John Kerry

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I think we have had a good opportunity throughout today and yesterday to open some of the issues and give colleagues a sense of what is in the treaty, the resolution of ratification, and how it addresses many of the concerns. My hope is, perhaps, as we go out of executive session and into legislative session for a period of time, it will give some of us an opportunity to sit down and work together to see if we can find some of the clarifications that might resolve some of those issues for people. Senator Lugar and I are both prepared to sit with our colleagues and try to do that, and obviously we look forward to being able to get back to begin the process of legislating on whatever understandings, declarations, and clarifications Senators may have. I would ask my colleagues to carefully read the resolution and look at the many places in which rail-mobile missile defense and all these other issues have been addressed by that resolution. I see the hour of 7 has arrived, and I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KERRY

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 I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to proceed in morning business for such time as I may consume.

Mr. KERRY. I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from California, Mrs. Feinstein, be recognized at the conclusion of my remarks.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask to rescind that request.

Mr. KERRY. And that at such time that the other side has had an opportunity to speak, Senator Feinstein be recognized for 1 hour.

Mr. KERRY. I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, this afternoon, the Senate takes up an issue that is critical to our Nation's security, and we have an opportunity, in doing so, to reduce the danger from nuclear weapons in very real and very measurable terms. We have an opportunity to fulfill our constitutional obligation that requires the Senate to provide a two-thirds vote of the Members present who must vote in favor of a treaty. The Constitution, by doing that, insists on bipartisanship. It insists on a breadth of support that is critical to our foreign policy and to the security definitions of our country. That obviously requires that we put politics aside and act in the best interests of our country. I am confident that in the next days the Senate will embrace this debate in the substantive way it deserves to be embraced, and we look forward to welcoming constructive amendments from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. We will, obviously, give them time to be able to make those suggestions, and we certainly look forward to having an important discussion about the security of our Nation. We have been working together for a lot of months now to get us to this point in time, and I think it is indisputable that we have worked in good faith on our side of the aisle to try to provide enormous latitude to colleagues who have had questions about this treaty, some of whom have opposed this or other treaties from the beginning but who wanted to engage in the process. I think the administration, to their credit--Secretary Gottemoeller and others who have negotiated the treaty--has been available throughout the process. There have been an enormous number of briefings and discussions, dialogs, phone calls. There has been a very open effort, as open, incidentally, as any I can remember in 25 years in the Senate--and I have been through this treaty process with President Reagan, President Bush, President Clinton, and others--and I think this has been as open and as accessible and as in-depth and, frankly, as accommodating as any of those, if not significantly more. I wish to begin by thanking my colleague in this effort, my friend and a longtime knowledgeable advocate on behalf of nuclear common sense, Senator Lugar. We all know he is one of the world's foremost experts on the subject of threat reduction and proliferation reduction. There are very few Senators who can look out and see a program that has been as constructive in reducing the threat to our Nation that bears their name--the Nunn-Lugar Threat Reduction Program--and it has been an honor for me to work with Senator Lugar and to have his wise counsel in this process and, equally important, to have his courage in being willing to stand for what he believes in so deeply and what he knows will advance the cause of our Nation. I might comment to my colleagues that what we are doing in these next hours and days, providing advice and consent, is a responsibility that is obviously given only to the Senate. The Founding Fathers intended that the Senate be able to rise above the pettiness of partisan politics. As our friend Chris Dodd said in his valedictory speech: The Senate was designed to be different, not simply for the sake of variety but because the Framers believed the Senate could and should be the venue in which statesmen would lift America up to meet its unique challenges. ``Statesmen,'' that is the word we need to focus on in these next days. Too often in recent months--the American people signaled that in the last election--the Senate has been unable to lift America to meet its challenges. Too often we became one of those challenges, and rather than cooperating or compromising, we saw blockade after blockade and an inability to be able to address a number of issues. As Senator Dodd said: What determines whether this institution works is whether the 100 of us can work together. So with the New START treaty, we have the opportunity to do that and to demonstrate our leadership to the world. I would say to my colleagues that just 2 days ago the Foreign Relations Committee had the privilege of welcoming the entire United Nations Security Council, which came to Washington with our Ambassador, Dr. Susan Rice. Much on their minds was this question of: Could the Senate rise? Would the Senate accomplish this important goal, which has meaning not just to us but to them because they have joined with us in resolution 1929 in order to put pressure on Iran, not to mention the long-term efforts we have made with respect to North Korea. So what we do is going to be an expression of our opportunity, of our ability to be able to provide leadership to the American people. Let me clarify one thing at the outset of this discussion. We have enough time to do this treaty. To anybody who wants to come out here and claim: Oh, no, we do not have time; we cannot do it; it is right before Christmas, and so forth, let me just remind people the original START agreement, which was passed back in 1992, was a far more dramatic treaty than the New START. The original START treaty was formulated in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union. There was huge uncertainty in Russia at that point in time. The Soviet Union had just collapsed. Yet despite all the uncertainty, despite the complexity of going from some 10,000 nuclear warheads down to 6,000, the full Senate needed only 5 days of floor time in order to approve the treaty by a vote of 93 to 6. The START II treaty, which followed it about 4 years later, took only 2 days on the floor of the Senate. It was approved 87 to 4. The Moscow Treaty, which actually resulted in the next further big reduction--because START II was ratified by the Senate but not approved by Russia because of what had happened with the ABM Treaty, the unilateral pullout of the United States; so in their pique at that, it was not ratified--but we managed to go to the Moscow Treaty, and it resulted in further reductions to some 1,700 to 2,200 weapons, a very dramatic reduction. That treaty, which did not have any verification measures in it at all--no verification--that treaty took only 2 days on the floor of the Senate, and it was approved 95 to 0. So we have time to do this treaty. If we approach it seriously, if we do not have delay amendments and delay amendments, I believe we have an opportunity to embrace the fact that this New START treaty is a commonsense agreement in the next step to reduce down to 1,550 warheads and to enhance stability between two countries that together between them possess some 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons. It will limit Russia over the next 10 years to those 1,550 deployed warheads, 700 deployed delivery vehicles, and 800 launchers. It will give us flexibility in deploying our own arsenal. We have huge flexibility in deciding what we put on land, what we put in the air, and what we put at sea. At the same time, it will allow us to eliminate surplus weapons that have no place in today's strategic environment. New START's verification provisions are going to deepen our understanding of Russia's nuclear forces. For the past 40 years, the United States, often at the instigation of Republican Presidents, has used arms control with Russia to increase the transparency and the predictability of both our nuclear arsenals, and this has built trust between our two countries. It has reduced the chances of an accident. It stabilized our relationship during times of crisis. It has provided for greater communication and greater understanding and, as everybody knows, in making military decisions and strategic decisions, one's understanding of the legitimacy of a particular threat and the immediacy of that threat and knowing what the intentions and actions of a potential adversary might be is critical to being able to make wise judgments about what reaction might best be entertained. Frankly, that trust is exactly why President George H.W. Bush signed the START I and the START II treaties. That is why these treaties passed the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support. New START simply stands on the shoulders of those two START agreements. It is not new. There are a few new components of it, a few twists in terms of the verification, other things, but they are not fundamentally new. They also stand on the trust and the fact of the legitimate enforcement of that treaty over all the years that START has been in effect. So we are not beginning from scratch. We have a 1992 until today record of cooperation and of knowledge and increased security that has come to us because of the prior agreements. That is, frankly, why I was so pleased President Bush--George Herbert Walker Bush--last week, issued a statement urging the Senate to ratify this treaty. In addition to stabilizing the United States-Russia nuclear relationship, New START has a profound impact on our ability to be able to work to try to stop the spread of nuclear weapons in states such as Iran. I might point out that in the 7 months since President Obama signed this agreement, Russia has already exhibited a greater cooperative attitude in working with the United States on a number of things, not the least of which is in supporting harsher sanctions against Iran, and they have suspended the sale of the S-300 air defense system to Tehran. That is critical. We were struggling a couple years ago to try to strengthen the sanctions against Iran. There is not a Member of this body who did not articulate, at one point or another, the need to move to the Iran Sanctions Act. We finally did that, but we did not have a partnership. Neither China nor Russia, who are permanent members of the Security Council, were joining in that effort, so we could not get the United Nations even to move. Now we have, and there is nobody who has watched the evolution of this restart with Russia who does not understand that cooperation has been enhanced by our signing of this treaty. To not ratify it now would be a very serious blow to that cooperative effort and, in fact, according to many experts, could ignite an opposite reaction that would move us back into the kinds of arms race we have struggled so long to get out from under. So the fact is, we need to understand that relationship. I might add, I think Steve Forbes, in Forbes magazine, wrote an article just the other day urging the Senate to ratify START because he said it does not just have an implication in terms of the security component of it, the nuclear side, it has a very strong economic component. He is arguing for greater economic engagement between Russia and the United States and Russia and the West. He said the restart relationship is critical to that increased commerce, to that increased economic strengthening between our countries. I hope my colleagues will look carefully at a strong conservative voice such as his that urges the ratification of this treaty. In addition to the Russian component of the relationship, New START will help us keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists. One of the greatest fears of our security community is that terrorists may not necessarily get what we strictly call a nuclear bomb, but they may be able to get nuclear material through back channels and through the black market because it has not been adequately guarded and because we have not reduced the numbers of missiles and the amount of material and so they could get a hold of some of that material and make what is called a dirty bomb; that is, a bomb that does not go off in nuclear reaction but which, because of the nuclear material that explodes with it, has a very broad toxic impact on a very large community. That is a legitimate concern and one of the reasons why we drive so hard to reduce the nuclear actors in the world. The original START agreement was, frankly, the foundation of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. That is, simply put, the most successful nonproliferation effort of the last 20 years. As James Baker, former Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State, said: I really don't think Nunn-Lugar would have been nearly as successful as it was if the Russians had lacked the legally binding assurance of parallel U.S. reductions through the START treaty. So the New START is going to strengthen our ability to continue to secure loose nuclear materials, and without New START, absolutely, to a certainty, that ability to contain those materials will be weakened. In short, New START is going to help us address the lingering dangers of the old nuclear age while giving us important tools to be able to combat the threats of the new nuclear age, and the sooner we approve it the safer we will become. That is why there is such an outpouring of support for this treaty. Every single living former Secretary of State, Republican and Democrat, supports this treaty. So do five former Secretaries of Defense and the Chair and the Vice Chair of the 9/11 Commission. So do seven former commanders of our nuclear forces and the entirety of our uniformed military, including Admiral Mullen and the service chiefs, and our current nuclear commander. All support this treaty as well. It is difficult to imagine an agreement with that kind of backing from so many individuals who contributed so much to our Nation's security, almost all of whom know a lot more about each of these arguments than any Senator--myself, everybody here. They have been in the middle of this, and over the last weeks every single one of them has spoken out in favor of this treaty. Some have suggested we shouldn't rush to do this, but I have to tell my colleagues, only in the Senate would a year and a half be a rush. We started working on this treaty a year and a half ago. Senators have had unbelievable opportunity to be able to do this. I think the question is not why would we try to do it now, it is why would we not try to do it now. For what reason within the four corners of the actual treaty--not talking about modernization; that is not in the four corners of the treaty--notwithstanding that, the administration has allowed delay after delay after delay in order to help work with Senator Kyl and provide adequate increases in modernization, so much so that the modernization is way above what it was under President Bush or any prior administration. But that is not in the four corners of the treaty. That is something you do because you want to maintain America's nuclear force, and we all want to do that, which is why we have worked hard to be able to provide that funding. I believe the importance here is to recognize it has been more than a year since the original START treaty and its verification provisions