Jon Kyl

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. If I may respond very briefly, I appreciate the Senator's comments. I am sure the chairman would acknowledge the basis for some Republican concerns about the ability to offer, not an unlimited number of amendments for the purpose of filibustering the bill, but, rather, enough to try to solve what are perceived to be the problems of the bill. Part of the problem is a lack of trust. There are some on the Democratic side who have said they believe the intent of the Republican leadership, or Republicans, is to filibuster this bill so there would be no bill. It is hard to prove a negative, but I do not know how many times Leader McConnell and I or Ranking Member Shelby have said that is not our intention. Everybody acknowledges that there is work to be done in the regulatory regimes that govern the trade in these very esoteric instruments, the derivatives and others, and regulating financial institutions and dealing with the problem when some of them become financially troubled. Everybody acknowledges the need to do that. I firmly believe at the end of the day there will be legislation passed that deals with that. I do not think there is anything the minority could do, even if it wanted to, to stop legislation from ultimately passing. So to those colleagues on the other side who believe it is the Republicans' intent to stop the legislation, to have no legislation, all I can say is, yet one more time, that is not true. I do not know of a single Republican who believes that, of a single Republican who does not want to see legislation. Nor do I believe this is analogous to health care in that there was a strictly partisan approach taken there. The lines were drawn, and we do not have to debate how we got there. The reality was, at the end of the day, Republicans were trying to do everything we could to stop the legislation, and the majority did everything within its power to ultimately get it passed. That is not the same situation I see with this bill because, first of all, I think Members are a little closer than was the case on health care. Secondly, there has been at least a negotiating process between the chairman and the ranking member and others that has suggested ways to at least approach some of these problems. Republicans are suffering under no illusions that with a 59-to-41 Senate lineup we should get 100 percent of the way or even 60 or 50 percent of the way. Senator Shelby has made it clear he understands he needs to compromise because the majority has more votes than the minority does, but to try to get at least a proportional or representative sample of Republican ideas in here. Moreover, as my colleagues' conversations just revealed, there is a lot of overlap in intent. I do not think we intend the bill to reach into Main Street to the degree that some of us are concerned it still does. I do not think there is the intention to see taxpayers still on the hook to the extent some of us think the bill still does. And to the extent the chairman of the committee says there have to be ways to ensure that does not happen, and we can do that, I accept what he says in good faith. I also accept in good faith his view that amendments, within reason, should not be limited. Again, there is no intent on the Republican side to filibuster the bill to prevent a vote from ever occurring. I do not think we would have that ability even if we wanted to do that. So we have to get over this problem of trust. Another way to do that is to lead by beginning to make a difference in the way that the--not the legislation is discussed, but the Senators are discussed, the motivations for different Senators. It would be easy to come to the floor and talk about motivations. It would also be wrong. I think the leaders in the debate, starting with the leadership and then the chairman and ranking of the committee and on down, perhaps have had some responsibility to take the lead in making sure in the discussions on the merits of the bill--when I raise a particular issue, as the chairman just did, to say: Well, let me go to the language and see if I think we do have it already covered, rather than: I know why you are saying that, Senator from Arizona. You have some ill motive. The Senator would not say that. So perhaps we can begin to reach a better sense of trust where we can begin to work through these things in a much more constructive way by taking the leadership and getting a more civil conversation. When I say that, I point to nobody in particular as in violation but rather point to myself and the other leadership as the place to start with setting that tone. All of these things could begin to build the trust that might enable us to begin to engage each other.

Mr. KYL. How time flies when you are having fun. And to conclude a process that will be constructive and helpful to the American people.

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Utah (Mr. Bennett).

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. May I ask my colleague, who has been down on the border fairly recently. He went to the Tucson sector which is a sector that has about half of all of the illegal immigration in the entire United States coming across; is that correct?

