John Kerry

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, for the past 3 days, the Senate has been bogged down debating a constitutional amendment on gay marriage. You might ask yourself, why now? What's the constitutional crisis that needed to be addressed this week? Did the Republican leader bring this legislation to the floor in response to a marriage crisis in the United States? States, which have had the responsibility of setting marriage laws for two centuries, have taken action on gay marriage as they've seen fit. No crisis there. No, this amendment is front and center in the Senate in response to a political crisis: a crisis in the Republican Party. What is most outrageous to Americans is the cost of this debate in opportunities lost to address very clear and present crises in our country. Debating the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage displaces Americans' real priorities--dealing with gas prices and our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, providing health care to the 45 million uninsured, lowering health care costs, advancing stem cell research, securing our ports, bringing our troops home from Iraq, and ensuring our returning veterans have the support they need. Why the sudden call from so-called conservatives to take the power to regulate marriage away from the States? The Federal Government does not even have the jurisdiction to regulate marriage. Since this country was founded, States have had the authority to regulate marriage and other family-related matters. Currently 49 States limit marriage licenses to heterosexual couples, and 18 States have adopted State constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriages. For over 200 years, this balance of power has worked. The Federal Government is not in the business of issuing marriage licenses or dissolving marriages. Congress does not dictate the age at which people can get married or the grounds for seeking an annulment or divorce. I do not believe the Federal Government even has the power to legislate such things. Should this amendment pass, it would be the first time that the Constitution is amended to deny rights to a particular group of Americans, singling them out for discrimination. The discrimination would not be limited to actual marriages either. The wording of the amendment could limit rights afforded under civil unions. When similar State amendments were adopted in Ohio, Michigan, and Utah, domestic violence laws and health care plans for couples--gay and straight--were taken away. In the past, we have amended our Constitution to protect groups of citizens suffering from discrimination, to ensure that everyone enjoys the same basic civil rights. I strongly oppose any effort by the Senate to change the course of history in such a dramatic way, and I particularly resent that this is being done for raw political purposes. In 2004 when this amendment was brought up, only 48 Senators supported it. The outcome of today's vote is no surprise. Instead of spending 3 days debating a doomed constitutional amendment, we should have spent these 3 days guaranteeing all American children health care, addressing record-breaking gas prices, stimulating the economy after a month of sluggish job growth, or working out a real plan for dealing with the mess in Iraq. We should have been doing the work of the American people, but instead we debated a constitutional amendment that never had any hope of passing. Mr. President, I hope that in the future the Senate can get its priorities straight, and I am confident that if it doesn't Americans will find their own way of holding the system accountable.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I opposed the nomination of GEN Michael Hayden to serve as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. General Hayden has many qualifications as an intelligence professional, but I am sad to say that he is the wrong person for the job. Over the last years, the abuse of the CIA by the Rumsfeld Pentagon and the Cheney White House has hurt our national security and our credibility around the world, as the CIA was bullied into becoming a client of administration ideologues, yielding unfounded claims of ``slam dunk'' evidence for mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I am not confident that General Hayden is the person best equipped to restore the CIA's independence and credibility, not just because he comes from Secretary Rumsfeld's Pentagon but because he was the Administration's principal spokesperson and defender of an illegal domestic spying program. We are reminded again and again of the administration's determination to keep the extent of their illegal domestic spying program secret. All we have to do is look at the news that the Department of Justice abruptly ended an investigation into the conduct of Department lawyers who approved the program--not because the approving lawyers were cleared of wrongdoing but because investigators were denied the information to conduct the investigation. The question before us is not whether we are committed to destroying terrorists and preventing terrorist attacks before they happen. We all are. In fact, we can wage and win a far more effective war on terror. No, the question is whether we can restore checks and balances between the executive and legislative branch and what can be done to restore accountability for an administration that too often appears run by people who hold themselves above the law. How many times will Government secrecy shield decisionmakers from any kind of accountability? The fact that General Hayden was the key architect and, more recently, the principal defender of a program that listened to phone calls of Americans without a warrant, a program the administration refuses to come clean about, resides at ground zero of this debate. The goal of General Hayden's program was appropriate: to find al- Qaida operatives who would do us harm. But the administration, instead of relying on the consent of the people through the American Congress and the court created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, chose, unnecessarily, to assert the President's unfettered authority as a war-time commander to execute this program. We must use every tool at our disposal to protect America. But the administration has no reason to assert unchecked Executive power when Congress is more than willing to work to create the mechanisms to keep America safe while we still preserve our essential liberties. America has been the strongest, safest, most secure Nation on the planet for more than 200 years without ever having to choose between security and freedom. We can have both. But it requires an executive branch that respects the co-equal branches of Government. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Nation was united behind the President. Congress was--and is--prepared to do anything necessary to win the war on terror and ready to work with the President. If President Bush believed the domestic eavesdropping laws were insufficient, then all he had to do was ask Congress to improve them immediately. But the President didn't do that. Instead, he decided he was above the law. General Hayden was the architect of that plan, and to this day he clings to an unnecessarily expansive interpretation of Executive power. That is not what America needs in the next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. We take our civil rights very seriously--and we should. It is our heritage and our birthright--one generation's gift to the next, earned in the blood of Americans since our revolution. The mistrust, the anger, the lack of confidence so many Americans feel about this program is a reflection of our love of liberty. Regrettably, it is also the result of the way this administration has conducted itself: asserting its right to act by executive branch dictate because we are a nation at war. In one moment, the President of the United States says we are not listening to domestic calls without a warrant; in another, the Attorney General says he can't rule it out. We are a nation at war with global jihaadists, a war that, as the Department of Defense calls it, will be a ``long war.'' Ad hoc and secret solutions to issues that demand a reasoned balance between security and the freedom of law abiding Americans cannot simply be handed over to the executive branch--of any party. This Congress has much work to do before we can say we have effectively insisted on that balance and done our duty. Before we do, it would be a mistake to support General Hayden's nomination.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I am proud to cast my vote today in support of S. 2611, the immigration reform bill. This legislation has strong bipartisan support--something we don't see enough of these days in the Senate. Time and time again, amendments were offered and motions were made in order to derail this bill, yet time and time again, our strong bipartisan coalition stuck together to fend off every single attack. As a result, we're able to pass comprehensive immigration reform--reform that has a real chance of solving the immigration crisis that we face today. The bill addresses what I consider to be the four cornerstones of successful immigration reform: (1) strengthening our Nation's borders; (2) providing a path to legalization for the approximately 11 million undocumented workers currently living and working in the United States; (3) addressing future flow needs by adjusting visa caps and creating an effective guestworker program with strong labor protections; and (4) implementing a reliable employment verification program. Thus, not only will this bill prevent people from illegally crossing our borders, it will eliminate incentive for coming illegally in the first place. I am particularly happy that the bill included an amendment I offered to strengthen our border security. My amendment increases the number of border patrol agents by an additional 1,000 this year, bringing the total number of agents in fiscal year 2006 to 3,000. It also gives border State Governors the ability to request up to 1,000 more border patrol agents from the Secretary of Homeland Security in times of international border emergencies. We need more agents on the border, and we need to make sure they have the tools to get the job done. That is why my amendment provides more helicopters, power boats, patrol vehicles, GPS devices, encrypted 2-way radios, night vision equipment, high-quality border armor; and reliable and effective weapons. The bill also includes my amendment to the performing artist visa, which will ensure that international artists will have their visa petitions processed in a timely manner. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS, delays are making it increasingly difficult for international artists to appear in the United States. Currently nonprofit arts organizations confront uncertainty in gaining approval for visa petitions for foreign guest artists and inconsistent policies in processing artist visa petitions which result in delays, expense, and unwarranted requests for further evidence. USCIS practice compounds the growing risk that foreign guest artists will be unable to enter the U.S. in time for their engagements, causing financial burdens on nonprofit arts organizations, and potentially denying the American public the opportunity to experience international artistry due to delays and cancellations. My amendment requires the UCIS to review these visa applications in a timely fashion--and consistent with protocols that ensure our security would never be compromised. Of course, the bill contains some things that I do not agree with. For example, I would prefer that the bill not include Senator Inhofe's English language amendment not because I do not believe that English should be our national language but because I think the amendment will have some unintended, negative consequences. I believe everyone who aspires to be a part of our country should learn English. I was proud to support Senator Salazar's amendment declaring English is our common language. Yet I felt compelled to oppose Senator Inhofe's amendment because it would prevent critical services--including health, public safety, or education services--from being provided in more than one language. I believe that in some instances it may be important for the government to communicate in a language other than English. However, I accept these provisions as part of the compromise. Take the temporary worker provisions, for example. They represent a true compromise between the need to protect American workers and the need to meet the future labor demands of the U.S. marketplace. Thus, the bill allows a certain number of temporary workers into the country every year, but only after the employers seeking to hire them have made serious efforts to hire an American worker. The bill also includes significant labor protections to ensure that temporary workers receive the same wages, benefits, and working conditions as similarly-employed U.S. workers. Thus, the bill does everything possible to prevent temporary workers from becoming a secondary class of citizens or from depressing American worker wages. Passing this immigration bill is just the first step. The House passed a punitive, enforcement-only immigration bill that I believe will exacerbate rather than ameliorate the immigration crisis. The House bill sparked protests across the country. Millions of people took to the streets to call for a comprehensive and humane approach to immigration reform. I hope that the House has heeded their calls. I hope that the President can rally support for a comprehensive solution. And I sincerely hope that the conference comes back with a bill I can support.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, this month I was lucky to have the chance to address the 178th graduating class of Kenyon College in Gambier, OH. I wanted to introduce my remarks into the Congressional Record because it was such an honor to be there to share in this graduation ceremony. In Gambier I met some of the most passionate, dedicated, involved young Americans out there, and I know that as graduates they will go from being student activists to citizen activists. In advance of my speech, I also had the chance to meet in my office with many recent Kenyon alumni who shared a deep pride and genuine excitement about the role Kenyon plays in their lives even to this day. I was lucky to spend this time with young people--Democrats, Republicans, and Independents--who affirm anyone's faith in the vibrancy of our democracy and the young people who will shape its future. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my remarks be printed in the Record. The remarks follow. Class of 2006--fellow survivors of November 2, 2004. I'm happy to be here at this beautiful school, which had my admiration long before that night when the country wondered whether I would win--and whether you would vote. Your website has a profile of a very smart math major in the class of 2006. Joe Neilson. He said that once, after a statistics course here, he realized ``the probability of any event in our lives is about zero.'' ``I probably spent a week,'' Joe said, ``annoying my friends by saying: `What are the odds?' '' Well Joe, what were the odds that we'd be linked by those long hours--not that I keep track--560 days ago? Like everyone that night, I admired the tenacity of Kenyon students. But what you did went far beyond tenacity. My wife, Teresa, is honored by the degree you grant her, today. But she's also here to honor you because when you grow up in a dictatorship as she did, when you don't get a chance to vote until you're thirty-one, when you see your father voting for the first time in his seventies, you know what a privilege it is to cast a ballot. Through that long night, we in Massachusetts watched you in Gambier. We were honored. We were inspired. We were determined not to concede until our team had checked every possibility. If you could stay up all night to vote, we could certainly stay up that next day to make sure your vote would count. In the end, we couldn't close the gap. We would have given anything to have fulfilled your hopes. And I also thank those who cast a ballot for my opponent. I wish all Republicans had been just like you at Kenyon-- informed, willing to stand up for your views--and only 10 percent of the vote. Actually, all of you, through your patience and good humor showed Americans that politics matters to young people. And so I really do thank every student here. I especially want to thank someone who isn't a student. Because at the meeting Hayes was kind enough to mention--and I did take notes--the alums made it clear how much they'd been influenced by great friends, great teachers. Or a great coach. I know what it's like to be on a team before an important game. I know how crucial that last practice can be. For the field hockey team, that November 2nd was the last day before the Oberlin game. Winning meant getting into the league championship--and from there to the NCAAs. So I can understand why players were upset after hours waiting in line at the polling place that afternoon. When Maggie Hill called her coach to ask if she should come back to practice--you'd expect the coach to say ``you better believe it.'' This coach had a different reaction. ``I'll cancel practice,'' she said, ``and I'm sending the whole team to vote.'' In that one moment she became a hero to me, and an example to many. It takes a special coach to know there are more important things than a big game. We should all express our gratitude to Robin Cash. Her values are the values of Kenyon. By the way, for parents who may not remember--Kenyon played brilliantly--and won that Oberlin game 3-zip. Now, it's not as if seeing brilliance here at Kenyon is a surprise. Like everybody, I know that when you look at a resume and see a Kenyon degree, you think, ``Smart. Committed. Good writer.'' And maybe, ``Likes to see a lot of stars at night.'' But there's more. The Kenyon alums I met with were so eloquent about what it meant to be here, where all your friends live, study, and play along a one mile path in a town surrounded by cornfields. One said, ``I came here on a cold, rainy October, but after my interview I saw professors having coffee at the deli, and heard everybody so excited about the Tom Stoppard play they were putting on--I fell in love with the place.'' Someone else said, ``Intelligent conversation permeates the whole campus.'' Another said--and I don't think he was kidding--``Nobody gets drunk at Commencement.'' We talked until I got dragged into an intelligence briefing from the White House. Believe me, I learned more at the Kenyon meeting. What they said sounded very familiar. And important. Because there are other places where you can find a small community--where the bonds you forge will never dissolve. You can find it on a tiny boat in the rivers of Vietnam's Mekong Delta. You can even find it in the Senate--sometimes. Someone described to me what it's like walking into Gund for dinner after your girl friend breaks up with you. You see every single person staring to make sure you're all right. I thought, ``Sounds like walking into the Democratic Caucus after that first New Hampshire poll.'' The fact is, the Kenyon grads in Washington didn't agree on everything. But they agreed that Kenyon is a place where you have the luxury of examining an idea not for whether it sounds good but for whether it is good. Actually, one Kenyon parent told me something that bothered him. His son took Quest for Justice his first semester here. That's not what bothered him. But, the class met early in the morning, and his son made every class. After years of pushing his kid to get out of bed, the father wanted to know, ``What changed?'' His son said, ``Dad, I could disappoint you. But not Professor Baumann.'' And that brings up one of the things I want to talk about. For the Election Day event that united us was a disappointment. There's no way around it. Even as we flew in over Columbus this morning, I was looking down at the Ohio landscape, thinking: we came so close. So what. You cannot go through life without disappointment. No team, no politician, no writer, no scientist--no one avoids defeat. The question is: what do you do next? It's simple: you pick yourself up and keep on fighting. Losing a battle doesn't mean you've lost the war. Whether it's a term paper, an experiment or a race for President, you will learn from experience, and experience breeds success. That's important, because frankly there are so many things to fight for. By that, I don't just mean the things we fight over in the halls of Congress. Kenyon produces graduates that produce our literature and drama--like E.L. Doctorow did with The March, 54 years after leaving Gambier. Or Allison Janney did on West Wing--the first show ever to portray politics with something approaching the complexity it deserves. Your challenge is to produce and perform the rich imaginative works that move and illuminate your time. Kenyon has vastly expanded its science programs. And your challenge is to fight in laboratories against enemies like the tiny HIV virus that has created the most devastating epidemic in human history--killing more people every two hours than there are in this graduating class. At a time when we read about the high-tech jobs of a globalized world, your challenge is to find a way to educate the millions of Americans who can't get those jobs because they can't read well enough to understand how to get online. And now, we are engaged in a misguided war. Like the war of my generation, it began with an official deception. It's a war that in addition to the human cost--the tragedy of tens of thousands of Iraqis and Americans dead and wounded--will cost a trillion dollars. Enough to endow 10,000 Kenyons. Money that could fight poverty, disease, and hunger. And so, your challenge is also to find a way to reclaim America's conscience. I have no doubt you will. For one thing you have great role models. Like your parents, sitting out there under the trees. You may laugh looking at the old photos of your dad in a ponytail, and your mom in bellbottoms and that crazy, tie-dyed shirt. But their generation too faced the task of ending a war. And they did. And went on to invent Earth Day, march against racism, bring women into the workplace and become the first generation to usher in an acceptance for all people regardless of race, religion, gender or sexuality. They honored democracy by making government face issues of conscience--and I ask you to applaud them for making the world better BEFORE they made it better by making you what you are! And of course, in addition to those sitting behind you--you have great role models sitting among you. Students from this class who had a dream, took a chance, and have already achieved great things. I know, because sitting here is a student who dreamed of being published, and felt ambitious enough to send a poem he'd written for class to the Chatauqua Literary Journal. And so Sam Anderson became a published poet at the age of 21. I know, because sitting here is a student who, watched a cousin struggle with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, dreamed of finding a way to help--and designed a project that involved her with the leading DMD researcher in the world. Now Amy Aloe's been invited to work in his ground-breaking lab. I know, because sitting here is a student who dreamed of returning to the country of her birth, the country that shaped a part of my life. And in Vietnam, Nhu Truong could examine not just issues, but the more difficult job of examining herself. They all took a chance. If you ever despair of making a difference you'll have Kenyon people to remind you of what's possible if you take that chance. And not just from the class of '06. One of the alums mentioned that every week, a group of them meet to talk about issues. They don't think alike about every idea, he said. But they share a passion for ideas they learned here. Another asked me to tell those of you suspicious of government, that ``it's made up of a lot of people like us, trying to make things better.'' The group included one alum who's well known here--and getting well known in Washington. But a while back he was just a nervous 24-year old, sitting silently in a meeting with a new Secretary of State. Until he got up the nerve to raise his hand and make a point. ``Who's that young, red- haired kid?'' Condoleeza Rice said afterward, to an aide. ``Keep your eye on him.'' No, she didn't mean he was a security risk. He'd said something that, as a Washington Post reporter put it, ``crystallized her thoughts about foreign policy.'' And now Chris Brose, Kenyon 2002, travels everywhere with Secretary Rice, not just crafting her speeches but talking about policy. I wish the policies were a little different, but he's making a mark. He's making a difference. You know, during World War II, my father was flying planes in the Army Air Corps. While he was away on duty, my mother was volunteering to care for the sick and wounded. She sent him a letter about it. ``You have no idea of the ways in which one can be useful right now,'' she wrote. ``There's something for everyone to do.'' She was right about her time. And what she wrote is right about yours too. In a few minutes you will walk across this stage for your diploma. You'll line up on the steps of Rosse Hall to sing for the last time. You'll turn in your hoods, go back and finish packing. Maybe sell that ratty sofa to somebody from the class of 2007. And then you'll watch the cars pull away. I know you've heard too many times the old saying that commencement is not an end but a beginning. The truth is, it's both. It is a day to feel sad about leaving Gambier. It's a day to feel eager about what lies ahead. Because you have a special mission. Those who worked to end a war long ago, now ask you to help end a war today. Those who worked to end poverty ask you to finish what we have left undone. We ask you to take a chance. We ask you to work for change. Promise yourselves, promise your parents, promise your teachers that you will use what you have learned. Don't doubt for an instant that you can. Only doubt those pessimists who say you can't. For all along the way, I promise, that while you leave the campus, Kenyon will never leave you. You will be linked by the experiences vividly brought to life today by Hayes Wong, who experienced them with you. As you fight for justice in this world, you will be linked by the insights you all had in courses like Quest for Justice. You will be linked to classmates whose success you predict will take the world by storm--and to some whose success takes you by surprise. You will be linked by the times you sat on a bench in Middle Path and argued about politics with people whose views you opposed--and learned you could disagree and still be friends. At some point you'll see that this small campus that changed you has already produced enormous change in the world. But much more is urgently needed. Remember that the bedrock of America's greatest advances-- the foundation of all we take for granted today--was formed not by cheering on things as they were, but by taking them on and demanding change. No wonder Thomas Jefferson himself said that ``dissent is the highest form of patriotism.'' So if you're not satisfied with the dialogue today, if you feel your issues are being ignored, speak out, act out, and make your issues the voting issues of our nation. You might say, ``who's he kidding? We can't do that.'' Well, I remember when you couldn't even mention environmental issues without a snicker. But then in the '70s people got tired of seeing the Cuyahoga River catch on fire from all the pollution. So one day millions of Americans marched. Politicians had no choice but to take notice. Twelve Congressmen were dubbed the Dirty Dozen, and soon after seven were kicked out of office. The floodgates were opened. We got The Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water. We created the EPA. The quality of life improved because concerned citizens made their issues matter in elections. So it's up to you now to take up the challenge of your times if you want to restore a politics of big ideas, not small-minded attacks. Make no mistake--you'll meet resistance. You'll find plenty of people who think you should just keep your mouths shut or that by speaking out you're somehow less than patriotic. But that's not really new either. When we protested the war in Vietnam some would weigh in against us saying: ``My country right or wrong.'' Our response was simple: ``Yes, my country right or wrong. When right, keep it right and when wrong, make it right.'' Graduates of the Class of 2006, you know how to make it right--and you will see that it came from what you learned here: from a class so compelling you were awake at the crack of dawn to learn . . . from that night Teresa and I will never forget when you waited patiently till 4:15 at a polling place in Gambier . . . or from a coach who knew that her mission was to teach you how to win on and off the field. Congratulations--and God Bless.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, yesterday we learned that personal information, including names, dates of birth, and social security numbers of as many as 26.5 million Americans--overwhelmingly veterans-- may have been compromised. I know we are all shocked and concerned that so many of America's veterans could be in jeopardy of identity theft. The case is unique in many ways. This is not the result of computer hacking or private companies failing to protect data. This data was stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee. We have been told that the FBI, local police, and the VA Inspector General are all investigating. That aspect of this case should be left to them. There are other issues associated with security practices that must be explored by the VA and the appropriate oversight and investigatory bodies of Congress. But we in Congress have another responsibility. We must act now to help veterans secure their own identity and protect their credit. As we read in this morning's papers, experts tell us that this is the largest breach of Social Security numbers in history. A criminal can use this information to do grievous harm and perpetrate fraud on a massive scale. Mr. President, this isn't a private company that is responsible for this breach. It's the Department of Veterans Affairs of the United States Government and we have a moral obligation to make sure that we protect the identity and credit of every American veteran. That is why today I am introducing the Veterans Identity Protection Act of 2006--to ensure the government assumes its rightful responsibility to protect the identity security of so many Americans. This legislation will require the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide 1 year of credit monitoring to each affected individual. After that year, this legislation requires the VA to provide one free credit report to each person in addition to the free credit report already provided by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. As a result, after the full year of credit monitoring, those affected by this theft will have access to four free credit reports over the course of 2 additional years. The legislation provides $1.25 billion in budget authority in the first year to pay for these programs. The total cost over 3 years is estimated at $2.5 billion. That is a lot of money and I would urge the VA to negotiate reduced costs with the service providers. To be sure, this is no insignificant sum and the VA has many needs, but I hope my colleagues will join me in recognizing that this is not an optional course of action. It is something we have to do to protect American veterans. It is also an expense that the VA cannot realistically fund out of its strapped budget. We will need an emergency appropriation to fund this security initiative--but let us begin to do right by our veterans. Mr. President, I believe that caring for America's veterans is a continuing cost of war. I also believe that the United States government has a moral obligation to protect the identity security of those who are in jeopardy because of mistakes or the lax security practices of government employees. America's veterans put their lives on the line for all of us throughout history. Those who served in peace and in war, from Iwo Jima and Normandy to Baghdad and Kabul, shouldn't be forced to bear the additional cost and worry of protecting their security identity because the government put them at risk. We must act. Mr. President, thank you.