expired. It has been more than 1 year since we had inspectors on the ground in Russia without access to their nuclear facilities. Every day for the past year our knowledge of their arsenal or whatever they are doing begins to diminish, one step, one small amount at a time, cumulatively over time, which is why our entire national intelligence community has come out and said this treaty, in fact, will advance America's security and assist us to be able to know what Russia is doing. Let me point out 2 weeks ago James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, urged us to ratify the New START and he said: ``I think the earlier, the sooner, the better.'' That is our National Intelligence Director. Others have tried to suggest again that this is a squeeze in the last days here, but let me say respectfully I have already given the timeframe. START took 5 days; START II, 2 days; Moscow, 2 days. So if we work diligently, there is nothing to stop us from finishing this in the time we have. We just have to stay here and make it clear we are going to stay here, and the President wants us to, and Harry Reid has said we will, until we get this done. The fact is that starting in June of 2009, over a year ago--a year and a half ago--the Foreign Relations Committee was briefed at least five times during the talks with the Russians. We met downstairs in the secure facilities with the negotiators while they were negotiating. We met with them before they negotiated. We gave them parameters we thought they needed to embrace in order to facilitate passage through the Senate. We met with them while they were negotiating at least five times--Senators from the Armed Services Committee, Senators from the Intelligence Committee, Senators from the Senate's National Security Working Group, which I cochair along with Senator Kyl. Whenever Senator Kyl wanted to meet with that group, we called a meeting with that group. We met and called in Rose Guttemoeller and others and we sat and talked. The Select Committee on Intelligence did its work. In the end, if you count them, more than 60 Senators were able to follow the negotiations in detail over a 1-year period. Senators also had additional opportunities to meet with the negotiating team and a delegation of Senators even traveled to Geneva, which the administration helped to make happen in order to meet with the negotiators while the negotiations were going on. So even though the New START was formally submitted to the Senate in May, the fact is Congress knew a lot about this treaty before it was even signed. The President made certain we were continually being briefed and that the input of the Senate was taken into account in the context of those negotiations. No other Senate--not next year's Senate--could come back here and replicate what this Senate has gone through in preparing for this treaty. We can't replicate those negotiations. They are over. They can't go back and give advice to the negotiators at the beginning. That is done. We did that. It is our responsibility to stand up and complete the task on this because we have put a year and a half's work into it. We have done the preparation. We have the knowledge. It is our responsibility. The fact is over the last 7 months, this Senate has even become more immersed in the treaty. We have had briefings. Documents have been submitted. Nearly 1,000 formal questions were submitted to the administration and they have been answered. We have volumes of these questions, all of which were asked by Senators, completely within their rights, totally appropriate in the ratification process. We welcome it. I think it has produced a better record and a stronger product. The Foreign Relations Committee conducted 12 open and classified hearings. We heard from more than 20 witnesses. The Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee held more than eight hearings and classified briefings of their own. We heard from Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense; from ADM Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; GEN Kevin Chilton, the Commander of the Strategic Command; LTG Patrick O'Reilly, the Director of the Missile Defense Agency, who incidentally repeated what every single person involved in this, from Secretary Gates all the way through the strategic command, has said: This treaty does nothing to negatively impact America's ability, or to even impact it in a way that prevents us from doing exactly what we want with respect to missile defense. We also heard from the directors of the Nation's nuclear laboratories, the intelligence officials who are charged with monitoring the threats to the United States, and we heard, as I mentioned previously several times, from the negotiators of the agreement. We heard from officials who served in the Nixon administration, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43. We heard from officials in every one of those administrations, and you know what. Overwhelmingly, they told us we should ratify the New START. As I said, some of the strongest support for this treaty comes from the military. On June 16 I chaired a hearing on the U.S. nuclear posture, modernization of our nuclear weapons complex and our missile defense plans. General Chilton, Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, who is responsible for overseeing our nuclear deterrent, explained why the military supports the New START. He said: If we don't get the treaty, A, the Russians are not constrained in their development of force structure; and B, we have no insight into what they are doing. So it is the worst of both possible worlds. That is the head of our Strategic Command telling us if you don't ratify this treaty, it is the worst of both possible worlds. This treaty may have been negotiated by a Democratic President, but some of the strongest support for this treaty comes from Republicans. Two weeks ago, five former Republican Secretaries of State--five--Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, and Colin Powell--wrote an article saying they support ratification of New START because it embraces Republican principles such as strong verification. Last week, Condoleezza Rice published an op-ed which said that the New START treaty deserves bipartisan support when the Senate decides to vote on it. As Secretary Rice wrote, approving this treaty is part of our effort to ``stop the world's most dangerous weapons from going to the world's most dangerous regimes.'' So if some think we haven't somehow considered this treaty carefully, I encourage them to revisit the voluminous record that has been produced over the last year and a half, and I look forward to reviewing it here as we debate New START in the coming days. In the end, I am confident we are going to approve this treaty just as the Senate approved the original START treaty in 1992. At that time there were also Senators who insisted on delay. There were Senators who suggested that serious questions remained unanswered. That is their privilege. There were Senators who drafted dozens and dozens of amendments. But in the end, within 5 days, the Senate came together to approve the treaty 93 to 6. So what is important that we pay attention to as we look at the big picture here and to the national imperative, the security imperative behind this treaty and what our military leaders and civilian leaders are urging us to think about, both past and present? Well, if you pay attention to the facts, you can come to only one conclusion, and that is we have to ratify this treaty. Some of our colleagues have said they could support the treaty if we addressed certain issues in a resolution of ratification. Well, again, I hope they are listening. We have addressed the issues they raised in the resolution of ratification. I think many people may not even be aware of how much we have put into the resolution of ratification and how much we have done over the last 7 months to respond to the concerns raised during the consideration of the treaty. The draft resolution is 28 pages long. It contains 13 conditions, 3 understandings, 10 declarations, and the conditions will require action by the executive branch. The understandings are formally communicated to the Russians, and the declarations express clear language of what we in the Senate expect to happen in the next years. That is the distinction between each of those categories. This resolution currently addresses every serious topic we have addressed over the course of the last 7 months. For example, on the issue of missile defense, our military has repeatedly and unequivocally assured us that the New START does nothing to constrain our missile defense plans. The Secretary of Defense says it does nothing to constrain our missile defense plans. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says it does nothing to constrain our missile defense plans. The commander of our nuclear forces says it does nothing to constrain our defense plans. Indeed, the man who probably knows more about these plans in the greatest detail--much more than any Senator--LTG O'Reilly, the head of the Missile Defense Agency, testified that in many ways, the treaty reduces constraints on our missile defense testing. Get that. The head of missile defense says this treaty reduces the constraints on our missile defense testing. He also testified that the Russians signed the treaty full knowing that we are committed to the phased adaptive approach in Europe. He said: I have briefed the Russians personally in Moscow on every aspect of our missile defense development. I believe they understand what it is and that those plans for development are not limited by this treaty. Now, if the head of our missile defense sees no problem with this treaty, I don't understand the concerns being expressed. But if a Senator is still worried about the New START missile defense treaty, notwithstanding his comments, then they ought to read condition 5, understanding 1, and declarations 1 and 2, all of which speak directly to that issue. We have also addressed the issue of what resources are needed in order to sustain our nuclear deterrence and modernize our nuclear weapons infrastructure. This is not an issue that falls within the four corners of the treaty, as I mentioned. But as a matter of good faith, in an effort to sort of accelerate the ability of people to support this treaty, every step of the way the administration, in good faith, has worked to provide Senator Kyl and others with the full knowledge of how that program is going to go forward from their point of view. Obviously, the administration doesn't control what a Republican House is going to do next year. I don't know. But Senator Inouye has given his assurances. Senator Feinstein has given her assurances. We have shown a good-faith effort to guarantee that there is knowledge of the funding going forward--the 1251 program, which lays out the spending going forward and has been made available ahead of schedule, in a good- faith effort to try to make certain every base is covered. The Obama administration proposed spending $80 billion over the next 10 years. That is a 15-percent increase over the baseline budget, even after accounting for inflation. It would have been much more an amount than was spent during the Bush administration. Notwithstanding that commitment, still last month some Senators expressed further concerns. So guess what. The administration responded even further and put up an additional $5 billion over the next 10 years. In response, the directors of our three nuclear weapons laboratories sent me a letter saying they were ``very pleased with the new plan,'' and they said: We believe that the proposed budgets provide adequate support to sustain the safety, security, reliability, and effectiveness of America's nuclear deterrent within the limit of the 1,550 deployed strategic warheads distinguished by the new START Treaty with adequate confidence and acceptable risk. Last week, the person responsible for running our nuclear weapons complex, who was originally appointed by George W. Bush, told the Wall Street Journal: I can say with certainty that our nuclear infrastructure has never received the level of support we have today. That is a ringing endorsement, Mr. President, one that is completely persuasive--or ought to be--to any reasonable mind with respect to this issue. If Senators are still concerned, then I suggest they go see condition 9 of the resolution of ratification. It says if any of this funding doesn't materialize in the coming years, the President is required to report to Congress as to how he or she will respond to that shortfall. Every other issue that has been raised is also addressed in the resolution as well. If you are worried about modernizing our strategic delivery vehicles, declaration 13 gets at that concern. Conventional prompt global strike capabilities--look at conditions 6 and 7, understanding 3, and declaration 3. Tactical nuclear weapons are likewise covered in the resolution. Verifying Russian compliance is also covered. Even the concern raised about rail mobile missiles has been addressed in the resolution of ratification. Obviously, there is room for someone else to come in and say you need to do this or that; not everything has been covered. We completely remain open to any reasonable and legitimate efforts to improve on or guarantee some safeguard that somehow is not included in a way that it can be without obviously trying to scuttle the treaty itself. I have reached out to colleagues. We have had terrific conversations. I thank my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have sat with us in a lot of efforts and inquired and helped us to navigate this process. But make no mistake, we are not going to amend the treaty itself. We are willing to accept resolutions that don't kill the treaty, but we are not going to get into some process after all that has been said and done by all of the different bipartisan voices that have inspected this treaty and found it one that we should ratify. Mr. President, I have been through all the folks who signed and endorsed it, et cetera. I simply say I hope in the next hours we will have a healthy debate. I hope we can also work out--everybody knows the holiday is upon us--I hope we can work out reasonable time periods on amendments. We are certainly not going to prolong debate. I think most Senators have a sense of where they feel on most of these issues. We look forward to working with our colleagues in a very constructive way to try to expedite the process for our colleagues. We have other business before the Senate, as well, and we are cognizant of that. This is truly a moment where we can increase America's hand in several of the greatest challenges we face on the planet. First and foremost, obviously, if we are truly committed to a nonnuclear Iran, if the United States can turn away from reducing weapons with Russia in a way that sends a message to them about our bona fides and clean hands in this effort, it would be a tragedy if we didn't take this opportunity in order to strengthen the President's and the West's and the U.N.'s hands in trying to deal with this increasingly threatening issue. I hope our colleagues will warmly rise to that challenge in the Senate. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, reserving the right to----

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I appreciate the comments of the leader with respect to that question. I wonder if the order might predicate at the outset that Senator Lugar--he has asked me for 40 minutes as an opening. I know Senator Kyl would probably want to be able to speak an equal amount of time. I would like to, obviously, make an opening, appropriately a little longer. So if we could perhaps make the order 40 minutes to Senator Lugar, 40 minutes to Senator Kyl. I would like a half hour. And we have some other Senators from there. And we could vary this as we go. Is that possible?

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, for the Committee on Foreign Relations I report favorably the following nomination lists which were printed in the Record on the dates indicated, and ask unanimous consent, to save the expense of reprinting on the Executive Calendar that these nominations lie at the Secretary's desk for the information of Senators .