Mr. KYL. The point here is, the Tucson sector is one of two sectors in Arizona. It is maybe 60 percent of our southern border. The Yuma sector may be the other 40 percent. The Tucson sector ends at the New Mexico border. We are talking about a couple of hundred miles, give or take--not that much area when we consider the entire, more than 2,000-mile border all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to the San Diego area. About one-tenth of the entire border area accounts for over half of all the illegal immigration. My colleague was there within the last month or so. I was down in the Yuma sector. The reason I mention these two sectors is that it is literally the tale of two approaches to immigration reform. As Senator McCain said, there is absolutely no doubt that application of the right principles and resources to the border can secure the border. Let me give my experience in the Yuma sector and then ask my colleague to talk a little more about the Tucson sector. Those are the two sectors in Arizona. The Yuma sector has virtually eliminated illegal immigration. There is still substantial drug smuggling, and that is a lot of what they are focused on right now. How could this have happened? Mainly three things. First, they completed the fencing in that particular area. There are just a couple miles left to go, but they have 11 miles of very good, new double fencing in the urban area around Yuma and then vehicle barriers beyond that. There are some areas where it is even triple fenced. They have enough Border Patrol agents, though we have to be careful we don't take some from the Yuma sector to send over to Tucson where they need more, because it is a little bit like these wars abroad. Once you take the area, you need to have enough troops to hold the area or, when you leave, bad guys come back in. We need the Border Patrol there. If we could add some National Guard troops, as my colleague has recommended, it would absolutely be the final personnel solution. I can remember when the Guard was withdrawn and there was only one guardsman left in the Yuma sector, and they still stayed away. I am not even sure if he had his weapon with him. But let's put it this way: The bad guys on the other side of the border, whether it is the cartels or others, do not want to mess with the U.S. military. They won't. That is the reason my colleague, then- Governor Napolitano, and many others believe we need more National Guard on the border. The third thing that brought illegal immigration in the Yuma sector almost to an end is called Operation Streamline. It is very simple. When you cross the border, you get thrown in jail. The first time it is for about 2 weeks; second time, 30 days. After that, it could be 60 days. The sheriffs tell us that about 17 percent of the people they apprehend are criminals in the United States or are wanted for crimes here. Obviously, that is the 17 percent you want to catch. You want to put them in jail. The rest of them want to come here for work. They can't work and make money while they are in jail. That is a huge disincentive for them to cross in that area. So what the Border Patrol and the Department of Justice did was to say, if you cross in this area, you go to jail. They stopped crossing in that area. They gradually expanded those areas until it finally covered the entire Yuma sector. Now illegal immigrant coyotes and cartel folks know that if they try to bring somebody across in the Yuma sector, immediately those people are going to jail. Then they will be going back home, so they don't try it anymore. As a result the statistics are, as Senator McCain pointed out, in the Tucson sector you had almost a quarter of a million people last year apprehended. Who knows how many more were not apprehended. How many in the Yuma sector? This year, 4,946 so far--from a quarter of a million almost to 4,000. It wasn't always so in the Yuma sector. In 2006, 118,000 were apprehended. The next year, it went down to 37,000. We could see a big impact. And then 8,000, 7,000, probably 5,000 this year. We can see the impact of the fencing. The personnel and Operation Streamline have made a huge difference.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I have made my point here. Senator McCain is absolutely right. If you want to do it, you can do it. You just have to apply the will and the resources. What worked in the Yuma sector could work in the Tucson sector, and almost all of those things are included in the 10-point proposal Senator McCain and I have made.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Utah (Mr. Bennett) and the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond).

Mr. KYL. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Utah (Mr. Bennett), the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond), the Senator from Nevada (Mr. Ensign), the Senator from Nebraska (Mr. Johanns), the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Kyl), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Roberts), the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Voinovich), and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Wicker).