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, yesterday we learned that personal information, including names, dates of birth, and social security numbers of as many as 26.5 million Americans--overwhelmingly veterans-- may have been compromised. I know we are all shocked and concerned that so many of America's veterans could be in jeopardy of identity theft. The case is unique in many ways. This is not the result of computer hacking or private companies failing to protect data. This data was stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee. We have been told that the FBI, local police, and the VA Inspector General are all investigating. That aspect of this case should be left to them. There are other issues associated with security practices that must be explored by the VA and the appropriate oversight and investigatory bodies of Congress. But we in Congress have another responsibility. We must act now to help veterans secure their own identity and protect their credit. As we read in this morning's papers, experts tell us that this is the largest breach of Social Security numbers in history. A criminal can use this information to do grievous harm and perpetrate fraud on a massive scale. Mr. President, this isn't a private company that is responsible for this breach. It's the Department of Veterans Affairs of the United States Government and we have a moral obligation to make sure that we protect the identity and credit of every American veteran. That is why today I am introducing the Veterans Identity Protection Act of 2006--to ensure the government assumes its rightful responsibility to protect the identity security of so many Americans. This legislation will require the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide 1 year of credit monitoring to each affected individual. After that year, this legislation requires the VA to provide one free credit report to each person in addition to the free credit report already provided by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. As a result, after the full year of credit monitoring, those affected by this theft will have access to four free credit reports over the course of 2 additional years. The legislation provides $1.25 billion in budget authority in the first year to pay for these programs. The total cost over 3 years is estimated at $2.5 billion. That is a lot of money and I would urge the VA to negotiate reduced costs with the service providers. To be sure, this is no insignificant sum and the VA has many needs, but I hope my colleagues will join me in recognizing that this is not an optional course of action. It is something we have to do to protect American veterans. It is also an expense that the VA cannot realistically fund out of its strapped budget. We will need an emergency appropriation to fund this security initiative--but let us begin to do right by our veterans. Mr. President, I believe that caring for America's veterans is a continuing cost of war. I also believe that the United States government has a moral obligation to protect the identity security of those who are in jeopardy because of mistakes or the lax security practices of government employees. America's veterans put their lives on the line for all of us throughout history. Those who served in peace and in war, from Iwo Jima and Normandy to Baghdad and Kabul, shouldn't be forced to bear the additional cost and worry of protecting their security identity because the government put them at risk. We must act. Mr. President, thank you.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, today, President Bush is signing H.R. 4297, the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005. I opposed this legislation because it contains the wrong priorities for America-- leaving behind working families and substantially adding to the deficit. This law chooses to extend the lower rates on capital gains and dividends for 2009 and 2010, but only addresses the individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) for 2006. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, those earning $200,000 or more will receive 84 percent of the benefit of the capital gains tax cut and 63 percent of the benefit of the dividends tax cuts. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 42.8 percent of taxpayers with income between $50,000 and $100,000 will be impacted by the AMT if the AMT is not addressed for 2007--a number that increases to 66 percent by 2010. The Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation of Act of 2005 extends a tax cut that does not expire to the end of 2008 with a price tag of $50 billion, but fails to protect the hard working families that will be impacted by the AMT. These families were never intended to be impacted by the AMT, a tax originally designed to prevent a small number of high income taxpayers from avoiding taxation. Today, I am introducing legislation that will address the AMT for 2007 and repeal the lower tax rates on capital dividends for 2009 and 2010. To calculate the AMT, individuals add back certain ``preference items'' to their regular tax liability. These include personal exemptions, the standard deduction, and the itemized deduction for state and local taxes. From this amount, taxpayers subtract the AMT exemption amount, commonly referred to as the ``patch'' which reverted to lower levels at the end of 2005. H.R. 4297 increased and extended the patch for 2006. The patch was increased in order to hold the same number of taxpayers harmless from the AMT in 2006 as in 2005. The problem with the AMT is that while the regular tax system is indexed for inflation, the AMT exemption amounts and tax brackets remain constant. This has the perverse consequence of punishing taxpayers for the mere fact their incomes rose due to inflation. A choice was made in 2001 to provide more tax cuts to those with incomes of over one million dollars rather than addressing a looming tax problem for the middle class. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 did include a small adjustment to the AMT, but it was not enough. We knew at the time that the number of taxpayers subject to the AMT would continue to rise steadily. The combination of lower tax cuts and a minor adjustment to the AMT would cause the AMT to explode. We are now approaching this explosion. My legislation extends and expands the AMT exemption amount for 2007 to prevent additional taxpayers from being impacted by the AMT. Without increasing and extending the AMT exemption for 2007, an additional 3.2 million taxpayers will be impacted by the AMT in 2007. In addition, the legislation will allow nonrefundable personal credits such as the higher education tax credits and the dependent care credit against the AMT for 2007. This legislation is offset by repealing the lower rates on capital gains and dividends. My colleagues in the majority argue that the extension of the capital gains and dividends benefits is necessary to provide investor certainty. But I believe that the certainty of working families worried about paying the AMT should come first. New data from the Joint Committee on Taxation requested by the Ways and Means Democratic Members shows that in 2007, 62 percent of all taxable capital gain income will be recognized by taxpayers liable for the minimum tax. Simply put, taxpayers forced to carry the AMT burden will not benefit from the lower capital gains and dividends rate. The AMT is a looming problem that is impacting hard-working families and for each year that we fail to address the AMT, it gets worse and more expensive. We need to address the AMT for 2007. My legislation is not a long-term cure to the AMT crisis, but it will provide certainty for next year to hard working families that will be impacted by the AMT just because of where they live and the number of children they have, and it will address the AMT in a revenue neutral manner for 2007 as well. The Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 addresses the AMT for 2006, but at a price--providing a $42,000 tax cut to those making more than a million dollars a year. The AMT for 2006 could have been addressed in a bill that did not include the extension of additional tax cuts and it could have been offset. Instead, addressing the AMT for 2006 was included in a bill that will add far more than $70 billion to the deficit. We all agree that the AMT should not be impacting families with incomes below $100,000. I am concerned that we will not address the AMT for 2007 in a timely and fiscally responsible manner. My bill does this and would give Congress time to work together in a bipartisan manner to find a fiscally responsible permanent solution to the AMT. I ask unanimous consent that the full text of this bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, today, President Bush is signing H.R. 4297, the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005. I opposed this legislation because it contains the wrong priorities for America-- leaving behind working families and substantially adding to the deficit. This law chooses to extend the lower rates on capital gains and dividends for 2009 and 2010, but only addresses the individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) for 2006. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, those earning $200,000 or more will receive 84 percent of the benefit of the capital gains tax cut and 63 percent of the benefit of the dividends tax cuts. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 42.8 percent of taxpayers with income between $50,000 and $100,000 will be impacted by the AMT if the AMT is not addressed for 2007--a number that increases to 66 percent by 2010. The Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation of Act of 2005 extends a tax cut that does not expire to the end of 2008 with a price tag of $50 billion, but fails to protect the hard working families that will be impacted by the AMT. These families were never intended to be impacted by the AMT, a tax originally designed to prevent a small number of high income taxpayers from avoiding taxation. Today, I am introducing legislation that will address the AMT for 2007 and repeal the lower tax rates on capital dividends for 2009 and 2010. To calculate the AMT, individuals add back certain ``preference items'' to their regular tax liability. These include personal exemptions, the standard deduction, and the itemized deduction for state and local taxes. From this amount, taxpayers subtract the AMT exemption amount, commonly referred to as the ``patch'' which reverted to lower levels at the end of 2005. H.R. 4297 increased and extended the patch for 2006. The patch was increased in order to hold the same number of taxpayers harmless from the AMT in 2006 as in 2005. The problem with the AMT is that while the regular tax system is indexed for inflation, the AMT exemption amounts and tax brackets remain constant. This has the perverse consequence of punishing taxpayers for the mere fact their incomes rose due to inflation. A choice was made in 2001 to provide more tax cuts to those with incomes of over one million dollars rather than addressing a looming tax problem for the middle class. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 did include a small adjustment to the AMT, but it was not enough. We knew at the time that the number of taxpayers subject to the AMT would continue to rise steadily. The combination of lower tax cuts and a minor adjustment to the AMT would cause the AMT to explode. We are now approaching this explosion. My legislation extends and expands the AMT exemption amount for 2007 to prevent additional taxpayers from being impacted by the AMT. Without increasing and extending the AMT exemption for 2007, an additional 3.2 million taxpayers will be impacted by the AMT in 2007. In addition, the legislation will allow nonrefundable personal credits such as the higher education tax credits and the dependent care credit against the AMT for 2007. This legislation is offset by repealing the lower rates on capital gains and dividends. My colleagues in the majority argue that the extension of the capital gains and dividends benefits is necessary to provide investor certainty. But I believe that the certainty of working families worried about paying the AMT should come first. New data from the Joint Committee on Taxation requested by the Ways and Means Democratic Members shows that in 2007, 62 percent of all taxable capital gain income will be recognized by taxpayers liable for the minimum tax. Simply put, taxpayers forced to carry the AMT burden will not benefit from the lower capital gains and dividends rate. The AMT is a looming problem that is impacting hard-working families and for each year that we fail to address the AMT, it gets worse and more expensive. We need to address the AMT for 2007. My legislation is not a long-term cure to the AMT crisis, but it will provide certainty for next year to hard working families that will be impacted by the AMT just because of where they live and the number of children they have, and it will address the AMT in a revenue neutral manner for 2007 as well. The Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 addresses the AMT for 2006, but at a price--providing a $42,000 tax cut to those making more than a million dollars a year. The AMT for 2006 could have been addressed in a bill that did not include the extension of additional tax cuts and it could have been offset. Instead, addressing the AMT for 2006 was included in a bill that will add far more than $70 billion to the deficit. We all agree that the AMT should not be impacting families with incomes below $100,000. I am concerned that we will not address the AMT for 2007 in a timely and fiscally responsible manner. My bill does this and would give Congress time to work together in a bipartisan manner to find a fiscally responsible permanent solution to the AMT. I ask unanimous consent that the full text of this bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 3999.