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Madam President, I believe a number of colleagues are lined up to speak. They are not here, so I will take a moment and take it off the Democratic side and just speak for a very few minutes. I know a number of my colleagues are wanting to talk a little bit about the START treaty. I look forward to their doing so. I did want to bring colleagues up to speed on sort of where we are and hopefully give an accurate, up-to-the-moment assessment of sort of what the progress is. I wish to express my gratitude to a group of Senators on the other side of the aisle--Senator Kyl, Senator McCain, Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Isakson, and Senator Corker, particularly--all of whom have been working in good faith and consistently. Senator Kyl and I are talking almost every single day. It has been a constructive process. Obviously, there are points of disagreement here and there on substance. We are trying to work through those. I wish to say that Senator Kyl has worked with us calmly and quietly and in good faith in an effort to try to resolve some legitimate questions from Members on his side of the aisle. He has been consistent and persistent in hammering home those differences and the needs that must be met as we go through the process. Vice President Biden has been particularly engaged and particularly helpful in helping us to move the process forward, so the administration has a voice that is directly engaged in these discussions and is working very hard to meet the concerns raised by Senator Kyl and others. I am encouraged by the process in which we are engaged. Senators need to know it has not been a process of sidestepping a best effort to try to get to a place where we can take up the START treaty in the next days. We still have some issues to try to complete. Some Senators have expressed the desire to hear from the administration with respect to the Lisbon conference and what modality was arrived at there with respect to deployment. We will make that happen. In addition, the President was sent an additional set of questions just the other day. Those answers are being worked on, and they will be forthcoming. As long as everybody keeps working in this kind of positive and constructive way, I am hopeful we can live up to our responsibility. I call the attention of Senators to the Washington Post today, an editorial op-ed written by former Republican Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, and Colin Powell. They clearly say: We urge the Senate to ratify the New START treaty signed by President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. They express their reasons why they believe it is important for us to do so. It is my hope that the conversations we are having and the process that is in place is going to produce a positive outcome. We will certainly work in good faith to try to make that happen in the next days and hours. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for such time as I will consume.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, we are in what we all understand are very difficult times--challenging in every respect and certainly with respect to the national security concerns of the country. As we speak, American soldiers are fighting a war in Afghanistan, winding down a war in Iraq, and our Nation has young men and women in harm's way in many parts of the world, engaged in a persistent challenge against global terrorism. Iran's nuclear program continues to advance, and North Korea is building a uranium enrichment facility and provoking the south on a regular basis with its military aggression. Every single one of these is a complex challenge without any easy solution. But in the middle of all these challenges, the Senate has been given an opportunity to actually reduce the dangers our country faces. We have been given an opportunity set an example for the world. We have been given an opportunity to make the decision that would help to put greater pressure on Iran, on North Korea or on any other country that might be contemplating the notion of moving toward nuclear weapons. The Senate has been given the opportunity in the next days to express the leadership of our country with respect to moving in the opposite direction--away from nuclear weapons to greater controls, greater accountability, greater security and safety for our people. With one simple vote before we leave here in the next days, we could approve the New START treaty and make America and the world more secure and take an important step forward in leadership as we express to the world our sense of responsibility with respect to the challenge of nuclear weapons. That is the opportunity we have. The question before every Senator is going to be whether we come here in these next days to do the business of the American people, to do our constitutional responsibility to advise and consent to a treaty negotiated by the executive department of the country. New START is, quite simply, a commonsense agreement to control the world's most dangerous weapons and enhance stability between the two countries that possess over 90 percent of them. Just think of the statement it makes to those countries contemplating where Iran may be going when the countries that possess 90 percent of these weapons begin to dismantle these weapons and provide intrusive verification steps between us for how we will both behave. What an important statement at this moment in time with respect to Iranian behavior, with respect to North Korean behavior, and what a completely opposite, irresponsible decision it would be if the Senate just got bogged down in politics and walked away from this moment, unwilling to make that kind of decision that offers the leadership that I think the world and certainly the American people expect us to make. This treaty will limit the number of nuclear weapons Russia can deploy to 1,550 warheads. What American who contemplates the nature of nuclear war and conflict and the potential damage of 1 weapon, 10 weapons, 20 weapons--what American does not understand the common sense of limiting Russia to 1,550 weapons pointing at the United States of America, some of them directly pointing at us even as I stand here and speak today? This treaty will give us flexibility in deploying our own arsenal so we do not have to live by a strict restraint with respect to land or sea or air. We have flexibility in which weapons we want to put into which modality, and the verification provisions will significantly deepen our understanding of Russian forces. It has been almost a full year now since the original START treaty and its verification procedures expired. Every day since then, insight that treaty provided has been degrading. New START does more than just restrain the weapons. It does more than just provide verification. It actually strengthens the relationship between the United States and Russia, and it enhances the global nonproliferation regime we signed up to years and years ago during the Cold War. It will improve our efforts to constrain Iran and, most important, to contain the loose nuclear materials we all fear could one day fall into the hands of terrorists and, if not result in a nuclear explosion, result in what we call a dirty bomb explosion where nuclear material is, in fact, scattered for want of the ability to create a nuclear weapon itself but with grave consequences of radioactive material doing enormous injury to large populations as a result. Already in the 7 months since we signed the New START, Russia has shown greater dedication to this renewed relationship. They have supported harsher sanctions against Iran. They have suspended the sale of the S- 300 air defense system to Tehran. The original START agreement which was the bedrock of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, a program whereby we are currently reducing nuclear warheads with Russia and containing the nuclear material--one of the great contributions to nonproliferation of modern times--that is the most successful nonproliferation effort to date in which any country has engaged. That would be threatened if this START agreement does not pass. It is strengthened if the START agreement does pass. Without the START treaty, the New START treaty--I think nobody expresses concern greater than Senator Lugar. Senator Lugar, a Republican Senator, has shown enormous leadership on this issue for years and years now. He is respected all across the globe by those people who follow these issues. He has expressed the urgency of passing this treaty now, in this Senate, in this Congress, in this session. In summary, the New START helps the United States to lead other countries so we help each other to address the lingering dangers of the old nuclear age, and it gives us a very important set of tools in order to combat the threats of the new nuclear age. Indeed, the single most significant question being raised at this point in time is not about the substance of the treaty within the four corners of the treaty; it is about language external to the treaty with respect to whether it somehow might limit our missile defenses. All of us acknowledge that those missile defense investments we have made to date will go a long way toward helping us to be able to address the threat of rogue states. Let me just say as unequivocally as I know how that there is nothing in this treaty--there is no way this treaty--there is no way the policies of this administration--there is no way any language that is formal or binding between our nations or any other language, in fact, binds the United States or restrains us from pursuing missile defense. The answer with respect to any question on missile defense in this treaty is, no, it unequivocally does not restrain America's ability to develop and deploy missile defense. What is more, the evidence of that was very clear in Lisbon just the other day where the President of the United States, together with European countries, publicly announced the procedure by which we are going forward to deploy a missile defense in Europe in order to deal with the rogue threat problem. Let me be even more clear. With respect to the question of any limitation of missile defense, the Secretary of Defense, appointed by President George W. Bush, says no, there is no limitation on missile defense; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says no, there is no limitation on missile defense; the commander of our nuclear forces says no, no limitation on missile defense; the Director of the Missile Defense Agency says no, there is no limitation on missile defense. Again and again, senior military leaders have said unambiguously that this treaty does not limit our missile defense plans. So, in my judgment and the judgment of most people I know who reasonably approach this treaty, there is no issue of missile defense with respect to this treaty. Now we are beginning to hear people say that maybe we do not have time, in the context of the lameduck session, to deal with this question of American leadership, this constitutional responsibility that ought properly to be executed by the Senate that has done all of the work on this treaty. There is in that statement about lack of time, to some degree, a sort of question: Maybe there are a whole bunch of issues out there that just have not been resolved. Let me try to deal with that for a moment because I wish to make it very clear that the New START treaty's inspection and evaluation and analysis process by the Senate and appropriate committees has been extensive and exhaustive. I wish to make clear what the record says about the time we have to consider this treaty. The Senate has been working on this treaty for the past year and a half, ever since the negotiations first began. Starting in June of 2009, the Foreign Relations Committee was briefed at least five times during the talks with the Russians. Senators from the Armed Services Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate's National Security Working Group--all of them took part in those briefings. That was an obligation of this Congress. This Congress was present during the briefings with the negotiators, this Congress was privy to those negotiations as they went along--something a future Congress could not be because the negotiations are over. That underscores even more why this is the Congress that is the appropriate Congress to deal with this treaty. Roughly 60 U.S. Senators, through those committees I named, were able to follow the negotiations in detail, and individual Senators had additional opportunities to meet with our negotiating team, and a delegation of Senators even traveled to Geneva in the fall of 2009 to meet with the negotiators. I might add that included Senator Kyl, who has been one of the leading Senators on the other side involved in our discussions on this treaty. In other words, by the time the New START treaty was formally submitted to the Senate in May, the 111th Congress was already steeped in this, deeply steeped in this. No other Senate can now replicate the input we had into these negotiations. Over the next 6 months after the Senate treaty was submitted, the Senate became even more immersed in the treaty's details through hearings, briefings, documents, and hundreds upon hundreds of questions that were submitted to the administration. Something like 900 questions were submitted to the administration, and all of them have been answered in full. This Senate has done its homework on the New START treaty, and it is this Senate that has an obligation to complete the advice and consent on that treaty. The fact is, there are also very important security reasons for us not to wait. Next Sunday, December 5, it will have been 1 year since the original START treaty expired--a whole year without on-the-ground inspections in Russia. Some people say it doesn't really make a difference whether it be a month or 2 months or whatever. I have to tell you something: When it comes to nuclear arsenals, every day matters. Without this treaty, we know too little about the only arsenal in the world that has the potential to destroy the United States. As James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, said--and he does not come to us with an opinion that is clouded by politics; he doesn't come to us as a Democrat or a Republican; he comes to us as a professional whose task it is to defend the security of our country and who has a lifetime career wearing the uniform of our Nation, defending our country--he says of ratifying New START, ``I think the earlier, the sooner, the better.'' One of our most solemn responsibilities is this responsibility of advice and consent. We have been through a tough political year. The American people, we all understand--Senators keep coming to the floor and referring to the anger. It is real. It is there. We know the American people are angry. But they are angry because the business of the country does not seem to get done. They are angry because they see a partisan food fight, a political food fight taking place instead of the serious business of our Nation. I believe other countries are watching us to see whether we can fulfill our constitutional responsibilities. Just how well does this democracy we sell all over the world actually work? If we can't make it work here at home and we can't deliver now, what kind of a message does it send about the power of the United States to leverage its values and its interests in the challenging world we face today? Every Senator has an obligation to ask that question of themselves over the course of these next days: Are we a credible partner? Can other nations rely on us? What happens when the President of the United States negotiates a treaty, and he comes back here and the rest of the world sees that treaty bogged down, not in the substance of the treaty but in the politics of the day? With this vote we can demonstrate our resolve and our leadership, and we can demonstrate something about the quality of our democracy. I think the schedule of the Foreign Relations Committee shows good-faith efforts which we have applied to live up to the Senate's responsibility. After the treaty was signed in April, Senator Lugar and I worked together to set up a bipartisan review of the treaty. Never once did Senator Lugar or I approach this in a partisan way. I am grateful to Senator Lugar for his exceptional leadership and his willingness to stand up to some of the currents of the day and act on the interests of the country as he sees them. Our primary consideration in the scheduling of witnesses before our committee was not whether they would support or oppose the treaty, we looked for expertise and we looked for experience. On April 29, the committee heard from Bill Perry, former Secretary of Defense, and Jim Schlesinger, former Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Energy, and Director of Central Intelligence. These men recently led the congressionally mandated Strategic Posture Commission. They both said we should approve the New START treaty. Dr. Schlesinger said it is--this is the quote of Dr. Schlesinger, who served a Republican President--``obligatory''--that is his word-- ``obligatory for the United States to ratify New START.'' Dr. Perry told us this treaty advances American security objectives, particularly with respect to nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. On May 18, the committee held a hearing with Secretary Clinton, Secretary Gates, and Admiral Mullen. Admiral Mullen told us the New START treaty ``has the full support of your uniformed military.'' Secretary Gates made clear the treaty will not constrain U.S. missile defense efforts. He said: From the very beginning of this process more than 40 years ago the Russians have hated missile defense. They do not want to devote the resources to it and so they try and stop us from doing it through political means. This treaty does not accomplish that for them. That is what Secretary Gates said. The next day, former Secretary of State Jim Baker, who helped negotiate START I and helped negotiate START II, said that the New START ``appears to take our country in a direction that can enhance our national security while at the same time reducing the number of nuclear warheads on the planet.'' A week later, on May 25, Henry Kissinger recommended ratification of the treaty. He also cautioned us that rejection of the treaty would, in his words, have an ``unsettling impact'' on the international environment. We also heard from two former National Security Advisers; Stephen Hadley, who served under George W. Bush, who told us the treaty is ``a modest but nonetheless useful contribution to the security of the United States and to international security''; and Brent Scowcroft, who served under George H.W. Bush, said he supports the treaty and he told us the New START does not restrict our missile defense plans. He said the Russian unilateral statement was simply an issue of ``domestic politics for the Russians.'' So we heard from some of the most eminent statesmen this country has produced, Republicans and Democrats, with decades and decades of public