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. DeMint). Further, if present and voting, the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. DeMint) would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, before I begin talking about this bill specifically, I wish to compliment Chairman Dodd for the hard work he has put into this matter. I believe it is important for us to reach a bipartisan consensus, and many of the things we just discussed are matters on which we can reach a consensus. That is the goal of Republicans. I am concerned that there has been some politicization of this issue by many on the other side and, frankly, some in the administration. I know, for example, that Senator Chambliss, a Republican, and Senator Lincoln, a Democrat, worked very closely together and had virtually, I am told, reached an agreement on the derivative issue as it pertains to the jurisdiction of their Agriculture Committee, only to be told by the White House that was not acceptable and that Chairman Lincoln needed to go back and redo it the way they wanted it done. As a result, the bill was passed out of the Agriculture Committee on an almost partisan line. The same thing was true of the legislation that came out of the Banking Committee. While Chairman Dodd is here, let me make this point. He suggested this morning that there are Republicans who support this bill, he knows, but that they are being told by Republican leadership that they can't support it. I want to make it clear that our leadership does not operate that way. One reason I know that is because I am one of our leadership. Our members of the Republican caucus think for themselves. We came to a conclusion unanimously in the Republican conference that the partisan bill that came out of the Banking Committee--and it was partisan; it was written by Democrats, not Republicans, and it was passed on a party-line vote--that bill was not the way to move forward. It was partisan, it was flawed and, among other things, it would provide for perpetual bailouts and therefore didn't achieve the first goal of the legislation, which was to finally end the taxpayer bailouts. So all 41 of us wrote to the leader and said we will not vote to proceed to that bill because it is a partisan bill. It would be better if we could work together in a bipartisan way to bring a bill to the floor of the Senate that represented not just Republican ideas but a combination of Democratic and Republican ideas that had been negotiated by the members of the Banking Committee, members of the Agriculture Committee, and others. That would ordinarily be the way we would take up a bill here on the Senate floor. Having said that, I am still confident, based upon what Senator Shelby and other Republicans on the Banking Committee have said, that it is possible to reach a bipartisan consensus. I know Chairman Dodd and Senator Shelby have been working hard every day on various aspects of the bill to try to reach a conclusion. The second point I wish to make is that one should not describe the bill that passed out of the Banking Committee as the end of the story, as a successful bill that is going to solve all of these problems. I do not think it will. It does not end taxpayer bailouts, for example, and at a minimum, it seems to me it ought to do that. So in just a few minutes here, I would like to describe some of the things that I think the bill should address and that I hope are being addressed in the bipartisan negotiations. I am sure it is obvious that it is very difficult--once a bill comes to the floor and you have a chairman and leader supporting the bill, with 59 Senators on their side of the aisle, it is very hard to amend that bill. That is one reason Republicans would like to see a bill brought to the floor that already has bipartisan consensus, and then, yes, we can work our will on the bill and maybe amend it, maybe not, but at least we know it is not going to be a purely partisan proposition. There has been much attention paid to the $50 billion fund that is created by this bill. While it is true that the financial institutions, of course, pay the money, supply the money that goes into that fund, we all know where the money eventually is paid--the costs are passed on to the consumers. But that is not the real problem because there are other funds, such as the FDIC fund, for example, which the banks obviously pass on to their consumers in order to have an ability to take care of their expenses to creditors should they not be able to do so. But what this bill does is not just create this $50 billion fund but also continuing government obligations beyond that. It provides not an orderly bankruptcy type of procedure for the resolution of a failed company but, rather, an ad hoc procedure determined by bureaucrats who are not accountable to anybody and who can apply pretty much any rule they want to the winding down of the institution. What does that do? Today--and frankly, it has been this way for two centuries--we have a series of laws that dictate what happens in the event of the failure of a company. Primarily, these are our bankruptcy laws. You know in advance what happens. If you are a company that cannot make it and you go bankrupt, there are two basic ways you can file bankruptcy, one in which you totally liquidate, the other in which you reorganize. In those two situations, the law provides for what happens to your creditors. By definition, bankruptcy means you cannot pay all your debts. So who gets paid and who doesn't and how much and in what order--all of that is resolved by the bankruptcy laws and by the laws built up as precedent applied in the bankruptcy courts. That is why you know--when you either lend money to an institution or you invest in it in equity investments, you have an idea of where you stand, where your loan or equity investment stands in the order of priority should the entity fail. For example, a secured creditor