Mr. KERRY. I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

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

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

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I also ask unanimous consent that Senator Bingaman be added as a cosponsor of this amendment.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, obviously this is an issue that has touched a lot of nerves all across the country. We all understand the volatility and the tension within in it. We have an enormous task to try to find a fair, orderly, humane, and secure process for protecting our border. That is what we are trying to do. Last night, President Bush spoke to the Nation about the challenge we face. I have strong reservations about some of the President's immigration proposals. But I believe on balance the President gave a thoughtful and compelling address that laid out why we have to act urgently. I think he particularly talked about the importance of acting comprehensively in solving the immigration puzzle. I say to my colleagues, I think most of us have found as we have been wrestling with this issue, it is like a balloon. If you push in one place, it expands in another place, so you have to come at it in a comprehensive way. Each component of this reform is dependent on the other component in order to make the overall reform successful. We are not going to be successful if we don't create an effective employer verification system because workers will find a way to keep coming if we don't. By the same token, securing the border doesn't address the 11 million undocumented workers currently in the country. We need the President's leadership so that this bill or this approach does not turn into one of those unfunded mandates or neglected opportunities like No Child Left Behind or even the Medicare prescription drug law. Last night, the President announced his intention to dispatch 6,000 National Guard troops to the southern border. All of us agree we need to strengthen the southern border. But I disagree with President Bush about how we ought to get there and how fast we can get there. Yes, we need more strength and more personnel at the border. We need better enforcement of our immigration laws. But, particularly in a post-9/11 world, when you look at the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, we need to do a better job of preventing the flood of immigrants who are crossing the borders every day. But the bottom line is, what you need to do that job is not a makeshift force of already overextended National Guardsmen to militarize the border but rather specialized agents who are trained to do the police work, to track down individuals who make an illegal crossing, and to ensure that the borders are not easy avenues for those crossings. I remind my colleagues that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when our cities and our communities were facing a crime epidemic, we didn't send the National Guard in to do the job. We hired more police officers and invested in community policing. The COPS Program put 100,000 skilled and trained law enforcement officers on the streets of the communities of our country and crime dropped. After 9/11, the mission of the Border Patrol changed. No longer are they charged with simply securing the border. They are now patrolling one of the greatest vulnerabilities in the war on terror. As their mission changed, their numbers increased, but they have never increased enough to do the job. Each year for the past 10 years between 700,000 and 800,000 illegal immigrants arrived in this country. Despite more than doubling the number of Border Patrol agents between 1995 and 2005, Federal enforcement of our immigration laws has decreased significantly. The number of border apprehensions has declined by 31 percent, from an average of 1.5 million apprehensions a year between 1996 and 2000, to an average of 1.05 million between 2001 and 2004. At the same time, the number of illegal immigrants apprehended within the interior of the country has plummeted by 36 percent, from an average of 40,193 between 1996 and 2000, to an average of 25,901 between 2001 and 2004. As much as the strength of the Border Patrol has grown in the last years, actual performance demonstrates that we have to close a gap by almost twice or three times as much. The current Border Patrol agents protect more than 8,000 miles of international border and they detect and prevent smuggling, unlawful entry, undocumented immigrants, they apprehend persons violating the immigration laws, and they interdict contraband such as narcotics. They work under difficult circumstances for long periods and in all kinds of weather. Currently, we have fewer than 12,000 Border Patrol agents. Those agents are responsible for patrolling 8,000 miles of land and seacoast, and because of the need to provide continuous coverage, no more than 25 percent of those agents are securing our borders at any given moment. That means there are only 4,000 agents patrolling 8,000 miles of land and our borders. So, if instead of spreading them out as we do today you put them all along the border, with just Texas alone, you would then have roughly two Border Patrol agents per mile. It is physically impossible to protect the borders of the United States under those circumstances. There are additional numbers put into this legislation, but I have heard that, in fact, by joining the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center together with the National Training Center in Artesia, NM, which has recently increased its training capacity, we could do more. It is not rocket science, it is about capacity. If you don't have the capacity, then you build the capacity to meet the demand. If we have the will to make this happen, we can make it happen. So we already know this is a stopgap measure with the military to cover up what is already a failed immigration policy and a failed border policy. The 9/11 Commission warned us, several years ago now, that we needed to have additional personnel. Those calls have never been heeded. We need to heed them now. My amendment will increase the number by an additional 1,000 this year and that will be above the increase of 2,000 agents contained in the underlying bill. Frankly, I think we ought to be trying to do more than that, but that is the reasonable level that we seem to be able to accept and also train at the same time under the current circumstances. In addition, my amendment would give border State Governors the ability to request up to 1,000 more Border Patrol agents in the Department of Homeland Security in times of international border emergencies. In deciding whether to grant the Governor's request, the Secretary would have to consider the effect any shuffling of Border Patrol agents would have on overall border security. Last year, a survey by Peter D. Hart found that just 34 percent of the front-line Border Patrol agents said they were satisfied with the ``tools, training, and support'' they received to protect our borders. That should be 100 percent. What we need to do is guarantee that we take the steps in order to make it so. In addition, my amendment increases the number of helicopters and power boats available for Border Patrol, and it provides Border Patrol agents with the training they need to use those tools. We guarantee a ratio of one patrol vehicle for every three agents and ensure that each of those vehicles is equipped with a portable computer. That also provides every agent with clear and encrypted two-way radios, night vision equipment, GPS devices, high-quality body armor, and reliable and effective weapons. It makes each and every agent certain that they have the necessary equipment and uniforms for the kind of climate in which they are working. I am glad that the Senator from Pennsylvania is prepared to accept this amendment. I thank my colleagues for their support of it. As I said, if we don't have a sufficient training capacity, it is clear that the expertise needed is real. I heard of Border Patrol agents who have had to go through survival training and different kinds of training that is highly specialized. These individuals are engaged in law enforcement and police work. I think everybody in this country would like to see our National Guard, which is already stretched thin, minimally involved to the degree possible. The best way to do that is to get more Border Patrol agents trained faster. I thank the Senator from Pennsylvania.

Mr. KERRY

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

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, what is the order now?

Mr. KERRY. I thank the Chair. I will proceed in morning business.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, last Friday, May 5, at the invitation of Senator Landrieu, I went down to New Orleans, LA, for a second trip to the State since the hurricane. I wanted to have a chance to be able to get around the city, meet with people, and measure the recovery effort up close and personally now that we are 8\1/2\ months since Hurricane Katrina. Let me, first of all, express my gratitude to Senator Landrieu who has been tireless, as I know Senator Vitter has. They both have been pushing hard for their State, as they ought to. But I particularly want to thank Senator Landrieu who spent the day with me and who, together with me, sat through a small business roundtable with a great many small businesspeople in New Orleans who were struggling to make things work in the aftermath of the hurricane. She took me around New Orleans East, and we drove through on the interstate, able to see on both sides of the interstate the still- current state of abandonment of so much of the city. The statistics somehow don't really convey what is happening there and what is not happening there. I know Washington is a tough place to make anything mean anything right now. We are caught up in an awful lot of partisanship, and there is a lot of back and forth and not a whole lot that is going on legislatively as a consequence of that, though we all hope there is going to be a breakthrough on the immigration bill in the next days. But I have to tell my colleagues that somehow we have to find a way to break through on the reality of what is happening to a whole bunch of folks down in New Orleans and on the gulf coast, whose lives have been disrupted, who have all the hope in the world of being able to return to their homes but increasingly are finding a lagging effort and a bureaucracy and other kinds of problems standing in their way. That has a huge cost--a huge cost. Before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Louisiana had 86,000 small businesses, employing more than 850,000 people and contributing $22 billion to the local economy. Of those 86,000 small businesses, 71,000 were in the disaster zones, and nearly 20,000 were catastrophically destroyed. More than 365,000 residents were left homeless. But those statistics 8\1/2\ months later do not tell the story of New Orleans. I thought I was going to go down there and I was going to see this incredible burst of energy of the cleanup, unbelievable numbers of folks out in the streets loading trucks and moving debris and doing things. But instead what I saw in New Orleans East and, most importantly, what I heard from people who are there struggling to make ends meet, to make this work, stunned me as to how little organized, fundamental activity is still taking place 8\1/2\ months after New Orleans was devastated. When I went to New Orleans the first time in the immediate days after the hurricane, I saw a region that was damaged by a storm but at that point in time still very strong in spirit. I saw people determined to turn things around and to make it work. I talked to people who proved their resilience and their love of their State when they committed themselves to not just not giving up, but to not leaving, to rebuilding their homes and their businesses. On that trip I met people who felt that if the words of the Federal Government and the State and the city were, in fact, followed through on, they had hope for the future. On this trip that I just made a week ago, I met with small business CEOs. I met with people who have spent a lifetime there who are beginning to feel a kind of despair about the lack of presence of real leadership that is changing their lives for the better. As I went down streets, I saw street after street after street filled with debris, garbage bags just out in the streets, cars with the word ``tow'' on them waiting to be towed. Eight and a half months later, we can't tow cars. Where were the trucks lined up with people loading them up with the debris being taken out? I expected to see a backed-up line of trucks with an enormous burst of energy. No such thing. I met people in New Orleans who are increasingly afraid, angry, and disillusioned. I was reminded by small business owners and homeowners last week that New Orleans doesn't only have a hurricane problem, New Orleans has a levee problem. And the levee problem is more than just a problem of the levees that broke, it is an overall levee problem. And if that levee problem were addressed with the speed--I know there are some who say, well, we just allocated additional money and this and that. I tell you, we are building bases in Iraq a lot faster than we are rebuilding New Orleans, and we are putting more energy into saying we will stay the course there than we are staying the course in New Orleans. Too little has been done in any kind of rapid fashion to help deal with those levees with respect to the hurricane season that starts in just a few weeks. I left New Orleans convinced that the gulf coast doesn't have a morale problem, but I will tell you what: Washington and the community there have a leadership problem, and it is up to us to change it before it is too late. I want to explain that. We all understand the response immediately after Hurricane Katrina, and there is a lot on the record about who did what, and so forth. I don't want to go back to that. That is not what this is about. But what is most distressing to me is that after that lesson was supposed to have been learned, the people I met in New Orleans told me they were fed up with empty promises that have followed the initial shock of what happened at the Superdome. They believe the promises have been broken and more mistakes have been made after they had been promised that mistakes weren't going to be repeated. What I heard from people on a very personal level is that schools are overcrowded, that parents are struggling to hold on because they want to stay there, but they don't know if they can. There is an enormous personal anxiety that takes a toll day after day after day as people are living like that. One of the businesses I visited is a linen and laundry business that used to take care of all of the hospitals in the region. Well, now there is only one trauma center open. They are paying more employees than there is work because they want to try to keep the employees there, but the CEO just left last week. He took his family and left New Orleans. Gone because they don't see the revitalization taking place that they need. Across the way from that particular business was another business: Tommy's Seafood. He has been there a long time. He bought a new building. The new building was mortgaged. The new building was hurt, damaged in the winds. So he gets the insurance check, but guess what. The insurance check is made out to the bank. So the bank gets the money and the building still has to be fixed. That is not what we intended in the U.S. Congress. That is not what disaster assistance is supposed to do in a smart way. There are all kinds of examples like this where people are waiting for SBA loans, trying to get the loans. They can't get the loans. More loans have been denied than have been granted. Out of $9 billion--the administration says: Well, we have given $9 billion in loans. Guess what. Only $1 billion of that $9 billion has actually gone out to people. On September 15, the President spoke to the Nation from Jackson Square, and he made a series of promises. Here is what he said: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes. We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. When the streets are rebuilt, there should be many new businesses, including minority-owned businesses, along those streets. When the houses are rebuilt, more families should own, not rent, those houses. When the regional economy revives, local people should be prepared for the jobs being created. Over 8 months later--over 8 months later--history is repeating itself. Too little has been provided in real response, and a lot of time has been wasted without real solutions for getting the gulf