service. They said we should approve this treaty. In all, six former Secretaries of State, five former Secretaries of Defense, the Chair and Vice Chair of the 9/11 Commission, and numerous other distinguished Americans have said it is important we approve New START. On July 14, seven former heads of the U.S. Strategic Command and Strategic Air Command sent the committee a letter urging approval of the treaty. Indeed, some of the strongest support for this treaty has come from the military, which unanimously supports the treaty. On June 16, I chaired a hearing on the U.S. nuclear posture, modernization of the nuclear weapons complex, and our missile defense plans. GEN Kevin Chilton, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, which is responsible for overseeing our nuclear deterrence, explained why the military supports the New START. He said: If we don't get the treaty, A, the Russians are not constrained in their development of force structure, and, B, we have no insight into what they are doing. So it is the worst of both possible worlds. Again, the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command says not ratifying this treaty is the worst of both possible worlds. And LTG Patrick O'Reilly, who heads the Missile Defense Agency, told us the New START does not limit our missile defense plans. I have briefed the Russians, personally in Moscow, on every aspect of our missile defense development. I believe they understand what that is. And that these plans for development are not limited by this Treaty. In other words, the Russians know what we intend to do and they signed the treaty, nonetheless. On July 14, the committee had a closed hearing on monitoring and verification of treaty compliance with senior officials from the intelligence community. Obviously, that was a highly classified briefing. But every Senator is welcome to go down to the Office of Senate Security and read the transcript of that hearing, which I suspect will stay there and not appear in WikiLeaks. If my colleagues want a public statement on verification, I would once again cite what James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, said last week about ratifying the New START treaty: I think the earlier, the sooner, the better. You know the thing is, from an intelligence perspective only-- This is General Clapper's perspective-- are we better off with it or without it? We're better off with it. The committee also heard testimony from the directors of the Nation's three nuclear laboratories. As we all know, much of the debate on the treaty has focused on the resources that are needed to sustain our nuclear deterrent and modernize our nuclear weapons infrastructure, and it was important for our committee to hear from the responsible officials directly. They praised the Obama administration's budget request for this fiscal year. I suspect my colleague from North Dakota, in a few minutes, will have something to say about that additional funding for the nuclear modernization program and the plan of action that has been outlined. I will simply say, again and again, the administration has bent over backward to work in good faith openly and accountably with Senator Kyl. I have been part of those discussions all along. I think we have acted in good faith to try to meet the needs--so much so that we put money into the continuing resolution a few months ago, in order to show our good faith for this effort to try to produce the modernization funding as we go forward. In all, the Foreign Relations Committee conducted 12 open and classified hearings, featuring more than 20 witnesses. The Armed Services and Intelligence Committees held more than eight hearings and classified briefings of their own. We did not stack the deck with Democrats. In fact, most of the former officials who testified were Republicans. Even the executive branch witnesses included several holdovers from the last administration--Secretary Gates, Admiral Mullen, General Chilton, Lieutenant General O'Reilly--all originally appointed to their posts by President Bush. Overwhelmingly, these witnesses supported timely ratification of the New START treaty. As I have said, some of the strongest endorsements came from America's military leaders. The combined wisdom of our current and former military and civilian leaders, accumulated over decades in service, not to political parties but in service to the Nation as a whole, was clear: All of them said this treaty should be ratified. Over the summer, the committee also reviewed a number of important documents, including a National Intelligence Estimate, assessing the U.S. capability to monitor compliance with the terms of the New START, a State Department report assessing international compliance with arms control agreements, including Russia's compliance with the original START, the State Department's analysis of the New START's verifiability, a classified summary of discussions during the treaty negotiations on the issue of missile defense. By the end of July, the Foreign Relations Committee had compiled an extensive record. We could have reported the treaty out of committee then. We had the votes. I was prepared to move forward, but because some Republican Senators knew we were prepared to move forward, they came and asked for more time to review the treaty and to look at the testimony and the documents we had gathered. So, in August, in direct response to this Republican request, I made a decision as chairman to postpone for 6 weeks, over the course of the August recess, until after that so Members would have more time to review the record, as the Republicans requested. Frankly, the treaty, I have said again and again, is too important to get caught up in partisan politics, so I thought it was very important not to allow anybody to say we were rushing it. We gave that additional time, even though we had the votes. We came back afterwards and we dealt with each and every one of the concerns that were raised in good faith. Frankly, it is important to have reciprocal good faith in the workings of the Senate. Over the next 6 weeks, I encouraged Senators to contact Senator Lugar and me with their comments on a draft resolution of ratification. In discussions with Senator Lugar, Senator Corker, Senator Isakson, I made it clear we welcomed and needed their input and, indeed, we got their input. At the same time, the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees were wrapping up their work on the treaty. Senators Levin and McCain each wrote to the Foreign Relations Committee with their views on the treaty, as did Senators Feinstein and Bond from the Intelligence Committee. We received the answers to several outstanding questions Senators had posed to the administration. In all, over the past 7 months, Senators formally submitted some 900 questions to the Obama administration, and they have received thorough responses to every one of them. By mid-September, our bipartisan work produced a resolution of ratification we should all be able to support. Our review process was not designed to cheerlead for the treaty. It was designed to probe every aspect of the treaty and to come up with a resolution that provided the Senate's input and protected the prerogatives of the Senate and, indeed, of individual Senator's points of views. That is what we have done. At 28 pages, the resolution of ratification-- including 13 conditions, 3 understandings, 10 declarations--addresses every serious topic we have discussed over these months. If a Senator was worried about the treaty and missile defense, then condition (5), understanding (1), and declarations (1) and (2) addressed those issues. If they were worried about modernization of our nuclear weapons complex and strategic delivery vehicles, then condition (9) and declaration (13) addressed those concerns. If they were worried about conventional prompt global strike capabilities, then conditions (6) and (7), understanding (3) and declaration (3) addressed those. Worried about tactical nuclear weapons? Well, that is in there. Verifying Russian compliance? It is in there. Even the concern that was raised about rail-mobile missiles was fully addressed in the resolution of ratification. In short, the resolution is the product of careful, bipartisan deliberation and collaboration intended to address each of the concerns that was raised. That does not mean the resolution is perfect. It does not mean it could not possibly be further improved. But in the past weeks, I have been reaching out to colleagues to get additional ideas. I will be happy to consider any germane amendment that colleagues might propose. But the only way to do that is by having the floor debate on this treaty. With the Senate now back in session, there are 33 days before the end of the year. All of us would obviously not like to repeat what happened last year and not be here right up until Christmas Eve. But there is plenty of time in the next 3 weeks for debate. Look at the record. The original START agreement was a far more dramatic treaty than the New START because its cuts were sharper and because the Soviet Union had just collapsed, leaving tremendous uncertainty in its wake. Yet the full Senate needed only 5 days of floor time before it approved that treaty, by a vote of 93 to 6, a far more complicated and far more provocative, if you will, treaty at that time. The START II treaty took only 2 days on the floor in the Senate before it was approved by a vote of 87 to 4. So leave the precedent aside for a moment. When it comes to protecting our national security, the American people expect us to make time. That is exactly what we are prepared to do. We are prepared to work around the clock. If time is the only concern, then we have no concerns. Given the time that it took to consider past treaties, it is clear we can do this. We are not new to this business. We are not new to this treaty. We could get this done if there is a will to do so. I know some Senators still worry about the administration's plans with respect to modernization of the nuclear weapons complex. That is not directly within the four corners of the treaty, but I understand their concern. So let's review the work very quickly that has been done there. The Obama administration proposed spending $80 billion over the next 10 years. That is a 15-percent increase over the baseline budget, even after accounting for inflation. It is much more than was spent during the Bush administration's 8 years. Still some Senators have concerns. On September 15, the Vice President assured our committee that the 10-year plan would be updated and a revised 2012 budget figure would be provided this fall. In the meantime, because I believed that the nuclear weapons program ought to be adequately funded, I worked with other colleagues--with the leader and Senators Dorgan and Inouye--to guarantee that an anomaly in the continuing resolution that we passed in October provided an additional $100 million for the past 2 months. It ensured that we would get the updated figures from the administration. The administration has now provided those figures. It is asking for an additional $5 billion over the next 10 years. I remind colleagues that according to the resolution of ratification, if any of this funding does not materialize in future years, the President will be required to report to Congress as to how he is going to address the shortfall. But if the Senate does not now approve the ratification of the New START, it will become increasingly difficult without any requirement for a report, and it will become increasingly difficult to provide that funding. That is a solid reason why we ought to get this done now. Ultimately, bottom line, we need to approve this treaty because it is critical to the security of our country. It is better to have fewer nuclear weapons aimed at the United States. It is better to have the right to inspect Russian facilities. It is better to have Russia as an ally in our efforts to contain Iran and North Korea and in order to deal with the global proliferation challenge. Our military thinks it is better to have these things. If any of my colleagues disagree, let them make their case to the full Senate. That is the way it is supposed to work around here. Let them make their case to the American people. If the American people said anything in this election year, it is that Congress needs to get down to the real business of our Nation. If the national security of our Nation is not the real business, I don't know what is. They have asked us to protect American interests. By ratifying this treaty, we will do so. I yield the floor.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I am necessarily absent for the vote today on the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, S. 510. If I were able to attend, I would have supported the motion to proceed to the bill.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, CMS, recently announced that nearly three-quarters of Medicare enrollees will see no increase in their Medicare Part B premium in 2011. This group of beneficiaries is protected by a ``hold harmless'' provision in the law for years when there is no increase in Social Security checks. As a result, these beneficiaries will continue to pay the same monthly premium of $96.40 that they have paid since 2008. Unfortunately, 27 percent of Medicare beneficiaries do not receive this ``hold-harmless'' protection and will see their monthly premiums disproportionately increase to $115.40 to shoulder the full load for those beneficiaries who are held harmless. This represents an increase of nearly 19 percent over the past two years with no cost of living adjustment to their retirement pensions or annuities. This inequity in the law negatively affects new Medicare enrollees, low-income beneficiaries who receive Medicare and Medicaid, higher income enrollees who already pay higher premiums, and seniors who do not receive Social Security, such as federal, state, and local government retirees. I believe we have a responsibility to protect all Medicare beneficiaries from premium increase, especially during these tough economic times when every penny counts. A premium increase for many seniors would mean choosing between food and medicine and that's a choice they should not have to make. That is why today I am introducing the Medicare Premium Fairness Act. This legislation would restore fairness to our Medicare system and put money in the pockets of 12 million seniors and individuals with disabilities who desperately need it. It would correct this inequity in the law by applying the ``hold harmless'' provision to all Medicare beneficiaries, so that no enrollee will pay a monthly premium more than $96.40 in 2011. The Medicare Premium Fairness Act is cosponsored by Senator Dodd and Senator Casey, both of whom have been integral to the development of this legislation. Our legislation is supported by twenty four organizations that represent retirees and senior citizens across the country. I would like to thank all of the number of organizations who have endorsed our legislation today, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFSCME, the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, NARFE, and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, NCPSSM. Now is the time to protect all Medicare beneficiaries from substantial and unfair Part B premium increases next year. I look forward to working with my colleagues in the Senate to pass the Medicare Premium Fairness Act before the end of the year.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, in just over 100 days, Sudan will face a defining moment. The choices its leaders make can lead to a peaceful two-state solution. Or, as many fear, they could result in a return to chaos and war in a place too often synonymous with both. Responding to this urgency, the Obama administration has recently launched a heightened campaign of diplomatic engagement with both North and South Sudan to help the parties to find their way through this process. I traveled to Sudan in April 2009 and I have met with Sudanese from all parts of the country since that time, including Salva Kiir, the leader of Southern Sudan, last week. Today, joined by Senators Brownback, Durbin, Wicker and Feingold, I am introducing legislation known as the Sudan Peace and Stability Act. Congress must not be silent at this critical time. On January 9, 2011, the people of Southern Sudan and the adjoining territory of Abyei are scheduled to hold referenda on secession. Realistically, Sudan's choice is no longer between unity and separation--southerners have apparently made that decision. Every reliable source indicates that they will vote for separation, dividing Africa's largest country and taking with them some eighty percent of known Sudanese oil reserves. The Secretary of State has called a vote for separation inevitable. No, the choice before the peoples of Sudan is that between a future of peaceful coexistence or a return to the country's bloody past. The Sudanese, both North and South, set out on this path when they signed the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The CPA brought to a close a war that had raged for two decades and claimed millions of lives. And it offered Southern Sudan the promise of a choice in 2011 between continuing unity and separation from the Sudanese government in Khartoum. The landmark agreement ended the war, but it intentionally postponed the tough decisions about the modalities and meaning of 2011. In theory, the six intervening years were intended to solidify connections between former enemies. But not enough was done to build those ties, and the death of South Sudan's most forceful voice for unity, Dr. John Garang, further diminished unity's prospects. For champions of separation, the time period meant a deferral of their dream of independence that has now come due. But this intervening period has also served one crucial purpose: It has demonstrated that North and South can live side by side in peace. With January fast approaching and progress scant on the mechanisms for division, the two sides are almost out of time to craft a peaceful transition. To fulfill the full promise of the landmark 2005 peace agreement, they must negotiate terms of separation and prepare for a future in which they remain fundamentally connected. Southern Sudan possesses most of the known petroleum reserves, but the pipelines to market for that oil run through the north. An estimated million and a half southerners displaced by the war live in Khartoum and may well remain there, and northerners will live in the South. Every dry season, herders from the north's Arab Misseriya tribes cross into what will likely become the country of Southern Sudan and then return. The Nile will continue to flow northward, irrespective of borders and politics. Boundaries must simultaneously be demarcated and accommodating. And the parties need to finalize the details fast enough to ensure that violence cannot fill the vacuum. The last war between North and South lasted for decades and claimed millions of lives. And, earlier this year, then Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told