for us to constrain them and particularly to do so in the context of the treaty itself. Mr. President, we are working with our friends on the other side of the aisle to really try to get the final agreement as to how we are going to proceed. I believe it is going to be possible for us to work out the issues with Senator Kyl and his amendment. So I hope we will not need any other votes other than the final vote on the treaty. That is our hope at this point. We will try to work through that over the course of the next few minutes. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, knowing that we are getting to that moment at which point we are going to have an understanding of how we are proceeding forward and knowing that because of the 30-hour limitation, no matter what, we are getting toward the end, rather than chew up time for Senators later on, I thought I would take a moment now to say thank you to a few folks involved in this process. Before I do that, I also will reserve some time, as I will for Senator Kyl and Senator Lugar-- and this, I assume, will be part of the agreement we are going to reach--to speak to the substance of the treaty at the appropriate time before we vote. It has been an incredible team effort by an awful lot of people over the course of a lot of months. I wish to thank all of them for their involvement. Senator Lugar has been an unbelievable partner and a visionary with respect to these issues but, importantly, just a very steady, wise, and thoughtful collaborator in the effort to get the treaty to where we are today. It hasn't always been easy for him because there were times when he was a lonely voice with respect to those who were prepared to support this treaty. I wish to pay tribute to his statesmanship and his personal courage in steadily hanging in there with us. I thank President Obama for his determination to make certain that this was the priority that he felt it was and that I think it is. He and so many folks in the administration have been helpful in this effort. I will reserve some comments later more specifically, but I think the Vice President has been, at the President's request, an invaluable collaborator in this effort. He has talked to any number of colleagues, made any number of phone calls, been involved in any number of strategic choices here, and I am deeply grateful to him for taking his prior stewardship of this committee and being as thoughtful as he has been in the way he has approached this particular treaty. Secretary Clinton likewise has dedicated herself and her staff to the effort to work through unbelievable numbers of questions, to make themselves available and to make herself available to talk with colleagues. This has been a tremendous team effort with Secretary Gates, Secretary Chu, Admiral Mullen, General Chilton, LTG O'Reilly, and others. None of these things can happen if there isn't a team pulling together to answer questions and deal with the issues colleagues have. At the State Department, Assistant Secretary Rose Gottemoeller has been unbelievably available, patient, thoughtful, and very detailed in her efforts to answer the questions of Senators and be precise about this negotiation. She led a tremendous team and worked very closely with Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs Rich Verma, who likewise helped coordinate and pull people together to deal with the issues we faced. Dave Turk, Terri Lodge, Paul Dean, and Marcie Ries have all been key members of that team, and we thank them for their amazing commitment of hours and the dedication they have shown to the effort to try to get us to where we are today, to this final vote. Likewise, at the Pentagon, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Jim Miller; the chief Defense Department representative on the negotiating team, Ted Warner; Marcell Lettre; Eric Pierce; Michael Elliott; and Chris Comeau--all of them, together with the State Department, provided the kind of linkage we needed and the consistent effort to answer questions and deal with their principals in order to get the information necessary for Senators to be able to make good judgments. At the Energy Department, Tom D'Agostino and Kurt Siemon were also constantly available. At the White House, I thank Pete Rouse, chief of staff, and Tom Donilon, the National Security Adviser, and I especially thank Brian McKeon, Vice President Biden's National Security Deputy, who has just done an extraordinary job of helping to provide the bridge between various agencies, as well as strategy, and has been consistently available to us. Louisa Terrell and Jon Wolfsthal have been part of that team. We are very grateful to all of them. On the Foreign Relations Committee, it has been a great team effort with Senator Lugar. The chief of staff of the Foreign Relations Committee, Frank Lowenstein, has worked countless hours on this treaty, together with Doug Frantz, Ed Levine, and Anthony Wier. These two gentlemen, Ed Levine and Anthony Wier, are unbelievable veterans of this kind of effort. They worked with Senator Biden for years. I am delighted they were willing to stay over and continue with the committee. In the case of Ed Levine, he lost his dad during the course of this debate a few days ago and, nevertheless, hung in there with us and stayed right at it. The wisdom and experience he has brought to this task is invaluable, together with his collaborator Anthony Wier. Peter Scoblic, Andrew Keller, Jason Bruder, and Jen Berlin have been enormous contributors to this effort. I am grateful to all of them. On the Republican side, Ken Myers--Ken brings so much experience and wisdom to this task. He has been with Senator Lugar for a long time. What he has done to help us bridge the divide is immeasurable. Tom Moore and Mike Mattler worked with him. Our staff in S-116, which has sort of been headquarters for us, Meg Murphy and Matt Dixon have put up with strange hours and interruptions. We are eternally grateful to them. Obviously, nothing happens in the Senate without the floor staff, the folks who put in these long hours. Jessica Lewis and Tommy Ross on Senator Reid's staff have been invaluable to us. Lula Davis, Tim Mitchell, and Stacy Rich are invaluable on every issue here. The Senate would not work without them. We are deeply grateful to all these people. I am glad the schedule allows us a moment where we can actually thank them all publicly. They do a service for our country that many people in the country never have a sense of. They do not see it. Government gets a lot of criticism, but let me tell you, these folks work as hard as any people I know anywhere, and a lot of things could not happen without them. As I said, I wish to speak to the substance of the treaty before we vote, but for the moment I yield the floor.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, we are now in the final throes of getting together a unanimous consent request. The leadership has asked us to proceed forward on the amendment. Senator Kyl has asked me--I think he wanted to be here when we do his amendment on modernization, which we are now prepared to accept, with further modification. So I will wait for Senator Kyl in order to do that. In the meantime, I understand we also have an agreement on the missile defense amendment, and that amendment is now going to be cosponsored by Senator Lieberman and Senator McCain. So if the Senator from Tennessee wants to talk about that amendment, we are prepared to accept it. I think we should have the discussion of that amendment at this point in time. I yield the floor.

Mr. KERRY. No objection.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I believe at the desk now is the Kyl amendment, as modified. I am sorry about the confusion. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we be able to immediately proceed to the Kyl amendment. We will come right back to the Corker amendment, but I ask unanimous consent to proceed to the Kyl amendment, as modified, with the modification that has been submitted at the desk.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I believe Senator Kyl wishes to say something.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I agree with the comments of the Senator. It does leave the President that important ability, but it also puts the question of whether this is a way that is more efficient. It is something we should be looking at, and the President intends to look at it. We will accept this amendment. Mr. President, I don't think there is further debate.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank Senator Kyl and the Chair, and now, Mr. President, I believe the Corker amendment is the pending business.

Mr. KERRY

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

Mr. KERRY

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

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I would ask, before we proceed on that-- because Senator Kyl is now here, so we could quickly accept his amendment and dispose of that--I ask unanimous consent that we call up Kyl amendment No. 4892, as modified--as additionally modified. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KERRY. Objection.

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

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I know the Senator from North Dakota wants to speak on this a little bit. I thought we might, if he was willing-- we could accept the amendment and then the Senator would have an opportunity to speak. Mr. President, we are prepared to accept this amendment.

Mr. KERRY. We are shortly going to propound a unanimous consent request. I have been saying that a couple of times now, but we really are shortly going to do it. There are several Senators who wish to speak. I would like to see if we could set up an order for them. I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Washington proceed for 10 minutes, then the Senator from Texas for up to 10 minutes, then the Senator from North Dakota for 5 minutes. I ask unanimous consent also that each of those Senators would allow the interruption for the propounding of the unanimous consent request if it comes during the time they are speaking.