coast back to business. Eight months after the President stood in Jackson Square, there aren't trucks massively lined up, hauling this debris out of the city and garbage out of the city. In fact, there seems to be very little activity from the Federal Government. I know the President has been down there 12 times. That is what they will tell you very quickly. They will tell you about the amount of aid that has flowed into the region. We will talk about that in a minute. The fact is, the piles of debris that remain standing before every building are an unbelievable reminder of the devastation to people, but they also stand as a blockade, as a barrier to the ability of businesses to get going, to the ability of people to be able to come back and figure out what they are doing with their homes. The more they see that, the more a homeowner sees that kind of debris just stuck there, the more they begin to say: This ``ain't'' happening. I am out of here. I am out of here. Local officials told me they have fears that mosquitoes and rodents are carrying diseases as a result of the piles of garbage on the streets. In the richest country on the face of the Earth, we shouldn't have Americans abandoned to the worry that their children are going to be at risk for Third World health problems because Washington didn't meet its most basic obligations to those citizens. More than $10 billion in contracts have been awarded for debris removal, emergency response, and reconstruction efforts, but where is it? Tens of thousands of abandoned cars are still littering different streets. There is garbage, hurricane debris, trash in front of virtually every home or business that I saw. Most of those homes are abandoned still, obviously. Katrina pulled back the curtain, and it revealed poverty and squalor that many didn't believe could exist in our country. But 8 months later, after people said no more and never again, and the cameras went away to a large degree, those images are still there on the streets of New Orleans. I don't know any Americans who remember what they saw in the Superdome who feel that their dues have been totally paid by making a one-time contribution to the Red Cross. And in the same way, when you look at what the Federal Government response is, people in New Orleans are left wondering whether we have come to a different conclusion. Eight months after the President promised the revitalization of new, small, minority-owned businesses, the businesspeople who have shown great courage staying in New Orleans are literally fighting to keep their doors open in the face of such a slow and woefully inadequate Federal response. Orleans Parish, which is the center of Louisiana's economy, had 12,695 small businesses employing 245,000 people before August 29 of last year. Today, it is estimated that only a little more than 2,000 of the 12,600 have opened. Where is our response? Those businesses need people to sell things to and people need a place to live. The President seems to mean something when he speaks about staying the course in Iraq, but it doesn't appear as if we are staying the course down in New Orleans, notwithstanding the money that has been allocated. It takes more than money. It takes a strong leader who is rolling up his sleeves and bringing people together and organizing all of these contractors and different efforts in a way that maximizes both the volunteer and paid effort of the United States of America. One person I spoke with confirmed what I could see with my own eyes. One person said to me--this is a professional who has spent years down there, whose home is there, who helped rescue people, who stayed through the whole thing, and he was rescuing people in boats blocks away from his house. He said: Basic services in 70 percent of the city don't exist. In those areas, there is no fire protection, police presence is minimal, there is garbage, hurricane debris, trash in front of all of the homes. Billions have been spent. Yet the city is piled high with debris of every kind. Those are his words. Those are his words. The residents of New Orleans are beginning to put their hopes elsewhere. That is what is happening. Maybe some people want that to happen. That is a question that ought to be asked. They are starting to put their future in a new place. Over 3,400 private homes are for sale in New Orleans, more than at any other time since we started tracking this indicator 6 weeks after Katrina made landfall. This is up from approximately 2,800 homes that were for sale in February, and it is the highest number since October of 2005. Jim Funk, who is CEO of the Louisiana Restaurant Association, said the pre-Katrina restaurant workforce of New Orleans has been reduced from 133,000 to 22,000. Only 1,500 of the almost 3,500 pre-Katrina restaurants are back open. Of course, restaurants need people and need workers. The unemployment rate of those who remain displaced jumped to nearly 35 percent in March, a 54-percent increase from the month before. Unemployment is up 54 percent from the month before, even though we are supposed to be putting people back to work. I met Pat Murphy, who owns United Cab. United Cab is a 66-year-old business. He spoke at our roundtable. After wading through redtape and months of administrative delay in a process that he described as, quoting Pat Murphy, ``turning into harassment,'' he finally received his SBA loan. Why does a small business that has existed for 66 years have to go through 8\1/2\ months of a painful process, which they term ``harassment,'' in order to get a loan after a disaster and come back into business, from the very agency whose sole purpose is to be able to provide that kind of assistance? The worst part is that Pat Murphy will tell you he is one of the lucky ones. He actually received a loan, and he knows a whole bunch of folks who are still waiting around for that money. Some may have heard that the administration brags about that $9 billion of disaster loans they have approved. But as I said, only one- ninth of that, only $1 billion, has found its way into the hands of people. Why can't you deliver the checks? If you approve it, why can't you make sure people get it right away? Mr. President, 11 percent of the funding has actually reached the people who are asking for it. In addition, what is more, about half of those who applied for disaster loans were denied. What are they going to do? All these folks who have been denied loans have nowhere to turn. If you are serious about revitalizing New Orleans, you have to be willing to put that money into their hands. One of the biggest problems they have is capital, being able to pay some people for a period of time so they can stay. For people who need to put food on the table and take care of their kids, if there is no certainty as to that availability of money, they are going to go somewhere. They have to go somewhere. What happens is the fabric of New Orleans gets destroyed because people put down their roots somewhere else. For those who have been fortunate enough to receive housing assistance, they are living in front of their damaged homes, many of them in trailers that are sitting on concrete blocks. What is the problem with that? Let me tell you what the problem is. No. 1, the trailers FEMA is providing cost $70,000 a piece. They are not permanent. Hurricane season starts in a few weeks. The National Weather Service is predicting 14 named storms to hit the gulf during this next hurricane season. I might add that they were accurate last year in the number of named storms they predicted. Do you know what is going to happen when the wind hits, 90 miles an hour, 100 miles an hour or more? Those trailers are going to blow around, and they are going to create more damage. I am told by people in New Orleans you could have built modular housing for less money with greater permanency. If you had been smart about this, you could have set up a village of modular housing for people who are working on their permanent housing, you could create lumber distribution centers, you could bring carpenters from around the country, plumbers, electricians. Labor unions from all around the country would be willing to donate, come down and live in a special village and then to rebuild. None of that kind of basic organization effort that America is supposed to be so good at--that we are so good at, when led--is taking place. I want to know what kind of leadership spends $900 million to buy 25,000 manufactured homes and 1,300 modular homes and they can't be used because FEMA rules say they are too big or unsafe in a flood zone. Bureaucracy, lack of imagination, lack of willingness to do what it takes--which is what the President said we would do in Jackson Square. What type of leadership spends $249 million to secure 8,136 cruise ship cabins for 6 months at a cost that Inspector General Richard Skinner estimated at $5,100 a month per passenger, six times the cost of renting a two- bedroom apartment? Eight months after the promises were made, New Orleans has only one level 1 trauma center. The largest medical complex, Charity Hospital, needs to be rebuilt, but FEMA will only fund repairs, so they are not going to rebuild, or can't yet. So what do the residents of New Orleans do during the coming hurricane season if one of those named storms is severe? Eight months after promises were made to expand local business participation in the recovery, guess what, FEMA is continuing its business model of hiring megacontractors to oversee the recovery efforts. Why is it that debris removal contract dollars aren't making it to the local businesses? We had one particular guy who has been in business for I think it was 27 years. He does tree removal and tree work. He has not been used. In fact, he was called and told by FEMA that they are using an outside contractor. He is one of the people trying to stay, and they are going to take his business away for somebody out of State. Why are so many local contractors waiting for FEMA to pay them millions of dollars for work they have already completed? Last Thursday, the Senate passed an emergency spending bill that includes $2.2 billion for levee reconstruction in southeast Louisiana, $1.5 billion for Orleans Parish levee projects, and $1.3 billion for the disaster loan program. Senator Landrieu and I offered--I cosponsored an amendment that she proposed--two amendments. One was to ensure the SBA sends up its disaster response plan to Congress before June 1, which is the start of the 2006 hurricane season; and second, to require the SBA to report to Congress monthly on the status of the disaster loan program now and after future disasters. Senator Landrieu, Senator Snowe, and I also cosponsored an amendment by Senator Vitter that declares areas hit by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as historically underutilized business zones--HUBZones, as we call them. It makes sure, though, that small, local businesses will get first consideration for Federal contracts. This is something we have been trying to get done since last September. We put that on the floor of the Senate right after the hurricane, and still it has taken the Congress to this day to get this done. But that is only part of the story. We passed bipartisan legislation which offers a more comprehensive approach to help get small businesses back on their feet. Let me tell you what we wanted to do. We wanted to give some small businesses grants--not loans, grants--because clearly those small businesses are going to need a tide-over period of time until you can get a population back that is going to begin to use them. If you are serious about keeping the integrity of this city and you are serious about rebuilding it and allowing those citizens who have been told they will have the opportunity to stay there, to stay there, you have to give them some money. They can't repay the loans if they can't do the business right now. How much money have we spent in Iraq that is going to turn out to be a grant versus what is happening down in New Orleans, to our own citizens. The Senate passed that legislation. I will tell you what, it has been blocked. It has been blocked since we passed it after Hurricane Katrina. There has not even been a serious effort, despite our efforts, Senator Snowe and mine, to try to get some sort of negotiation on it-- not even serious. It was dropped from the 2006 CJS conference, and now it is waiting for action as a freestanding bill. This legislation includes essential bridge loans and the grants that would help those suffering the most to be able to keep their doors open so you do maintain the integrity of New Orleans. The Senate has yet to take action on a bill introduced by Senator Landrieu which I cosponsored to follow on this other bill which has additional provisions, recognizing the situation and the needs on the ground. There is no excuse for us not making every good-faith effort possible, in a bipartisan way, to do what makes sense if we are going to keep faith with those folks and with all of our citizens, to whom this sends a message. I don't want to just talk about the slow response. I think we have to find a way to get some urgency here. The businesses in the gulf coast cannot and should not have to face bureaucratic redtape and delays. They will not be able to last much longer. Many of the businesses that didn't have business interruption insurance are already gone. Many others are on the verge of closing unless they are able to secure financial assistance in an expedited manner. These companies cannot survive on empty promises. What Louisiana and Mississippi need, obviously, is a level of leadership that is prepared to break through the bureaucracy and come together and create the ingenuity and creativity to rebuild the region. There are a lot of Americans who would be prepared to volunteer time if you want to organize them. That could be done. You could have a civilian assistance corps of experts who are willing to undergo some hardship for a period of time, live in tough circumstances--a tent city or whatever it is--to lend their expertise to helping to rebuild and do certain things. There are all kinds of ways you could do more cleanup and more rebuilding in an expedited fashion. The fact is, we saw after Katrina, when the National Guard was there--I give them great credit. Under General Honore, a career soldier in the Army, he showed what strong leadership, what a hierarchal organization with clear lines of command, what a real structure could bring. In those areas where the National Guard did cleanup and did immediate work, a great deal happened. That is what should have continued. But guess what. They have gone. I thought we were going to stay as long as it takes. I thought we were going to do whatever it takes. Those are the words of the President. But they are gone. They could be there today still doing things if we had the will. New Orleans is one of the great cities of our country. It has an amazing history, a diverse and ethnically rich population, and great culture. I think every American has a stake in its resurrection. I thank Senator Landrieu again for inviting me there for a firsthand look. I really thought I was going to see something very different. I know there have been about 40 Senators or more who have gone down there at one point or another. They have seen a lot of this with their own eyes. It just defies my sense of what the possibilities are in our country. With all of the unbelievable equipment we have, with all of the skilled labor we have, with the volunteer spirit of our Nation, it is stunning to me that we are not proceeding more rapidly to do for New Orleans what New Orleans needs. My hope is that we will pass those bills I talked about and that over these next 8 months, over the next months, we can ramp up. Everybody said never again. I will tell you what is happening in New Orleans today. The images people saw at the Superdome, of people who felt abandoned, who didn't have adequate shelter, while misjudgments were being made around them by those who were supposed to be responsible, is actually being repeated at this very moment. There is a Superdome II taking place in New Orleans today, for those citizens who can't get back on their feet, who don't know what to do with their property, for the 70 percent of the city that has no basic services, for the people who cannot move because of the debris or the garbage, the people who don't have a prayer of getting their home going again or their business going again because of the lack of adequacy of the housing and a clear plan that says to them with certainty that there is a future. Right now, that future for a lot of folks is very difficult. One of the problems I heard about from a number of responsible people--there were chamber folks there and other folks there--is the mental health issue. There are a lot of citizens who have been living under an extraordinary level of stress since Hurricane Katrina. Some of them have lost family members. Almost all are struggling to pay bills. It is hard to think about the future. That stress takes its toll. I was told how crime is rising, about how the sense of despair is taking a greater toll, and how there is going to be a larger mental health problem within that region, as a consequence of the lack of adequacy of response and the plight in which people find themselves. We can do better. I think everybody here knows we can do better. We have strong leaders in this country. We have excellent generals and military personnel. They know how to manage. We have business leaders who run extraordinary companies, who understand the hierarchy and understand how to get things done. Clearly, FEMA doesn't, and clearly whatever the structure is that is there, it is inadequate to get the job done. My hope and prayer is that we can deliver on the promises to New Orleans and turn this around. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, today we are debating a $70 billion tax reconciliation bill and the centerpiece of this bill is a provision to extend the lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends that do not expire until the end of 2008. I cannot support this bill for many reasons. It abuses the budget reconciliation process in order to provide an extension of tax cuts to those with incomes above a million dollars rather than addressing tax issues in a fiscally responsible manner. This bill is the third and final piece of a flawed budget strategy that does not put us on a path towards deficit reduction. The first piece was the spending bill that cut $40 billion, with most of those cuts hitting those who need our help the most. The second piece was a $781-billion increase in the debt ceiling, which will bring the total to $3 trillion under this administration's watch. If you combine these three bills, the result is a $30 billion increase in the deficit and record level debt. The conference report does not reflect the tax bill passed by the Senate. Back in November during the Senate Finance markup, I did not support the bill even though it did not include capital gains and dividends tax relief. I was concerned that the bill would come back from the House with this tax relief and that it would substantially increase the deficit in future years. The conference agreement does what I expected and it is even worse than I initially imagined. The only reason this bill is before us is to extend the lower rate on capital gains and dividends. These lower rates do not even expire until the end of 2008. We have repeatedly heard how American families have benefited from this tax cut and that half of American households now have some investment income. We do not hear the entire side of the story. Even though about half of American households own stock, two- fifths of this stock is held in retirement accounts in which capital gains and dividends earned are not subject to taxation, and thus do not benefit from the lower rates on capital gains. According to the Federal Reserve Bank's Survey of Consumer Finance, only 17 percent of the households in the bottom 60 percent own stock and the average value is $52,000. This accounts for 9 percent of all taxable stock. Households in the top 1 percent own 29 percent of all taxable stock and 84 percent of these households own taxable stock with an average value of nearly $2 million. These tax cuts are skewed towards the wealthy because they have more capital gains and dividends income than the average family. For those with incomes under $100,000, capital gains and dividend income accounts for 1.4 percent of their total income, but for those with incomes over $1 million, capital gains and dividends account for 31.4 percent of their income. According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, those with income over $1 million will receive an average tax cut of $32,000 in 2009, whereas those with incomes below $50,000 will only receive an average tax cut of $11. Not only will upper-income individuals benefit from this provision, they will benefit from a new provision that was added during the conference. This provision removes the income limits for converting from traditional individual retirement accounts--IRAs--to a Roth IRA. This provision was added to meet requirements of the budget rules, but don't be fooled, this provision is a gimmick. It is ironic that this gimmick is being used to solve a budget issue--it is being added to solve the budget issue of the capital gains and dividend provision having a $30 billion cost in the second 5 years of the bill. The Roth IRA provision does solve this budget problem, but this provision will add to the deficit. It raises revenue initially because contributions to Roth IRAs are not deductible, but it loses revenue because earnings in these accounts accumulate tax free. Only households with income over $100,000 would benefit from the easing the restrictions on rollovers to Roth IRA accounts. The Tax Policy Center estimates that the 99.1 percent of the benefits of this provision will go to those in the top 20 percent of households with average incomes of $189,863. I have to admit that it is clever to offset one tax cut with another tax cut that only benefits families in the upper-income limits. This provision highlights how this bill makes a hypocrisy of the budget process. As I said before, there are several budget gimmicks used in this bill to mask its real price tag of the bill and its total impact on the deficit. All this is being done just so the lower rates on the capital gains and dividends can be extended for another two years. Many of those in the majority will argue that the lower rates on capital gains and dividends are needed to sustain economic growth. It is hard to prove that these tax cuts are the cause of recent economic growth. Prior to the enactment of these tax cuts, there were significant factors in support of an economic recovery. The President's Council of Economic Advisors was predicting a significant increase in employment growth starting in 2003 without the enactment of additional tax cuts. The rationale for cutting the tax on capital gains and dividends income is that it stimulates investment, but there is no solid data to support this conclusion. The stock market did much better during the 1990s when we had a higher tax rate on capital gains than it has done since the rates were cut in 2003. Proponents argue that these cuts encourage a great deal of selling by investors, so much so that they pay for themselves. However, in a letter to Finance Committee Chairman Grassley, the Congressional Budget Office found that, ``[I]ncreases might suggest a large behavioral response to the tax rate cut--except that realizations also increased by 45 percent in 1996, before the rate cut. Thus changes in realizations are not necessarily the result of changes in taxes; other factors matter as well.'' CBO explained that asset values, investor decisions, and other economic conditions can influence capital gains realizations just as much. CBO not only examined the year following the 2003 tax cuts, but they dug even deeper and did a historical analysis of capital gains cuts. The CBO experts found that, ``[a]fter examining the historical record, including that for 2004, we cannot conclude that the unexplained increase [in realizations] is attributable to the change in the capital gains tax rates.'' CBO concluded that much of the volatility in capital gains realizations ``seems unrelated to changes in the capital gains tax rates.'' However, the majority seems to think that the cutting taxes on capital gains and dividends is a priority and that debt financed tax cuts reflects sound economic policy. I disagree and believe that this bill chooses the wrong priorities. It fails to extend tax breaks that expired at the end of 2005. The research and development tax credit that is used to help businesses with innovative and groundbreaking research expired at the end of 2005. This bill does not help families with the cost of college tuition. Due to the deepest cuts in student aid in more than a decade, loans will increase by an average of $5,800. At the end of 2005, a tax provision that provides a deduction for college expenses expired. This bill chooses not to extend this tax cut. This bill does address the individual alternative minimum tax--AMT-- for 2006, but not for 2007. The conference report reflects the Senate language that is based on an amendment that I offered with Senator Wyden. This AMT provision will prevent any new taxpayers from being impacted by the AMT in 2006 that were not impacted by the AMT in 2005. It is important that we address the individual AMT, and it can be done in a way that does not increase the deficit. The individual AMT was created in 1969 to address the 155 individual taxpayers with incomes exceeding $200,000 who paid no federal income tax in 1966. Then, it applied to a tiny minority of households. But it is rapidly growing from 155 taxpayers in 1969, to 1 million in 1999 to almost 29 million by 2010. It now affects families with incomes well below $200,000. By the end of the decade, repealing the AMT will cost more than repealing the regular income tax. In 1998, we began to notice that something was happening that was unintended--the AMT was beginning to encroach on middle class taxpayers. At that time, the AMT was expected to impact over 17 million taxpayers in 2010. The AMT problem resulted because the regular tax system is indexed for inflation, while the personal exemptions, standard, deduction, and AMT are not. Under the AMT, exemption amounts and the tax brackets remain constant. This has the perverse consequence of punishing taxpayers for the mere fact that their incomes rose due to inflation. The AMT has another perverse consequence. It punishes families for having children. The more children a family has, the lower the income necessary to trigger the AMT. As we debated the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, I stressed the fact that the legislation would result in more individuals being impacted by the AMT and that not addressing the AMT hid the real cost of the tax cuts. This holds true today. A choice was made in 2001 to provide more tax cuts to those with incomes of over a million dollars rather than addressing a looming tax problem for the middle class. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 did include a small adjustment to the AMT, but it was not enough. We knew at the time that the number of taxpayers subject to the AMT would continue to rise steadily. The combination of lower tax cuts and a minor adjustment to the AMT would cause the AMT to explode. Each year that we wait to tackle the AMT, more taxpayers are impacted and the cost of addressing it only increases. We missed an opportunity in 2001 to address the AMT. Repeatedly, the AMT has been pushed aside to give priority to making the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans permanent. So often we hear that the bulk of the tax cuts assist the average American family. This is ironic because by 2010, the AMT will take back 21.5 percent of the promised tax breaks for individuals making between $75,000 and $100,000 per year and 47 percent from individuals making between $100,000 and $200,000. However, households with annual income over $1,000,000 will only lose 9.2 percent of the tax cuts. Instead of addressing the AMT for next year, this bill chooses to extend the lower rates for capital gains and dividends for 2009 and 2010. This bill ignores the fact that we will have to address the AMT for 2007. Without Congressional action, the AMT will impact 23 million taxpayers. To prevent additional taxpayers from being impacted by the AMT in 2007, the exemption amount will need to be increased at a cost of $48.3 billion. We need to address the AMT in a fiscally responsible manner before we extend tax breaks that do not expire until the end of 2008. Furthermore, this bill chooses to provide tax breaks to the oil and gas industry. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 contained $2.6 billion over 10 years in tax breaks for oil and gas companies. Recently, President Bush said: Record oil prices and large cash flows also mean that Congress has got to understand that these energy companies don't need unnecessary tax breaks like the write-offs of certain geological and geophysical expenditures, or the use of taxpayers' money to subsidize energy companies' research into deep water drilling. I'm looking forward to Congress to take about $2 billion of these tax breaks out of the budget over a 10-year period of time. Cash flows are up. Taxpayers don't need to be paying for certain of these expenses on behalf of the energy companies. Not long ago, we heard the top oil executives testify before Congress that they do not need the tax breaks either. At a time when the world's largest energy companies are reaping record-setting profits, this bill chooses to only scale back one of the new tax breaks for oil companies. Integrated oil companies will still receive benefit of a provision to expense their geological and geophysical expenditures. The provision only scales the tax break back by $189 million. The Senate bill included three provisions that address the tax breaks of large oil and gas companies, totaling $5 billion. This bill chooses not to include these provisions. Recently, I introduced legislation to address tax breaks provided to the oil and gas companies that would repeal over $28 billion in tax breaks for this industry. It is embarrassing that this bill keeps in place tax breaks that are not needed by this industry while at the same time providing lavish benefits to oil and gas executives. An executive who makes $400 million a year does not need tax breaks. Executives rewarded with exorbitant amounts of stock options will be able to sell their stock and benefit from the lower tax rate on capital gains. It simply does not makes sense to provide a $42,000 tax break for millionaires when the average American family has seen a $1,950 increase in their cost of gas. During this debate, we have heard that this bill does not provide tax cuts, that it is just a continuation of tax policy, but it is a continuation of a reckless tax policy. According to the Tax Policy Center, 87 percent of the benefits of the conference agreement go to the 14 percent of households with incomes above $100,000. The top 0.2 percent of households, those earning over a million a year would receive 22 percent of the benefits of this conference report. Those earning over $1 million will receive a $42,000 a year tax cut while the average tax cut for the 20 percent of households in the middle of the income spectrum would be just $20. We should not continue a tax policy that helps those who do not need our help. While American families are struggling with the costs of health insurance, college education, and gas tax prices, it is not the time to extend tax cuts that only help a small percentage of elite taxpayers. Last quarter, the economy grew 4.8 percent, but wages only grew 0.7 percent. Middle-class families are not feeling confident about the economy. These families are not experiencing the 4.8 percent growth of the economy. They are worried about their economic future. They are living paycheck to paycheck. With the continuing cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is not the time to extend debt financed tax cuts. We could have a very different bill before us that would extend the tax cuts that help families with the cost of the education, address the AMT for next year, and help businesses with the cost of research. Instead, we have a continuation of a tax policy that contributed to the broadening disparity between the rich and the poor. We are going through this process today, just so one provision in the bill can be passed--the extension of the dividends and capital gains cuts. These cuts expire at the end of 2008. We do not need to make a farce out of the reconciliation process. We can do better and we should reject this bill and take up a bipartisan bill that helps all American families.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Not that long, maybe 15 minutes, something like that. Hard to say entirely.

Mr. KERRY. I welcome it. It is not often a debate breaks out in the Senate anymore, so I am happy to welcome it. I ask, through the Presiding Officer, how long the Senator from Wyoming might think he would engage in debate?

Mr. KERRY. I appreciate that. Maybe that will work because I will just add to some of the things the Senator will probably want to answer, and he can take it all in one bundle.