Congress that, over the next five years, Southern Sudan is the place where ``a new mass killing or genocide is most likely to occur.'' America acted as one of the architects of the CPA in 2005, and has a moral obligation as well as a strategic interest in helping the parties to see it through. The Sudanese must make the decisions, but we--and others--can help them navigate this process. Failure to act now-- whether by high level diplomatic engagement, scenario planning for a variety of potential outcomes, and pre-positioning humanitarian supplies in the region--may contribute to a larger crisis later. While we try to prevent the next potential wave of genocide, we cannot ignore the fact that Darfur's tragedy remains unresolved. Even as America asks how it can help Southern Sudan prepare for the likely burdens of statehood, it must also consider the Sudan that remains and Darfur's need for peace, stability, and justice. Attention to Darfur must not be a casualty of our necessary fixation on the North-South crisis. The goals of the legislation are: 1. To spell out clearly the objectives of U.S. policy and the bilateral and multilateral tools available to pursue them; 2. To emphasize the need for all parties to commit to see the CPA through the January referenda and beyond; 3. To underscore the importance of Darfur and to provide policy guidance on both the peace process and the humanitarian situation; 4. To lay the legal groundwork, spur the humanitarian planning, and shape the policy framework in the likelihood of secession; and 5. To strengthen both capacity building and accountability. Our bill offers a number of specific prescriptions, including the designation of a senior official to work with the Special Envoy to Sudan by heading up the U.S. team in the Darfur peace process, much as Ambassador Princeton Lyman is currently doing in Juba in the South. The legislation also seeks to strengthen multilateral efforts to build capacity in the South and aid implementation of the CPA. In approaching Sudan we are rightly concentrating for the moment on the things that the parties must do between now and January 9, 2011, from registering voters for the referenda to coming to terms on major issues such as citizenship, oil, debts, and the border territory of Abyei. But we must also look beyond January as well. Much has to be done between January and July 2011, when, under the terms of the CPA, Southern Sudan and Abyei are to become independent if that is the outcome of the referenda. But even more importantly, we have to think beyond that milestone, to what independence will mean for a new and fragile country in the south and a significantly changed country in the north, including for Darfur. The United States helped to bring about the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. We have led the world in providing humanitarian assistance and in supporting the peacekeeping mission in Darfur. While the Sudanese must own their future, the United States can help the parties find a path forward to peace and stability.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, baseball celebrates ``walk off'' home runs, the four baggers that bring a game to an end. But 50 years ago today, the greatest hitter who ever lived, No. 9, Ted Williams, hit the ultimate ``walk off'' homer. After 21 seasons with our Red Sox, ``The Kid'' homered deep into right field in his very last at bat. At 42, despite the toll of nagging injuries, some of which dated back to his combat tours, Ted lofted the ball into the right field bleachers, not all that far from the spot where he hit the longest homerun in the history of Fenway Park at 502 feet. To this day the record stands and the seat in those bleachers is memorialized in red. This home run might not have been the longest but it was a fitting farewell to the game he loved so much--and excelled at like no other. He was bigger than life. We revered Ted Williams for many reasons--for what he did on the field, and off of it as well. It was not just his lifelong commitment to the Jimmy Fund, but the selfless way he twice walked away from baseball and served his country in uniform in World War II and in Korea where he was wingman to another icon, John Glenn. He was a two time American League Most Valuable Player, boasted a career batting average of .344, an on base percentage of .551, lead the league in batting six times, and hammered 521 home runs. Ted Williams was guts and grit personified--and all of Red Sox Nation was grateful for the special way he welcomed us into his hearts in his final years, at last tipping his cap to the fans of Boston, and letting us say goodbye to him one last time at the 1999 All Star Game in Boston when--on the Fenway mound--he was surrounded by the great players of the 20th century who were in awe of our own `Splendid Splinter.' It was one final moment of magic in a career--and life--seemingly ripped from a story-book. But it was that last home run that John Updike remembers in the extraordinary ``Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,'' an essay that captures the greatness of Ted Williams far better than any of us could--and still today, 50 years later, speaks to the Red Sox faithful, and baseball fans across the country. I ask to have this essay printed in the Record, and I thank the Senate for taking time today to remember an American icon--Boston's own Ted Williams. Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (By John Updike) Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty- seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. ``WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK'' ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams' retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a--considering his advanced age--fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there. I arrived early. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red Sox, 17-4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. I wondered who had invited them to the party. Between our heads and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, ``You maaaade me love you, I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it . . .'' The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor. First, there was the by now legendary epoch when the young bridegroom came out of the West, announced ``All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say `There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.' '' The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, hat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams' public relations. The spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams' case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they weren't there. Seeking a perfectionist's vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. It has been a costly theory--it has probably cost him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable Player awards, which are voted by reporters--but he has held to it from his rookie year on. While his critics, oral and literary, remained beyond the reach of his discipline, the opposing pitchers were accessible, and he spanked them to the tune of .406 in 1941. He slumped to .356 in 1942 and went off to war. In 1946, Williams returned from three years as a Marine pilot to the second of his baseball avatars, that of Achilles, the hero of incomparable prowess and beauty who nevertheless was to be found sulking in his tent while the Trojans (mostly Yankees) fought through to the ships. Yawkey, a timber and mining maharajah, had surrounded his central jewel with many gems of slightly lesser water, such as Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Rudy York, Birdie Tebbetts, and Johnny Pesky. Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was Hamlet. A succinct review of the indictment--and a fair sample of appreciative sports-page prose--appeared the very day of Williams' valedictory, in a column by Huck Finnegan in the Boston American (no sentimentalist, Huck): Williams' career, in contrast [to Babe Ruth's] has been a series of failures except for his averages. He flopped in the only World Series he ever played in (1946) when he batted only .200. He flopped in the playoff game with Cleveland in 1948. He flopped in the final game of the 1949 season with the pennant hinging on the outcome (Yanks 5, Sox 3). He flopped in 1950 when he returned to the lineup after a two- month absence and ruined the morale of a club that seemed pennant-bound under Steve O'Neill. It has always been Williams' records first, the team second, and the Sox non- winning record is proof enough of that. There are answers to all this, of course. The fatal weakness of the great Sox slugging teams was not-quite-good- enough pitching rather than Williams' failure to hit a home run every time he came to bat. Again, Williams' depressing effect on his teammates has never been proved. Despite ample coaching to the contrary, most insisted that they liked him. He has been generous with advice to any player who asked for it. In an increasingly combative baseball atmosphere, he continued to duck beanballs docilely. With umpires he was gracious to a fault. This courtesy itself annoyed his critics, whom there was no pleasing. And against the ten crucial games (the seven World Series games with the St. Louis Cardinals, the 1948 playoff with the Cleveland Indians, and the two-game series with the Yankees at the end of the 1949 season, winning either one of which would have given the Red Sox the pennant) that make up the Achilles' heel of Williams' record, a mass of statistics can be set showing that day in and day out he was no slouch in the clutch. The correspondence columns of the Boston papers now and then suffer a sharp flurry of arithmetic on this score; indeed, for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness. Whatever residue of truth remains of the Finnegan charge those of us who love Williams must transmute as best we can, in our own personal crucibles. My personal memories of Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company. For me, ``W'ms, lf'' was a figment of the box scores who always seemed to be going 3-for-5. He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose. I remember listening over the radio to the All-Star Game of 1946, in which Williams hit two singles and two home runs, the second one off a Rip Sewell ``blooper'' pitch; it was like hitting a balloon out of the park. I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman's head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit. For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance--since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical--always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers' dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport's poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy. By the time I went to college, near Boston, the lesser stars Yawkey had assembled around Williams had faded, and his craftsmanship, his rigorous pride, had become itself a kind of heroism. This brittle and temperamental player developed an unexpected quality of persistence. He was always coming back--back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly a season went by without some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back, and always looked like himself. The delicate mechanism of timing and power seemed locked, shockproof, in some case outside his body. In addition to injuries, there were a heavily publicized divorce, and the usual storms with the press, and the Williams Shift--the maneuver, custom-built by Lou Boudreau, of the Cleveland Indians, whereby three infielders were concentrated on the right side of the infield, where a left-handed pull hitter like Williams generally hits the ball. Williams could easily have learned to punch singles through the vacancy on his left and fattened his average hugely. This was what Ty Cobb, the Einstein of average, told him to do. But the game had changed since Cobb; Williams believed that his value to the club and to the game was as a slugger, so he went on pulling the ball, trying to blast it through three men, and paid the price of perhaps fifteen points of lifetime average. Like Ruth before him, he bought the occasional home run at the cost of many directed singles--a calculated sacrifice certainly not, in the case of a hitter as average-minded as Williams, entirely selfish. After a prime so harassed and hobbled, Williams was granted by the relenting fates a golden twilight. He became at the end of his career perhaps the best old hitter of the century. The dividing line came between the 1956 and the 1957 seasons. In September of the first year, he and Mickey Mantle were contending for the batting championship. Both were hitting around .350, and there was no one else near them. The season ended with a three-game series between the Yankees and the Sox, and, living in New York then, I went up to the Stadium. Williams was slightly shy of the four hundred at-bats needed to qualify; the fear was expressed that the Yankee pitchers would walk him to protect Mantle. Instead, they pitched to him--a wise decision. He looked terrible at the plate, tired and discouraged and unconvincing. He never looked very good to me in the Stadium. (Last week, in Life, Williams, a sportswriter himself now, wrote gloomily of the Stadium, ``There's the bigness of it. There are those high stands and all those people smoking--and, of course, the shadows. . . . It takes at least one series to get accustomed to the Stadium and even then you're not sure.'') The final outcome in 1956 was Mantle .353, Williams .345. The next year, I moved from New York to New England, and it made all the difference. For in September of 1957, in the same situation, the story was reversed. Mantle finally hit .365; it was the best season of his career. But Williams, though sick and old, had run away from him. A bout of flu had laid him low in September. He emerged from his cave in the Hotel Somerset haggard but irresistible; he hit four successive pinch-hit home runs. ``I feel terrible,'' he confessed, ``but every time I take a swing at the ball it goes out of the park.'' He ended the season with thirty-eight home runs and an average of .388, the highest in either league since his own .406, and, coming from a decrepit man of thirty-nine, an even more supernal figure. With eight or so of the ``leg hits'' that a younger man would have beaten out, it would have been .400. And the next year, Williams, who in 1949 and 1953 had lost batting championships by decimal whiskers to George Kell and Mickey Vernon, sneaked in behind his teammate Pete Runnels and filched his sixth title, a bargain at .328. In 1959, it seemed all over. The dinosaur thrashed around in the .200 swamp for the first half of the season, and was even benched (``rested,'' Manager Mike Higgins tactfully said). Old foes like the late Bill Cunningham began to offer batting tips. Cunningham thought Williams was jiggling his elbows; in truth, Williams' neck was so stiff he could hardly turn his head to look at the pitcher. When he swung, it looked like a Calder mobile with one thread cut; it reminded you that since 1953 Williams' shoulders had been wired together. A solicitous pall settled over the sports pages. In the two decades since Williams had come to Boston, his status had imperceptibly shifted from that of a naughty prodigy to that of a municipal monument. As his shadow in the record books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color to the National. The inconsistency of the new superstars-- Mantle, Colavito, and Kaline--served to make Williams appear all the more singular. And off the field, his private philanthropy--in particular, his zealous chairmanship of the Jimmy Fund, a charity for children with cancer--gave him a civic presence somewhat like that of Richard Cardinal Cushing. In religion, Williams appears to be a humanist, and a selective one at that, but he and the Cardinal, when their good works intersect and they appear in the public eye together, make a handsome and heartening pair. Humiliated by his '59 season, Williams determined, once more, to come back. I, as a specimen Williams partisan, was both glad and fearful. All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in? He looked like a ghost in spring training. Manager Jurges warned us ahead of time that if Williams didn't come through he would be benched, just like anybody else. As it turned out, it was Jurges who was benched. Williams entered the 1960 season needing eight home runs to have a lifetime total of 500; after one time at bat in Washington, he needed seven. For a stretch, he was hitting a home run every second game that he played. He passed Lou Gehrig's lifetime total, then the number 500, then Mel Ott's total, and finished with 521, thirteen behind Jimmy Foxx, who alone stands between Williams and Babe Ruth's unapproachable 714. The summer was a statistician's picnic. His two-thousandth walk came and went, his eighteen-hundredth run batted in, his sixteenth All-Star Game. At one point, he hit a home run off a pitcher, Don Lee, off whose father, Thornton Lee, he had hit a home run a generation before. The only comparable season for a forty- two-year-old man was Ty Cobb's in 1928. Cobb batted .323 and hit one homer. Williams batted .316 but hit twenty-nine homers. In sum, though generally conceded to be the greatest hitter of his era, he did not establish himself as ``the greatest hitter who ever lived.'' Cobb, for average, and Ruth, for power, remain supreme. Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Jackson, and Lefty O'Doul, among players since 1900, have higher lifetime averages than Williams' .344. Unlike Foxx, Gehrig, Hack Wilson, Hank Greenberg, and Ralph Kiner, Williams never came close to matching Babe Ruth's season home-run total of sixty. In the list of major-league batting records, not one is held by Williams. He is second in walks drawn, third in home runs, fifth in lifetime averages, sixth in runs batted in, eighth in runs scored and in total bases, fourteenth in doubles, and thirtieth in hits. But if we allow him merely average seasons for the four-plus seasons he lost to two wars, and add another season for the months he lost to injuries, we get a man who in all the power totals would be second, and not a very distant second, to Ruth. And if we further allow that these years would have been not merely average but prime years, if we allow for all the months when Williams was playing in sub-par condition, if we permit his early and later years in baseball to be some sort of index of what the middle years could have been, if we give him a right-field fence that is not, like Fenway's, one of the most distant in the league, and if--the least excusable ``if''--we imagine him condescending to outsmart the Williams Shift, we can defensibly assemble, like a colossus induced from the sizable fragments that do remain, a statistical figure not incommensurate with his grandiose ambition. From the statistics that are on the books, a good case can be made that in the combination of power and average Williams is first; nobody else ranks so high in both categories. Finally, there is the witness of the eyes; men whose memories go back to Shoeless Joe Jackson--another unlucky natural--rank him and Williams together as the best-looking hitters they have seen. It was for our last look that ten thousand of us had come. Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh- colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead, came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those frowning, chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen, often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone. He did not once open his program but instead tapped it, rolled up, on his knee as he gave the game his disconsolate attention. A young lady, with freckles and a depressed, dainty nose that by an optical illusion seemed to thrust her lips forward for a kiss, sauntered down into the box seats and with striking aplomb took a seat right behind the roof of the Oriole dugout. She wore a blue coat with a Northeastern University emblem sewed to it. The girls beside me took it into their heads that this was Williams' daughter. She looked too old to me, and why would she be sitting behind the visitors' dugout? On the other hand, from the way she sat there, staring at the sky and French-inhaling, she clearly was somebody. Other fans came and eclipsed her from view. The crowd looked less like a weekday ballpark crowd than like the folks you might find in Yellowstone National Park, or emerging from automobiles at the top of scenic Mount Mansfield. There were a lot of competitively well-dressed couples of tourist age, and not a few babes in arms. A row of five seats in front of me was abruptly filled with a woman and four children, the youngest of them two years old, if that. Someday, presumably, he could tell his grandchildren that he saw Williams play. Along with these tots and second-honeymooners, there were Harvard freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when a quantity of insouciance is saturated with insecurity; thick-necked Army officers with brass on their shoulders and lead in their voices; pepperings of priests; perfumed bouquets of Roxbury Fabian fans; shiny salesmen from Albany and Fall River; and those gray, hoarse men-- taxidrivers, slaughterers, and bartenders who will continue to click through the turnstiles long after everyone else has deserted to television and tramporamas. Behind me, two young male voices blossomed, cracking a joke about God's five proofs that Thomas Aquinas exists-- typical Boston College levity. The batting cage was trundled away. The Orioles fluttered to the sidelines. Diagonally across the field, by the Red Sox dugout, a cluster of men in overcoats were festering like maggots. I could see a splinter of white uniform, and Williams' head, held at a self-deprecating and evasive tilt. Williams' conversational stance is that of a six-foot-three- inch man under a six-foot ceiling. He moved away to the patter of flash bulbs, and began playing catch with a young Negro outfielder named Willie Tasby. His arm, never very powerful, had grown lax with the years, and his throwing motion was a kind of muscular drawl. To catch the ball, he flicked his glove hand onto his left shoulder (he batted left but threw right, as every schoolboy ought to know) and let the ball plop into it comically. This catch session with Tasby was the only time all afternoon I saw him grin. A tight little flock of human sparrows who, from the lambent and pampered pink of their faces, could only have been Boston politicians moved toward the plate. The loudspeakers mammothly coughed as someone huffed on the microphone. The ceremonies began. Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox radio and television announcer, who sounds like everybody's brother-in-law, delivered a brief sermon, taking the two words ``pride'' and ``champion'' as his text. It began, ``Twenty-one years ago, a skinny kid from San Diego, California . . .'' and ended, ``I don't think we'll ever see another like him.'' Robert Tibolt, chairman of the board of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, presented Williams with a big Paul Revere silver bowl. Harry Carlson, a member of the sports committee of the Boston Chamber, gave him a plaque, whose inscription he did not read in its entirety, out of deference to Williams' distaste for this sort of fuss. Mayor Collins presented the Jimmy Fund with a thousand-dollar check. Then the occasion himself stooped to the microphone, and his voice sounded, after the others, very Californian; it seemed to be coming, excellently amplified, from a great distance, adolescently young and as smooth as a butternut. His thanks for the gifts had not died from our ears before he glided, as if helplessly, into ``In spite of all the terrible things that have been said about me by the maestros of the keyboard up there . . .'' He glanced up at the press rows suspended above home plate. (All the Boston reporters, incidentally, reported the phrase as ``knights of the keyboard,'' but I heard it as ``maestros'' and prefer it that way.) The crowd tittered, appalled. A frightful vision flashed upon me, of the press gallery pelting Williams with erasers, of Williams clambering up the foul screen to slug journalists, of a riot, of Mayor Collins being crushed. ``. . . And they were terrible things,'' Williams insisted, with level melancholy, into the mike. ``I'd like to forget them, but I can't.'' He paused, swallowed his memories, and went on, ``I want to say that my years in Boston have been the greatest thing in my life.'' The crowd, like an immense sail going limp in a change of wind, sighed with relief. Taking all the parts himself, Williams then acted out a vivacious little morality drama in which an imaginary tempter came to him at the beginning of his career and said, ``Ted, you can play anywhere you like.'' Leaping nimbly into the role of his younger self (who in biographical actuality had yearned to be a Yankee), Williams gallantly chose Boston over all the other cities, and told us that Tom Yawkey was the greatest owner in baseball and we were the greatest fans. We applauded ourselves heartily. The umpire came out and dusted the plate. The voice of doom announced over the loudspeakers that after Williams' retirement his uniform number, 9, would be permanently retired--the first time the Red Sox had so honored a player. We cheered. The national anthem was played. We cheered. The game began. Williams was third in the batting order, so he came up in the bottom of the first inning, and Steve Barber, a young pitcher who was not yet born when Williams began playing for the Red Sox, offered him four pitches, at all of which he disdained to swing, since none of them were within the strike zone. This demonstrated simultaneously that Williams' eyes were razor-sharp and that Barber's control wasn't. Shortly, the bases were full, with Williams on second. ``Oh, I hope he gets held up at third! That would be wonderful,'' the girl beside me moaned, and, sure enough, the man at bat walked and Williams was delivered into our foreground. He struck the pose of Donatello's David, the third-base bag being Goliath's head. Fiddling with his cap, swapping small talk with the Oriole third baseman (who seemed delighted to have him drop in), swinging his arms with a sort of prancing nervousness, he looked fine--flexible, hard, and not unbecomingly substantial through the middle. The long neck, the small head, the knickers whose cuffs were worn down near his ankles--all these points, often observed by caricaturists, were visible in the flesh. One of the collegiate voices behind me said, ``He looks old, doesn't he, old; big deep wrinkles in his face . . .'' ``Yeah,'' the other voice said, ``but he looks like an old hawk, doesn't he?'' With each pitch, Williams danced down the baseline, waving his arms and stirring dust, ponderous but menacing, like an attacking goose. It occurred to about a dozen humorists at once to shout ``Steal home! Go, go!'' Williams' speed afoot was never legendary. Lou Clinton, a young Sox outfielder, hit a fairly deep fly to center field. Williams tagged up and ran home. As he slid across the plate, the ball, thrown with unusual heft by Jackie Brandt, the Oriole center fielder, hit him on the back. ``Boy, he was really loafing, wasn't he?'' one of the boys behind me said. ``It's cold,'' the other explained. ``He doesn't play well when it's cold. He likes heat. He's a hedonist.'' The run that Williams scored was the second and last of the inning. Gus Triandos, of the Orioles, quickly evened the score by plunking a home run over the handy left-field wall. Williams, who had had this wall at his back for twenty years, played the ball flawlessly. He didn't budge. He just stood there, in the center of the little patch of grass that his patient footsteps had worn brown, and, limp with lack of interest, watched the ball pass overhead. It was not a very interesting game. Mike Higgins, the Red Sox manager, with nothing to lose, had restricted his major-league players to the left-field line--along with Williams, Frank Malzone, a first-rate third baseman, played the game--and had peopled the rest of the terrain with unpredictable youngsters fresh, or not so fresh, off the farms. Other than Williams' recurrent appearances at the plate, the maladresse of the Sox infield was the sole focus of suspense; the second baseman turned every grounder into a juggling act, while the shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open window. With this sort of assistance, the Orioles wheedled their way into a 4-2 lead. They had early replaced Barber with another young pitcher, Jack Fisher. Fortunately (as it turned out), Fisher is no cutie; he is willing to burn the ball through the strike zone, and inning after inning this tactic punctured Higgins' string of test balloons. Whenever Williams appeared at the plate--pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity--it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday Evening Post covers. This man, you realized--and here, perhaps, was the difference, greater than the difference in gifts--really intended to hit the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center. In the fifth, we thought he had it; he smacked the ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone, but the deep right field in Fenway and the heavy air and a casual east wind defeated him. The ball died. Al Pilarcik leaned his back against the big ``380'' painted on the right-field wall and caught it. On another day, in another park, it would have been gone. (After the game, Williams said, ``I didn't think I could hit one any harder than that. The conditions weren't good.'') The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on--always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us--stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause--no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his hat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush. Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future. Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished. Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs--hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted ``We want Ted'' for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters. Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams' miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his leftfield position, then instantly replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste. One of the scholasticists behind me said, ``Let's go. We've seen everything. I don't want to spoil it.'' This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams' last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams' homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4-3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinchhitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5-4. On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to support extending a critically needed program that provides hope to 250,000 of our poorest families. I am joined by Senators Durbin, Casey, Sherrod Brown, Bingaman, Burris, Harkin, Leahy, Boxer, Menendez, Reed and Dodd in offering the Job Preservation for Parents in Poverty Act, which simply provides a 3- month extension of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, TANF, Emergency Contingency Fund. The $500 million in funding needed to pay for this extension is offset with corresponding reductions to the regular TANF Contingency Fund in fiscal year 2012. We have suffered through the worst recession since the great depression. Just this month, the Census Bureau reported that nearly 44 million Americans--1 in 7--lived in poverty last year. This represents the largest number of Americans living in poverty since the Census Bureau began keeping these statistics 51 years ago. The TANF Emergency Fund was created as part of the Recovery Act enacted last year to provide temporary, targeted, emergency spending that combats the recession by helping to create jobs for our poorest families. It gave States funds to subsidize jobs for low-income parents and older youth and to provide basic cash assistance and short-term benefits to the increasing numbers of poor families with children. It addresses the emergency needs of low-income families that are struggling in the recession. At least 36 States have used TANF Emergency Contingency Funds to create or expand subsidized employment programs. States have used this fund to create subsidized jobs in the private and public sectors during the depth of the recession. By the time it expires at the end of September, the fund will have created approximately 250,000 jobs for low-income Americans who would otherwise be unemployed. Nearly all of these jobs will be eliminated if the program is not extended with additional funds. If this worthy program is allowed to end on Thursday, these States will no longer be able to use the TANF Emergency Fund to subsidize employment and provide basic cash assistance to struggling families to help with housing and heating bills, domestic violence services, and transportation costs. This will hurt our economy because families on TANF have to spend nearly all of the money they receive to meet their basic needs. This will reduce demand for the goods and services, particularly in low-income communities. Massachusetts relies on the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund to maintain the key existing safety net programs for cash assistance, emergency housing, rental vouchers, employment and training services, child care, and other initiatives to support low-income families getting back to work. In Massachusetts, the Emergency Fund is used to provide TANF cash assistance to more than 50,000 low-income families in the Bay State each month. To qualify for this assistance, a family of three must have income less than $1,069 a month. Let me repeat that. To qualify for this assistance a family of three must have income of less than $1,069 a month. The maximum cash grant they can receive from the state is just $578 a month. Massachusetts also uses the fund to provide emergency shelter and related services to 3,000 homeless families. An extension of the TANF Emergency Fund would provide Massachusetts with federal assistance to accommodate the 10 percent TANF caseload increase we have experienced since the start of the recession. It would enable the State to preserve and maintain critical services for our poorest citizens during these difficult economic times. If Congress does not immediately act, tens of thousands of jobs will be lost. Businesses will lose access to critical employment support programs, and the lives of our poorest families will be made even more difficult. Extending the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund is a common-sense policy that enjoys broad support from public officials, private experts, and bipartisan organizations, including: Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody's Analytics; the National Governors Association; the National Conference of State Legislators; the American Public Human Services Association; and the National Association of State TANF Administrators. I ask all my colleagues to support this legislation.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to support extending a critically needed program that provides hope to 250,000 of our poorest families. I am joined by Senators Durbin, Casey, Sherrod Brown, Bingaman, Burris, Harkin, Leahy, Boxer, Menendez, Reed and Dodd in offering the Job Preservation for Parents in Poverty Act, which simply provides a 3- month extension of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, TANF, Emergency Contingency Fund. The $500 million in funding needed to pay for this extension is offset with corresponding reductions to the regular TANF Contingency Fund in fiscal year 2012. We have suffered through the worst recession since the great depression. Just this month, the Census Bureau reported that nearly 44 million Americans--1 in 7--lived in poverty last year. This represents the largest number of Americans living in poverty since the Census Bureau began keeping these statistics 51 years ago. The TANF Emergency Fund was created as part of the Recovery Act enacted last year to provide temporary, targeted, emergency spending that combats the recession by helping to create jobs for our poorest families. It gave States funds to subsidize jobs for low-income parents and older youth and to provide basic cash assistance and short-term benefits to the increasing numbers of poor families with children. It addresses the emergency needs of low-income families that are struggling in the recession. At least 36 States have used TANF Emergency Contingency Funds to create or expand subsidized employment programs. States have used this fund to create subsidized jobs in the private and public sectors during the depth of the recession. By the time it expires at the end of September, the fund will have created approximately 250,000 jobs for low-income Americans who would otherwise be unemployed. Nearly all of these jobs will be eliminated if the program is not extended with additional funds. If this worthy program is allowed to end on Thursday, these States will no longer be able to use the TANF Emergency Fund to subsidize employment and provide basic cash assistance to struggling families to help with housing and heating bills, domestic violence services, and transportation costs. This will hurt our economy because families on TANF have to spend nearly all of the money they receive to meet their basic needs. This will reduce demand for the goods and services, particularly in low-income communities. Massachusetts relies on the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund to maintain the key existing safety net programs for cash assistance, emergency housing, rental vouchers, employment and training services, child care, and other initiatives to support low-income families getting back to work. In Massachusetts, the Emergency Fund is used to provide TANF cash assistance to more than 50,000 low-income families in the Bay State each month. To qualify for this assistance, a family of three must have income less than $1,069 a month. Let me repeat that. To qualify for this assistance a family of three must have income of less than $1,069 a month. The maximum cash grant they can receive from the state is just $578 a month. Massachusetts also uses the fund to provide emergency shelter and related services to 3,000 homeless families. An extension of the TANF Emergency Fund would provide Massachusetts with federal assistance to accommodate the 10 percent TANF caseload increase we have experienced since the start of the recession. It would enable the State to preserve and maintain critical services for our poorest citizens during these difficult economic times. If Congress does not immediately act, tens of thousands of jobs will be lost. Businesses will lose access to critical employment support programs, and the lives of our poorest families will be made even more difficult. Extending the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund is a common-sense policy that enjoys broad support from public officials, private experts, and bipartisan organizations, including: Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody's Analytics; the National Governors Association; the National Conference of State Legislators; the American Public Human Services Association; and the National Association of State TANF Administrators. I ask all my colleagues to support this legislation.