Mr. KERRY. I thank the Chair, and I thank my colleague from Wyoming. I listened carefully, and I hope a lot of other folks did, to the comments of the Senator from Illinois and from other colleagues in the Senate over the course of the last days. I wish the Senate were engaging in this issue in a serious way that allows Members to debate the merits of individual approaches to small businesses being covered. Regrettably, that is not the choice of our friends on the other side of the aisle. What they have done is come in with a series of amendments, with second-degree amendments, and, in the language of the Senate, filled the legislative tree, which basically means blocked out the ability of Democrats to bring amendments, to have a real choice between plans as to how we approach small businesses. That is point No. 1. That is irrefutable and damaging to the prospects of trying to deal with the health care crisis we face. Two years ago, when I was traveling the country as a candidate, no matter what State I went to, no matter what town or what size community or what the political definition of that community was, you always felt a profound sense of responsibility was thrown at you by the people you met from all walks of life. I met people in town meeting halls, in VFW halls, in rope lines at rallies, in visits to factories, in visits to medium-sized businesses, large businesses. A whole bunch of folks would come up and tug at my sleeve, often with tears in their eyes, look at me, and say: Senator, you have to help us on health care. You have to do something to help us be able to afford health care. They would show me a photograph and say: Look, this is my sister, or this is my mom, and they would tell you about a loved one who could not afford the medicine they needed or who lost their health care when a factory shut down or when a business closed or moved overseas. The faces of those people stay with you forever. Their names do, too. People--many of them Republicans, many of them conservative small businesspeople--were pleading not for a dumbing down of the system, not for an automatic reduction in coverage, but for a way to expand the ability to have the level of coverage they have today and be able to pay for it. They were looking wearily to this city for help. I met an awful lot of poor folks who obviously do not have any health care, and the numbers are climbing. More importantly, there is a change in the fabric of our society. I met an awful lot of working Americans who are increasingly watching health care costs go up, education costs go up, energy costs go up, and their wages either stay the same or go down. That is not a sustainable equation in our country. Increasingly, those workers are being pushed out of the middle class into the working poor or downward within the middle class itself. There isn't one of us who has not met a mother of a child who would describe situations in which she would make life choices for that child, about whether to let her kid play football or some other sport--hockey-- because she was afraid she could not afford the medical care if her child broke a leg or somehow were injured. I heard again and again stories from teachers who would tell me about kids who get no preventive care, they do not get routine exams. Schools have cut nurses, so you do not have a nurse in the school now to take care of someone. I heard instance after instance of kids who had some form of acting- out in the classroom as a consequence of either an earache or some other chronic disorder. Some of them went to the doctor for the first time when they were 9, 10, 12 years old, and it was too late; they discovered they had a permanent hearing impairment as a consequence. I met the head of pediatrics in the State of Washington at an event we did in Seattle for children's health insurance who told me specifically of kids she had examined who had permanent hearing impairment, and now they will be in special needs education because we did not care enough to give them early intervention. I met a lot of small business owners who would like to be able to provide their employees with health care but cannot afford it and who know the health care costs are so high that they are standing in the way of being able to hire more workers because they do not have the flexibility and the ability to be able to expand the business and try to cover people or pay even a portion of the health care. In New Hampshire, I met a woman who had breast cancer. I got to know her pretty well. She told me how she had to keep working day after day right through her chemotherapy no matter how sick she felt because she was absolutely terrified of losing her family's health insurance if she did not show up for a day or two. In Erie, PA, I met a man named Albert Barker who wonders how he is going to pay literally thousands of dollars in medical bills that he cannot afford. And after he suffered a heart attack and he underwent surgery, guess what. His employer just stopped his health coverage because it was too expensive because he had gotten sick. So they cut him off at the moment of need, and he was basically at that time facing bankruptcy as a consequence. His wife said at the time that she was reduced to hoping and praying that nothing else happened. In Council Bluffs, IA, I met a woman named Myrtle Walck who at the time did not know what she would do if the price of medicine rose any higher--which it has--and she paid a huge chunk of her Social Security, which was not very big and was her only source of income, her Social Security check, to the drugstore every month just to cover the cost of her two daily prescriptions. In Jacksonville, FL, Renee Harris, who owns a schoolbus company that was in her family for over 50 years, was forced to sell the company because she could no longer afford to insure her workers and felt compelled to want to be able to do so. I heard daily about workers' fears of losing coverage because they either could not afford the higher premiums, the deductibles, the copays, or they thought their employers would drop the coverage altogether. I talked to people who told me what it was like to live knowing they were one medicine bill, one hospital visit away from bankruptcy. That is the real world we are living in today. That is the real world the Senate ought to be debating. All of these problems are in our health care system today. Yet there is so little time devoted in this Congress to finding the common ground, to finding solutions to get something done for those people who want to believe we will do something to help them. Instead, what do we have? We have a so-called Health Week in the Senate. This is Health Week so that Senators can come to the Senate and give speeches--not legislate but give speeches. We have speech after speech in a stalemate where the whole week is going to go by, and everyone knows what will happen at the end because we are not really legislating because we are not really here to solve problems. The people I have met deserve to have a Congress that insists on a real debate, really getting the job done. In all the 22 years I have been here, this is one of those peculiarities of a moment in American history where the Senate is about as dysfunctional as it has been in that whole period of time. Serious efforts to try to deal with problems are just not on the table. What are we going to have? We are going to have one up-or-down vote on a flawed bill with no chance for Democratic amendments. I know the Senator from Wyoming is going to argue it is a good bill--and we will go through some of those details in a minute, et cetera--but what we have been reduced to doing here is spending an awful lot of time trying to stop bad things from happening instead of putting the competent energy of a lot of people who think a lot about these issues, some of whom have extraordinary expertise, into trying to fix them and move toward a positive health care agenda for our Nation. Right now, we are fighting to fix the devastating changes that have been forced on the Medicaid Program. We need to overturn the rules allowing increased cost sharing that has been imposed on families who cannot afford it. And we need to prevent new rules from tossing out the early periodic screening diagnosis and treatment protections for children on Medicaid. Who wrote to the Congress and said: ``Kids in America have enough coverage. We ought to cut out early periodic screening''? Every doctor you talk to worth their salt in this country will tell you what we need is more preventive care, wellness. We need to teach wellness in America. We need to be doing preventive care instead of treating people when they finally get sick, at a time when it is far more expensive than if we intervened early. On diabetes alone, if we had diabetes screening for every person in America, you could probably save $50 billion. You would avoid a lot of amputations. You would avoid a lot of dialysis. And you could treat it in a far less expensive, more easy way. Are we talking about that here? We also have to fix the Medicare prescription drug debacle and extend that May 15 deadline for signing up without penalties. Why? Because it has been confusing to seniors all across this country. Because the implementation has been exactly what a lot of people predicted. The result is a whole bunch of things that ought to be happening to reduce the cost for seniors are not happening. A simple thing would be bulk purchasing to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs. We ought to be simplifying the enrollment procedures. We ought to be making the benefit more comprehensive, by closing the gaps in coverage. But the bottom line is, it would be a tragedy if all we did was try to stop these bad things from happening, when everybody knows we have a health care system that is increasingly in extremis, a health care system that is in crisis and imploding on itself in many ways. This bill, I regret to say, because it deregulates in a selective way all of the insurance delivered in the States, is going to create chaos for people as States choose different offerings and the rules go out the window. I might add, for a group of people who traditionally have come to the floor to defend States rights, they have, in the last years, proven themselves remarkably selective in where and when they want to protect those States rights because State after State across the country has passed a certain standard of health care. Why? Because they know it works. Because they know it reduces costs. Because they know it helps people have greater quality of care and a better quality of life. Instead, this bill is going to open up the opportunity for people to reduce the level of coverage for people. There are a whole series of real health care initiatives that the Senate ought to be dealing with. I am convinced we can find an ethical way of dealing with the thorny issue--I recognize there are ethical considerations--but we could find, if we wanted to, an ethical way to deal with a host of in vitro embryos who, regrettably, are going to be discarded altogether, thrown out into the garbage and lost, rather than applied to the possibility of saving life. It seems to me there is a way to fully fund, in a limited way, the appropriate research of initiatives at the National Institutes of Health. We also need to take up real legislation to get at the heart of racial and ethnic health disparities. We need to make it legal to import prescription drugs from Canada. We need to put medical decisions back in the hands of doctors and nurses and patients, not insurance company bureaucrats. We need to address the nursing shortage by fully funding all the programs under the Nurse Reinvestment Act that we fought so hard to enact. We need mental health parity, which I heard the Senator from Illinois talk about. We need to address our growing childhood obesity problem which is going to increase the cost of health care all across the country. And we definitely need to reauthorize the State Child Health Insurance Program. But this is Health Week, and we are going to have a Health Week on the floor of the Senate. It is not going to deal with any of those issues. It also avoids giving families and small businesses access to the same private health insurance that Members of Congress give themselves. I heard the Senator from Illinois talk about this. I raised this all across the country in 2004. What is it about being a representative of the people, elected by the people to come here to represent the interests of the people, that empowers us to abuse that privilege by giving ourselves the best health care in the world, at less expense, with a nice Government match, bigger than what most businesses can afford, and we are not willing to allow that to happen all across the country? What kind of values does that represent for those who run around talking about values? It seems to me we ought to stand up and make it clear that every single family's health care is as important as any Member's of Congress. We ought to be offering every single person the opportunity to at least buy into it. Why shouldn't they be able to buy into it and get the coverage? Why shouldn't we open up Medicare and let people who are 55 or older buy into Medicare early? That could happen, and a whole bunch of people would get coverage and we would reduce costs to America. All you have to do is talk to any hospital administrator in America. First of all, they are dipping into their reserves. A lot of them are on the brink of bankruptcy. Many of them get refunded so late and with such difficulty, it is hard to plan and come up with a business plan for the hospital. Most importantly, none of them can afford the massive investments in technology that would, in and of themselves, reduce the cost of health care and raise the quality of life. Something like 45,000 to 50,000 to 90,000 people a year die in hospitals because of medical error. And often, that medical error is the result of pain management or pain mismanagement. The VA has a terrific system. I have been in the VA hospitals. I have seen it. Why do they have the system? Because it is the VA. It is a Government health care plan, and the Government made certain they could invest in these pain management computerized systems. The result is, they have reduced the incidence of mistaken pharmaceuticals being taken, people getting the wrong medicine, getting too much, getting it at the wrong time, getting it even when they took it already--all of these kinds of things that happen. This week, unfortunately, instead of bringing up a bill that would grant real relief to our small businesses, we are considering a bill that 41 attorneys general of the United States have written to say is bad policy and will only exacerbate the problems in States today. Why are we doing that? Attorneys general are looking at the regulatory process. They are looking at the overall ability of a State without regard, in many cases, to the politics of it but to the law and to the implementation of what happens. And 41 attorneys general have written to say this bill is going to exacerbate current troubles. I hope the Senator from Wyoming will address all of the concerns expressed in the letter of the attorneys general of the United States. We have also seen the numbers. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the number of firms offering health benefits has declined from 69 percent in the year 2000 to 60 percent in 2005. Forty-seven percent of firms with fewer than 10 employees offer health insurance, compared to 90 percent of firms with 50 employees or more. So everybody agrees something ought to be done. The problem is, the plan offered by the Republican leadership today is not going to help the small businesses to be able to gain coverage for their employees, unless, of course, they give up a whole set of things that currently they are covered for and then without regard to what the pricing is going to be for that. It is a wholesale deregulation of insurance markets. And a wholesale deregulation of insurance markets is, in fact, going to put consumers at risk. The studies show the approach we are being offered will, in fact, have a better chance of increasing the numbers of uninsured, rather than offering small businesses a lot of the relief they so desperately need. The proponents argue prices are going to drop once we get rid of the benefit mandates created and enacted by State legislatures. Well, first of all, that claim, frankly, does not stand up. There are two separate studies that show benefit mandates are estimated to increase health premiums by a small total of about 3 to 5 percent. Juxtaposed against the annual double-digit premium increases that we have been seeing, it is clear a benefit mandate is not at the heart of the problem. If the benefit mandate is only a 3- to 5-percent increase, but we have been seeing double-digit increases over a period of time, something else has happened. More importantly, why do we have mandates? What happened to the right of a State to make a decision, as Massachusetts has in the last weeks, that they want to make certain every person is going to be covered and to mandate a system by which businesses have agreed and the legislature has agreed they are going to fund it and people are going to be covered? Now, the people who have often argued about the heavy unfunded mandate hand of the Government--the people who have most objected to the Federal solution for individual States--are now going to come in and literally give this great gift to some small businesses to be able to go out and do whatever they want and take away from States the ability to guarantee a quality of care for their citizens. Forty-nine States have passed laws mandating that insurers cover mammography services because they are proven to save lives. Twenty- seven States have passed laws requiring cervical cancer screenings because too many women are dying as a result of poor detection. Forty- six States have passed laws requiring diabetes supplies to be covered because 20.8 million Americans are living with this disease and they have a basic need for care. So the Senate is going to come in and say: Those mandates are not important. You do not have to do that anymore. And companies are going to be able to create this unbelievable morass of different offerings which are going to confuse and, I predict, infuriate the consumers of this country, just the way the prescription drug medicine Part D program has infuriated seniors across the country. Now, the numbers I cited about cervical cancer and mammograms and screening, those are not just numbers in a report. We have seen, every day in Massachusetts, how those things make a difference. Kirsten Paragona of Ipswich discovered, in a routine pap test, that she had developed stage 3 cervical cancer. She was 23 years old. And because that pap test was included as a mandatory benefit in her health plan, Kirsten is alive today, with a 2-year-old daughter, instead of living without a reproductive system. For all those in the Senate who want to talk about a culture of life, that is a culture of life. And that is a culture of life worth fighting for. And then there is Gracie Bieda Javier of Jamaica Plain. She lost her mother to breast cancer in 1987. Without mandated coverage for treatment, Gracie's mother was unable to afford the service. And now Gracie is dedicated to helping other women avoid her mother's fate. And because Massachusetts now requires mammography and treatment services, Gracie screens and treats more than 800 low-income women a year. That is because it is mandated. What is going to happen when you open this up to so-called market forces? People who cannot afford it are really going to get hurt. In her own words: ``[Gracie] could not think of a better way to honor [her] mother on Mother's Day than to make sure we maintain these lifesaving mammogram services.'' I think she has it right. It saves lives. Under this bill, 2.3 million people in Massachusetts alone will lose guaranteed health benefits. So what are we going to do? We are going to go back and tell them: Gee, the Senate, in all of its wisdom, deemed that these things that the State thought were important for you--they are not important for you. And the State does not have to provide them. Typically, the great thing about a democracy is that if there is a better idea, people get to hear it and they get to perhaps choose it. They get to debate that kind of alternative on the Senate floor and engage in a debate on the merits of each of these approaches. What is so fundamentally frustrating about this week's discussion is that differing approaches are not really allowed to see the light of day except in speeches. Frankly, there are a lot of ways we could approach the small business issue. Senator Snowe and I have had hearings in the Small Business Committee. We have worked for a number of years to try to narrow down options on AHPs. A lot of people don't like them because of the mandate issue. We have tried to wrestle with how do you deal with the mandates and still lower costs. There actually is a way to open regional pooling for States and allow a State that doesn't want to lose its mandates to opt out. Why can't we have that discussion on the floor of the Senate? You could create pooling. You could create a regional effort to reduce costs. But you could allow people the right to also choose to hold onto the benefits they want, if they want, and not deprive the States of that option. There were a host of other ideas that we have been working on. I regret enormously that all of the effort that went into those negotiations and discussions is not going to see the effort of real legislation by voting on those different amendments. We also had hearings which suggested a whole bunch of different ways which we could provide and help small businesses without doing harm to the system. None of that has been incorporated or is going to be incorporated here. In 2004, I offered America a plan that would provide every single American the same health insurance enjoyed by Members of Congress. Since that time, Senator Durbin and Senator Lincoln have taken that idea and turned it into a bill that creates the Small Employers Health Benefits Program which he discussed. I am a sponsor of that. Under that bill, small businesses could join a national pool and could take advantage of the same Federal administrative functions and bargaining power that is enjoyed by 8 million Federal employees across the Nation. Why should we discriminate against them? Those small businesses could have the ability to pool, to come in and negotiate less expensive health care and provide better benefits to their people and do it with the same leverage that the 8 million Federal employees do. Most importantly, it would protect the State mandates that individual States have decided they want to put in. Republicans argue that that alternative does not provide the savings that small business owners desperately need. The facts tell a different story. We all want savings. We have to reduce the burden of health care on small business. I understand that. That is why Senator Snowe and I have been working to arrive at a way to do so. But experts predict that premium savings for participating small businesses could reach as high as 50 percent higher in the first 2 years, if it passes. It seems to me there is a way to approach this. If you go with the idea of Senator Durbin and Senator Lincoln, we would actually be able to reduce those costs by almost 50 percent. If this week was actually an effort to provide relief to small businesses, we would be discussing all of the options to provide that relief. I don't think that coming up with a precooked, one-size-fits- all, one-ideology, one-approach, one-party plan is the way to help businesses. It seems to me that what is going to happen is, a lot of our small business owners and about 25 million uninsured Americans who work for them are going to get caught up in this political show of the week. It is obvious there is a partisan disagreement in what is keeping the Senate as divided and as incapable of doing real legislative effort. And that is a shame. It doesn't have to be that way, if we mapped out enough time and actually worked across the aisle to try to find the common ground. This is one of those issues where you have to put the politics aside. That is how you are going to win one for struggling entrepreneurs. There are a couple of places we ought to be able to find that common ground pretty quickly. First, how about for children in America? The example I gave earlier of a mother who makes a decision about a child not playing a sport or a child who comes up with a permanent impairment is replicated tens of thousands of times over across the country. We have 11 million children who have no health insurance at all. Sure, if they get extremely sick, they will wind up being taken care of in a hospital and somebody will ultimately see them, if it isn't too late. But the fact is, by that early screening and by involving ourselves early in their lives, educators and medical experts tell us that kids who are properly fed, who have good nutritional practices as a consequence of their meeting with doctors and mothers, learning about those kinds of things, do 68 percent better in school and, in fact, reduces the cost in the long run because they begin to learn good health practices as a consequence of that exposure. Why couldn't we be using Health Week to talk about the most fundamental value of all, which is caring for our children and providing every child in America with health insurance? You would reduce unnecessary hospitalizations by 22 percent, and you would replace expensive critical care and inexpensive preventative care. Obviously, we would do much better in the classroom and much better in families if that were the case. We are the richest Nation on the planet. Yet one in four kids in America goes without immunizations. One in three children with asthma don't get the medicine they need. It is unbelievable to me that there is as much talk about family values as we hear in the political dialog, such as it is in the country, but then you have 11 million children who don't have any health care, and the country is content to let it stand. You could insure every single child in America for less than it costs to roll back the Bush tax cut for the wealthiest people. That is the choice. Every child in America could be covered with health insurance if people earning more than $1 million a year didn't have to get another tax cut. But Washington chooses the tax break for the few who don't need it instead of health care for the 11 million who need it desperately. A 2005 Mason-Dixon poll found the following: 82 percent of respondents think that every child in America should be covered by a Federal health program, if their parents can't afford it; 90 percent of voters believe that 11 million uninsured children in America is a serious problem and Congress ought to address it and resolve it; 79 percent agree that it is our moral responsibility to ensure health care for every child and for the Federal Government to invest in such programs. In addition, the poll found that when voters are presented with a description of Kids First, the specifics of the bill that would provide kids with health care, 75 percent of voters support it and support its passage by a margin of three to one. They have said overwhelmingly that providing health care to kids is more important than providing the next round of the tax cuts and making them permanent. So Americans know what we need to do. There is no more pressing need than improving health care for our children. That is why nearly 25 national organizations representing over 20 million Americans have endorsed the Kids First proposal. When I first sent an e-mail telling people about the Kids First, within 2 days, over 20,000 parents phoned in with recordings of why the Kids First Health Program is important to their families. Let me share one or two of those with you. Jennifer from Central Islip, NY, called in and said: I have a child who is on medication . . . that costs me $250 or more a month. I have children who can't go to the dentist. You know, it's the worst feeling in the world, as a mother, to know that in order to afford health care, you're not going to be able to afford the home you live in. Jordan from Reading, PA, called in and said: Nalani . . . my 3-year-old . . . was born with cataracts . . . Eventually chances are she will be blind. Unfortunately, times are really hard in my house and we don't have health insurance and I can't afford to give her the surgery that will fix the problem that she has. I just can't imagine growing up knowing that there was a way that you could have helped. But because nobody thought you were important enough and because your parents didn't have enough money for health insurance . . . you went blind. With calls like this, it is extraordinary to me that Congress continues to offer a blind eye to these cries for help. This program that is being offered, I regret to say, is only going to confound and confuse and make worse the current delivery of health care in America. I yield the floor.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I am honored to recognize iRobot Corporation, an outstanding Massachusetts company that develops cutting edge technology, and to congratulate the board, management team and staff on the quality products they provide to our armed services. Minimizing troop casualties is an endless task for both our civilian and military leaders, and I am proud to represent a State that hosts some of the country's leading thinkers in addressing that challenge. I had the pleasure of visiting such a company recently and I was deeply impressed by the commitment and perseverance of the people at iRobot. Founded in 1990 by three roboticists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--Helen Greiner, Colin Angle and Rodney Brooks--iRobot designs behavior-based, artificially intelligent robots. These robots are built to perform dangerous duties that would otherwise risk the lives of our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their economic impact on our state is considerable. As a homegrown Massachusetts business, iRobot brings in millions of dollars in revenue to the State's economy, and it is the only publicly traded company dedicated solely to this emerging industry. I recently had the opportunity to see firsthand an extraordinary piece of equipment developed by iRobot--the PackBot Tactical Mobile Robot. The PackBot is a lightweight robot designed to disarm IEDs. There are currently more than 300 PackBot robots deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world. Since mobilization, PackBot robots have performed thousands of missions and in the process saved countless soldiers' lives. I applaud iRobot's efforts to develop 21st century technology to help our troops accomplish their missions, and I am very proud that such an exemplary company calls Massachusetts home.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I am proud to join Massachusetts State Senate President Travaglini, Speaker of the House of Representatives DiMasi, Mayor Thomas Menino, the members and staff of the Boston City Council in celebrating the exemplary public service performed by City Councilman Paul Scapicchio over the last 8 years. Paul's time in office has been defined by a sustained love for the people of East Boston, Charlestown, and the historic North End. His constituents and colleagues regard him as a friend, as does everyone who gathered together last night in Boston to mark this important milestone in Paul's career. A native of Boston's North End, Paul has always been involved in his community. He spent much of his youth playing and coaching in various sports, including Babe Ruth baseball, youth hockey, and basketball. After college, it was natural that this connection to his neighbors and their lives would lead him to seek public office. As Councilman, Paul focused on issues such as affordable housing, improved public education, and increased economic opportunities for all of Boston's residents. He proposed incentives for Boston drivers to purchase hybrid vehicles, reached out to the seniors of his district by participating in Seniors Count, and helped countless constituents address the day-to-day problems that surface throughout Boston's neighborhoods. Mr. President, while a chapter of Paul's public service will come to a close with his departure from the Boston City Council, I am thrilled that he will continue to be part of Boston's future through his work at ML Strategies. I extend to him my gratitude for his service and my best wishes as he, Kate, and their children move on to these new challenges.