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, in the 25 years I have had the privilege of serving in the Senate, I have regrettably, in the course of almost every election period, with one brief exception when we had the McCain- Feingold bill in place, seen our system of funding campaigns become increasingly broken. The truth is, a lot of the anger the American people feel today-- rightfully--for the absence of this Congress--not just this particular session but the Congress of the United States being able to directly address the concerns of the American people--a lot of that anger really ought to be directed at the system itself, at the fact that we have locked in place funding of campaigns that robs the American people of their voice, that steals the legitimacy of our democracy, and concentrates decisionmaking in the hands of the powerful, individuals with a lot of money or powerful corporations with a lot of money. Money is driving American politics. Money is driving the American political agenda. Money decides what gets heard and does not get heard around here, what gets acted on and does not, and how it gets acted on in many cases. Every so often we have bubbling up a legitimate kind of citizen energy that motivates one particular reaction here or another, whether it is a tax bill or a particular piece of legislation for women, pay, but it is rare now. It is actually rare that the kind of grassroots effort that traditionally we think of when we think of legitimate democracy, that it is felt in its appropriate ways. The truth is, the increased influence of special interest money, big money in our politics, is robbing the average citizen of his or her voice in setting America's agenda. There are far more poor people, there are far more children, there are far more interests that don't get represented. We constantly see, like the debate we have had recently over carried interest, for instance, or a number of other interests here get as much time and as much debate over one or two of those single issues as some of those that affect a far greater proportion of the population. As a result of the Supreme Court's ruling in the case of Citizens United, we have seen an incredible step backwards from accountability, a step backwards from preserving our democracy, and an incredible gift to the power of money. In the last few years, under the McCain-Feingold bill and under our rules, at least if a company wanted to participate in the election, it had to go out and ask its executives to contribute. We went through the sort of charade of having a fundraising event at which a whole bunch of executives would have to show up or people who worked for a company, and they wrote a check. The checks were bundled together, and there were your contributions. But at least there was accountability. At least people knew those people had contributed. At least people saw where it was coming from and who it was coming from. Under the Citizens United decision, all a CEO has to do is put it in the budget of the corporation. The corporation can budget annually. We are going to put $2 million, and the CEO can turn that money over in its totality to some group that is formed to destroy somebody's reputation with a lot of lies, just pour the money over. That is it. Total secrecy. We don't even get to know who gave the money. No accountability. They just turn the money over to lobbyists who run the media campaigns to help their friends and defeat their opponents in Congress. We can have the best Congress. People have always said that money buys people in public life. But this is a step toward the greatest certification of that I have ever seen. It sends a chilling message to candidates without means, which is most candidates, that they can't combat the bottomless pocket of a K Street lobbyist who has some cabal of corporations that want to pour a bunch of money in to get their special interests protected. So American workers in Ohio or Indiana or any other State who wonder why those jobs went overseas, there is a tax benefit that helps those companies actually take those jobs overseas. Why is that tax benefit there? Why do we have thousands upon thousands of pages of special interest tax provisions in our Tax Code? Because the lobbyists and the powerful people are able to be heard, and they are able to work their will. They are able to make that happen. Now we have a rule, because the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are like people and have the same rights. So we have a new assault on America's democracy. I mean that. It is an assault on our democracy. We have always had money in the marketplace of politics. We understand that. For years people have tried to find one way or another of trying to address that concern. This is not a new concern of the American people. It is hard to say where we are headed, all of us, in our careers in public life. I am, obviously, on the back end of that runway, but I am stunned by what the impact of this is going to mean to our country and to the ability of average voices to be heard. The humorous Will Rogers once quipped that ``politics has gotten so expensive, it takes a lot of money even to get beat.'' But Will Rogers would be stunned by the amount of money in politics today. In 2008, a record total of $5.2 billion was spent by all the Presidential, Senate, and House candidates. When I ran for President in 2004 on a national basis, we spent $4.1 billion. That broke the 2000 record when Al Gore ran of $3.1 billion. So we go from $3.1 billion to $4.1 billion to $5.2 billion. Now we have a new rule. All these secret funds can come into the political process. We have already broken the record in 2010 from the 2006 race by a huge amount. I think the total amount of money spent in 2006, which was an off Presidential year, was about somewhere around $700 something million, $800 million. We are well over $1.2, $1.3 billion already in this cycle. That is just the campaign spending. That is the direct money that goes into the campaigns. But last year, special interests spent a record of $3.47 billion hiring lobbyists. The rest of the country might have been suffering from a recession, but it was a great year for K Street in Washington, a 5-percent increase in fees over the previous year. President Obama's ``change'' agenda stirred up so many people who were going to be opposed to it from the very beginning--health care, banking regulation, all the things that have undermined Americans in the last years--they wanted to preserve the status quo. They sat up, and they came up with about $1.3 million spent per minute in 2009. That is the amount the watchdog group, Center for Responsive Politics, arrived at when they took the $3.47 billion that lobbyists collected and divided it by the number of hours Congress was in session in 2009. It comes out to $1.3 million per minute spent to try to hold on to the status quo. Now thanks to the Supreme Court, it is a lot easier for special interests to finance and orchestrate contrived political movements. Unbelievably, the Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have the same right to speech as individuals. Therefore, they can spend unlimited amounts of money in elections. I remember from my days in law school learning distinctly that a corporation is a fictitious entity. It is a fictitious entity created as a matter of law to protect the corporation in the conduct of its economic business, not to protect it in the context of giving it the same rights as an individual with respect to speech. For a Supreme Court of the United States to somehow put a corporation on the same plane as the individual citizen is absolutely extraordinary. As a result, we are now seeing a whole bunch of spending by shadowy groups run by long-time Republican Party officials and activists that is going to end up in the hundreds of millions of dollars, money that cannot be traced to its source. How do Members feel about that? How do Americans feel about the millions of dollars being spent and they don't know who is spending it? Unaccountable democracy. What we are talking about, I suppose, means little to the corporations compared to what they are going to get in terms of blocking a regulation. We have people here who want to delay the regulations for clean air. They are going to come in here and try to say: We can't proceed now to have clean air. We have to delay it. So more coal fumes will pollute the air and more people will get sick and so forth. But they will try to work their way, and they have a lot of money to try to do it with. The Supreme Court's ruling also clears the way for the domestic subsidiary of a foreign corporation to spend unlimited amounts to influence our elections. I want people to think about that. A foreign corporation and a national of a foreign country are barred under the law from contributing to Federal or State elections. But nothing in the law bars the foreign subsidiary incorporated in the United States from doing so. Those subsidiaries do not answer to the American people. They answer to their corporate parents way off in some other country. That means that in no uncertain way a foreign corporation can indeed play in an American election, and clever people will not have a hard time in covering that trail. So today, on the floor of the Senate, in Washington, DC, in the year of the tea party--when the tea party is asking for accountability, and the tea party is asking for sunshine, and they want reform--I would like to hear the tea party stand up today and say: Republicans ought to vote overwhelmingly to have sunshine on the funding process of our campaigns. The DISCLOSE Act, on which we will vote today, does not amend the Constitution. It is not going to overturn the Supreme Court decision that equated the rights of people--I would think the tea party ought to be excoriated over the notion that a corporation has been given the same rights as the Constitution gives to an individual. But it does not even overturn that. It does not even constitute campaign finance reform. All it does is shine the disinfectant of sunlight on corporations and faceless organizations that are trying to buy and bully their way in Washington through campaigns run against Members who disagree with them. The DISCLOSE Act requires corporations, organizations, and special interest groups to stand by their political advertising, just like any candidate for office, and it requires the CEO of a company to identify themselves in their advertisements. And corporations and organizations would be required to disclose their political expenditures. Is that asking too much, that the American people get to know who is spending the money to influence them so that maybe they will have the ability to judge whether there might be a little bias in that ad or there might be a little personal interest in that ad, there might be a reason they are getting the information they are getting, the way they are getting it? That is all we are asking. It is not radical. It is not prohibitive. It simply removes the false notion that Americans are somehow voluntarily organizing all across this country in order to pursue a public interest. The fact is, corporate special interest money is being compiled and targeted to pursue a special interest and to send a loud televised message to those who disagree with them that they are going to be punished for disagreeing. If that practice is not disclosed and tempered, it is not only going to tip elections, it is going to cripple--cripple--the legislative process more than it has already been crippled in these past few years. Instead of negotiating with each other in the public interest in the Congress, Members of Congress find themselves asking corporations-- supposedly subject to the law and will of the American people--they ask them whether it is OK with them whether we regulate or legislate and release their allies to vote in favor of one thing or another. And guess what. No surprise to the American people, those corporations almost always refuse to do so. So when the Citizens United decision was handed down, the voices seeking support from these corporations argued it would have no effect on the American political process. They said: We don't need to worry about new funneling of funds to candidates. But the record already says otherwise. The truth is, Karl Rove admitted that based on the Citizens United decision, he has formed two new groups specifically, because this decision empowered him to do it, to influence the 2010 elections with $52 million of ads bankrolled anonymously by special interests. Now that the Supreme Court has opened the door to these anonymous ads, a lot of other groups are planning to spend approximately $300 million or more on the elections this fall. Already we have seen incredible disparity. I think the total spent by these anonymous groups attacking Democratic candidates around the country is over $30 million. The total amount the Democrats have had available to them, because they do not have as much money, and they do not represent those powerful groups, is about $3 million. Seven to one is the ratio. All you have to do is begin to analyze these ads, and you can see exactly what the message is and why it is coming. So here is the deal: Whether you agree with the ads or not is not what is at issue on the floor of the Senate today. At a minimum, I would hope our colleagues would support the idea that messages that are sent in American politics, advertisements that are made for or against a candidate, advertisements that are made for or against a particular idea, that those ought to be sent openly; that they ought to be sent in an accountable way so the American people--which is what this is all about, this institution, this house, the Senate, the House. All of this comes from the words ``We the People,'' and we have been hearing those words, ``We the People'' all over America from the tea party and from others who are trying to remind people what that is all about. This vote is all about that today, and their outrage ought to be summoned all across the country to shed the sunlight on this political process and hold it accountable. If our friends come to the floor this afternoon and vote en bloc against it, let me tell you, that is a declarative statement about whose interests are being protected and what is at stake in this election as we go into this November. The stakes for the American people are simply too high to let special interests hide behind faceless and unidentified campaigns. I cannot think of anything that is less American than secret money going into campaigns to try to affect the choices of the American people. This is an opportunity for us to truly speak for the American people, and I hope my colleagues will join us in doing so today. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Madam President, the Senate is on the verge of passing the Small Business Jobs Act which has been many months in the making and has been debated on the Senate floor for numerous weeks. I commend Senators Reid, Baucus, and Landrieu for their tenaciousness in pursuing this legislation. It is essential we help small businesses attain the investment and capital necessary to create jobs and grow our economy. Small business growth is critical to restoring our economy. Over the past 15 years, small businesses have created two-thirds of all new jobs. Unfortunately, small businesses have been hit hard by the recession--losing more than 6 million jobs since December 2007. The Small Business Jobs Act provides the long overdue assistance to small businesses that will help create as many as 500,000 new jobs. To assist small business owners and their employees, the Small Business Jobs Act will create jobs through a combination of much-needed tax credits, enhancements to Small Business Administration, SBA, lending programs, and the development of new community bank lending facilities. I am very pleased this legislation will extend the successful loan enhancement provisions that Senator Schumer and I successfully included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The bill extends the provisions in the economic stimulus to increase the SBA guarantee rate to 90 percent and reduces fees on small business 7(a) and 504 loans obtained through the SBA. These provisions have supported more than $30 billion in lending to small businesses across the country and helped create or retain more than 710,000 jobs. SBA lending in Massachusetts has nearly doubled in the past year as a result of this program. As the former chairman of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, I have been a long time advocate of small businesses and appreciate the role they play in our economy. The Small Business Jobs Act includes provisions that I have worked on for several years. The loan increases included in the bill build upon my legislation from last Congress. With 7(a) loan limits increased from $2 million to $5 million and 504 loans from $1.5 million to $5.5 million, small businesses will be better able to expand and meet their financial needs for sustainability and growth. The Small Business Jobs Acts expands upon the small business capital gains provision included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The bill temporarily increases the small business capital gains exclusion from 75 percent to 100 percent and eliminates the AMT preference. Back in 1993, I worked with Senator Bumpers to enact legislation to exclude half of capital gains from the sale of small business stock that is held for 5 years. The bill before us expands on this provision. I have also worked with Senator Ensign on a provision included in this legislation that would remove cell phones and other similar devises from the definition of listed property so their cost can be deducted or depreciated like other business property, without onerous recordkeeping requirements. In 1989, Congress passed a law which added cell phones to the definition of listed property under the Internal Revenue Code. Back in 1989, cell phone technology was an expensive technology worthy of detailed log sheets. Only a few top executives had cell phones. At that time, it was difficult to envision cell phones that could be placed in a pocket or handbag. Congress was skeptical about the daily business use of cell phones. With technology changing rapidly and many people owning a cell phone and a blackberry, a strict substantiation requirement to determine personal use is burdensome, inefficient, and administratively impracticable given their frequent use in a fast-paced global environment. The Tax Code should keep pace with technological advances. There is no longer a reason that cell phones and mobile communication devices should be treated differently than office phones or computers. Investing in small businesses is essential to turning around the economy. Not only will investment in small business spur job creation, it will lead to new technological breakthroughs. This bill is long overdue and I am pleased that it is close to becoming a reality. I urge all my colleagues to support this critical legislation for our economy.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, today I am introducing the Fair Playing Field Act of 2010 to provide a fairer playing field to America's businesses and workers. It will ensure workers are afforded protections already in the law, such as workers' compensation, Social Security, Medicare, payment of overtime, unemployment compensation, and the minimum wage. It will also ensure help employers who play by the rules are not forced to compete against those businesses that don't. This legislation is identical to legislation being introduced in the House of Representatives by Representative McDermott. Senators Murray, Gillibrand, Sherrod Brown, Franken, Akaka, Schumer, and Leahy are cosponsors. Under current law, employers are required to take certain actions on behalf of their employees including withholding income taxes, paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, paying for unemployment insurance, and providing a safe and nondiscriminatory workplace. Employers are not required to undertake these obligations for independent contractors. Too often, workers are misclassified by businesses looking to avoid paying taxes. These businesses receive an unfair advantage over businesses that play by the rules. The Internal Revenue Service, IRS, currently uses a common law test to determine whether a worker is an employee or independent contractor. Unfortunately, a loophole exists which allows a business to escape liability for misclassifying employees as independent contractors. Furthermore, there is statutory prohibition on the IRS providing guidance through regulation on employee classification. Federal and State revenue is lost when businesses misclassify their workers as independent contractors. A study estimated that, between 1996 and 2004, $34.7 billion of Federal tax revenues went uncollected due to the misclassification of workers and the tax loopholes that allow it. Recently, GAO and Treasury Inspector General reports have cited misclassification as posing significant concerns for workers, their employers, and government revenue. Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 generally allows taxpayers to treat a worker as not being an employee for employment tax purposes, regardless of the worker's actual status under the common law test, unless the taxpayer has no reasonable basis for such treatment or fails to meet certain requirements. Section 530 is commonly referred to as a ``safe harbor.'' This provision was initially enacted in 1978 for a year to give Congress time to resolve these complex issues. In 1982, the safe harbor was made permanent. In addition, section 530 prevents the IRS from requiring an employer afforded a safe harbor to reclassify a worker prospectively. The Fair Playing Field Act of 2010 ends the moratorium on IRS guidance addressing the worker classification issue. The legislation requires the Secretary of Treasury to issue prospective guidance clarifying the employment status of individuals for Federal employment tax purposes. The effective date for the provision of authority to issue guidance is the date of enactment. Under the Fair Playing Field Act of 2010, the section 530 safe harbor will continue to be available to employers with respect to the treatment of an individual for Federal employment tax purposes until the individual has a reclassification date. An individual's ``reclassification date'' is the earlier of the following two dates: the first day of the first calendar quarter beginning more than 180 days after the date of an ``employee classification determination'' with respect to such individual; or the effective date of the ``first application final regulation'' issued by the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such individual. An ``employee classification determination'' with respect to an individual is a determination by the Secretary of the Treasury, in connection with an audit of the taxpayer that begins after the date that is one year after the date of enactment, that a class of individuals holding positions with the taxpayer that are substantially similar to the position held by the individual are employees. I urge my colleagues to cosponsor the Fair Playing Field Act of 2010 which will provide valuable protections to workers who are erroneously misclassified and help combat the underground economy.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, today I am introducing the Fair Playing Field Act of 2010 to provide a fairer playing field to America's businesses and workers. It will ensure workers are afforded protections already in the law, such as workers' compensation, Social Security, Medicare, payment of overtime, unemployment compensation, and the minimum wage. It will also ensure help employers who play by the rules are not forced to compete against those businesses that don't. This legislation is identical to legislation being introduced in the House of Representatives by Representative McDermott. Senators Murray, Gillibrand, Sherrod Brown, Franken, Akaka, Schumer, and Leahy are cosponsors. Under current law, employers are required to take certain actions on behalf of their employees including withholding income taxes, paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, paying for unemployment insurance, and providing a safe and nondiscriminatory workplace. Employers are not required to undertake these obligations for independent contractors. Too often, workers are misclassified by businesses looking to avoid paying taxes. These businesses receive an unfair advantage over businesses that play by the rules. The Internal Revenue Service, IRS, currently uses a common law test to determine whether a worker is an employee or independent contractor. Unfortunately, a loophole exists which allows a business to escape liability for misclassifying employees as independent contractors. Furthermore, there is statutory prohibition on the IRS providing guidance through regulation on employee classification. Federal and State revenue is lost when businesses misclassify their workers as independent contractors. A study estimated that, between 1996 and 2004, $34.7 billion of Federal tax revenues went uncollected due to the misclassification of workers and the tax loopholes that allow it. Recently, GAO and Treasury Inspector General reports have cited misclassification as posing significant concerns for workers, their employers, and government revenue. Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 generally allows taxpayers to treat a worker as not being an employee for employment tax purposes, regardless of the worker's actual status under the common law test, unless the taxpayer has no reasonable basis for such treatment or fails to meet certain requirements. Section 530 is commonly referred to as a ``safe harbor.'' This provision was initially enacted in 1978 for a year to give Congress time to resolve these complex issues. In 1982, the safe harbor was made permanent. In addition, section 530 prevents the IRS from requiring an employer afforded a safe harbor to reclassify a worker prospectively. The Fair Playing Field Act of 2010 ends the moratorium on IRS guidance addressing the worker classification issue. The legislation requires the Secretary of Treasury to issue prospective guidance clarifying the employment status of individuals for Federal employment tax purposes. The effective date for the provision of authority to issue guidance is the date of enactment. Under the Fair Playing Field Act of 2010, the section 530 safe harbor will continue to be available to employers with respect to the treatment of an individual for Federal employment tax purposes until the individual has a reclassification date. An individual's ``reclassification date'' is the earlier of the following two dates: the first day of the first calendar quarter beginning more than 180 days after the date of an ``employee classification determination'' with respect to such individual; or the effective date of the ``first application final regulation'' issued by the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such individual. An ``employee classification determination'' with respect to an individual is a determination by the Secretary of the Treasury, in connection with an audit of the taxpayer that begins after the date that is one year after the date of enactment, that a class of individuals holding positions with the taxpayer that are substantially similar to the position held by the individual are employees. I urge my colleagues to cosponsor the Fair Playing Field Act of 2010 which will provide valuable protections to workers who are erroneously misclassified and help combat the underground economy.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, a silent killer is loose in America. It contributes to the deaths of 15,000 and threatens the health of 5.3 million Americans each year. It is more common than HIV/AIDS. It is the leading cause of liver cancer, which is on the rise and continues to be a fatal and costly disease. Yet it remains unrecognized as a serious threat to public health. This silent killer is viral hepatitis. That is why I am introducing the Viral Hepatitis and Liver Cancer Control and Prevention Act of 2010, which authorizes $600 million to develop a national strategy over the next five years to prevent and control Hepatitis B and C. Most people don't even know they have it until years later when it causes cancer or liver disease. We can help avoid such needless tragedies with prevention and surveillance programs and by educating Americans on the pervasive nature of Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C. In January, the Institute of Medicine, IOM, released a report entitled ``Hepatitis and Liver Cancer.'' The report concludes that the current approach toward treating hepatitis is not working. Too many Americans at-risk for hepatitis or living with it do not know it and too many health providers are not screening for it. That should come as no surprise because there is no Federal funding of core public health services for viral hepatitis. Also, there is no federally funded chronic Hepatitis B and C surveillance system. The IOM report calls for a national strategy to prevent and control Hepatitis B and C. Hepatitis B is 100 times more infectious than HIV and, left untreated, can cause liver disease, liver cancer and premature death decades after infection. About 2 billion people worldwide have been infected with Hepatitis B and about 170 million people are chronically infected with Hepatitis C. Tragically, \2/3\ of those infected, on average, are unaware of their status, which increases the chance of spreading the disease. Dr. Howard Koh, Assistant Secretary of Health, has convened a task force including representatives from all Department of Health and Human Services agencies to develop an action plan to implement the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine Report. Unless action is taken to prevent chronic Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C, thousands more Americans will die each year from liver cancer or liver disease related to these preventable diseases. The Viral Hepatitis and Liver Cancer Control and Prevention Act directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to develop a national plan for the prevention, control and medical management of viral hepatitis in coordination with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, the National Institutes for Health, the National Cancer Institute, NCI, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, SAMHSA, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Department of Veterans Affairs. The national plan is required to include the following components: education and awareness programs; an expansion of current vaccination programs; counseling regarding the ongoing risk factors associated with viral hepatitis; support for medical evaluation and ongoing medical management; increased support for adult viral hepatitis coordinators; and the establishment of an epidemiological surveillance program to identify trends in incidence and prevalence in the disease. The Viral Hepatitis and Liver Cancer Control and Prevention Act of 2010 also enhances SAMHSA's role in hepatitis activities by providing the agency with the authority to develop educational materials and intervention strategies to reduce the risks of hepatitis among substance abusers and individuals with mental illness. It authorizes nearly $600 million over the next five years to fund the national strategy to prevent and control viral hepatitis. I believe this investment in hepatitis control and prevention could save our country billions of dollars in the coming years. The baby boomer population is estimated to account for two out of every three cases of chronic Hepatitis C. As these Americans age into Medicare they are likely to develop complications and require expensive medical interventions at great cost to taxpayers. In the next decade, the costs of Hepatitis C to commercial insurance and Medicare will more than double, and within 20 years Medicare costs will increase five-fold. Projecting further out, over the next 20 years, total medical costs for patients with Hepatitis C infection could increase more than 2.5 times--from $30 billion to more than $85 billion. However, the costs for early detection and intervention are dramatically less than the costs for treatment post-infection. The costs for Hepatitis B vaccinations vary but range from $75 to $165, whereas treatment can cost up to $16,000 per year. Screening for Hepatitis C is also relatively inexpensive compared to treatment that can cost up to $25,000 per year. Untreated, these infections will develop into liver disease that can cost up to $110,000 per hospital admission. We can do better. Viral hepatitis is an increasingly significant issue for Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health reports over 2,000 cases of newly diagnosed chronic Hepatitis B infection and 8,000 to 10,000 cases of newly diagnosed chronic Hepatitis C infection each year. Viral hepatitis infections are by far the highest volume of reportable infectious diseases to the state. Additionally, there has been and continues to be a striking increase of cases of Hepatitis C infection among adolescents and young adults in the state. The Department of Public Health has received reports on over 1,000 cases in people under the age of 25 years every year since 2007, indicating that there is a new epidemic of Hepatitis C disease. Resources to address these complex problems have been extremely limited. Federal resources are scarce with the average award per state of $90,000 from the Division of Viral Hepatitis at CDC. That is less than the cost of one hospital admission for liver disease. The Massachusetts State Legislature has, until recently, provided modest funding to support Hepatitis C initiatives in the state. At this time, all of that funding, $1.4 million annually for the past several years, has been eliminated due to the ongoing fiscal crisis. However, past funding has allowed Massachusetts to develop innovative programs in many areas. State funds have supported disease surveillance initiatives so that changes in the epidemics can be detected, such as the increase of cases of Hepatitis C infection among young people or to identify cases of viral hepatitis that are being transmitted through non-sterile practices in health care settings. Disease surveillance programs have been used to identify women of childbearing age that are infected with Hepatitis B so that transmission to their babies can be prevented. The Viral Hepatitis and Liver Cancer Control and Prevention Act of 2010 would provide critical assistance to Massachusetts and other states by starting to provide appropriate levels of funding to address these epidemics of disease. In Massachusetts, funding would be used to expand disease surveillance efforts so that we can better understand the impact of these infections and direct services appropriately to highly impacted communities. It would help to expand screening and educational services to help identify the large numbers of people in the state living with Hepatitis B and C that have not been identified. It would provide support to address the complex prevention needs of adolescents and young adults who are using drugs and at-risk for infection. Increased funding for adult immunization would assist the State in better targeting and providing Hepatitis B vaccine to the adults at highest risk, including those that are incarcerated and being treated for drug abuse. Finally, it would also help to provide essential medical management for people already infected with Hepatitis B and C who are not able to access appropriate care currently. I would like to thank a number of organizations who have been integral to the development of the Viral Hepatitis and Liver Cancer Control and Prevention Act of 2010. I am pleased that 102 hepatitis focused organizations from across the Nation have endorsed the legislation, including the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable, National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors, NASTAD, the Hepatitis B Foundation, the Hepatitis C Association, American Association for the Study of Liver Disease, and the Hepatitis Education Project. We have no time to waste. This legislation, along with strategic investments in public health and prevention programs, can save billions of hard earned taxpayer dollars. It can improve the quality of life for tens of thousands of people all over America. I urge my colleagues to support activities that promote early detection and education and to cosponsor this important legislation.