would be very high on the list. Security means you have something to fall back on to take from the company if they can't pay their debt to you. As a result, you can lend the money at a lower rate because you don't have to account for that risk when you lend the money. It is a good way for companies to borrow money. Granted, they have to have something that backs it up. Sometimes it is even the personal guarantee of the CEO of the company. But you get a pretty cheap loan if you do that because the lender knows he or she or it is going to get its money back. By the same token, if you need money pretty badly and don't have any more security, you might ask people to invest in your company or to borrow money on an unsecured basis. Well, you are going to get charged a higher rate of interest on that because there is more risk to the investor or to the lender. But in every case, they know where they stand in the event you can't make it or you fold. What this bill does is substitute an unknown, untested process for the tried-and-true rules of bankruptcy. Nobody is suggesting there could not be some modification of the bankruptcy process or rules that might govern these particular institutions. They are unique institutions in some respects, and to the extent the rules should be tailored in order to fit these circumstances, they could be. But that is not what is done in this legislation. Instead, new entities are created and bureaucrats are allowed to decide when a company could destabilize the markets and therefore decide what to do about it. Their range of options is essentially unlimited. The bottom line is that taxpayers could end up being on the hook for the bailout. That is true with the FDIC, it is true with the Fed, and this legislation has specific language in it that provides for that. There are those who say: Why don't we just get rid of this $50 billion fund, and then the problem will go away. No, that problem doesn't go away unless you correct the other language as well. I will not try to substitute my judgment for that of others who say we need a $50 billion fund. I will say this: Creating that fund makes it more likely than less that risks will be taken and that therefore there will be instability in the market. I also suspect that those who have an implicit guarantee from the fund are more likely to receive credit, for example, at a lower rate because there is much of an assurance on the part of the lender or the equity investor that they will get their money back. So there are some downsides to having this fund. But those aside, if you want to do away with the fund, OK. If you want to keep the fund, OK. But what you should not do is provide that beyond that, the taxpayers are on the hook. Here is the problem. Lehman Brothers, I am told, had well over $600 billion in liabilities, and a $50 billion fund does not go a long way toward resolving a $600 billion liability. In the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are not even dealt with in this legislation even though they were the prime causes of the problem--and by the way, that is a deficiency in the law that needs to be corrected. I hope these negotiations will provide something in that regard. But they have now created--it is about $6.3 trillion in obligations. Guess who is on the hook for those obligations. Congress never passed a law that said the taxpayers were going to be on the hook, but that is exactly the result of the actions taken by the bureaucrats who decide these matters now. I do not want to create a perpetual situation where not Congress, not the courts, but bureaucrats--by the way, I do not use that term pejoratively. ``Government officials''--let's use that term. Unelected government officials, to whom we give the power, simply decide who gets bailed out, when, under what circumstances, who gets paid back, who doesn't get paid back, and how much it is going to cost the taxpayers. That, in essence, is what is provided for in this legislation. So when folks say this is a bill we need to support because it ends too big to fail, that is wrong because it doesn't end too big to fail and taxpayers are still on the hook. If those things are fixed, then my criticisms in this respect go away. But we have not heard from these negotiations that is being done. So I told my colleagues: Don't come to the floor and say this is a great bill, it solves all these problems, it ends too big to fail, and there is nothing wrong with it. There are some things wrong with it that need to be fixed. Let's do those things. I assume, on a bipartisan basis, if you just ask the abstract question of every 100 of the Senators, do you think we ought to end too big to fail, the answer would be yes. Ask our constituents--yes. Then we can get down to the nitty-gritty. What about the language in the bill that says the FDIC ``will guarantee the obligations of banks'' under certain circumstances? That is language that has to be carefully either defined, limited, crabbed, or eliminated, or we are going to have taxpayers continuing to be on the hook for these obligations. As I said, we haven't done anything to Fannie and Freddie in the legislation, and that is going to continue to mean a continuing taxpayer obligation as well. As I said before, too, those firms, the ones deemed too big to fail, have an advantage over the smaller banks, the community banks. My colleague just mentioned those a moment ago. We just met with the community bank representatives in Arizona, and they fear this kind of provision will make them uncompetitive vis-a-vis the big boys. As a result, what we will eventually end up with is a few really big banks and maybe some that aren't, in kind of a medium-size operation, and almost all of the smaller banks having to go out of business because of this anticompetitiveness that will result from the legislation. One of the other ways in which what I have been talking about occurs is through section 113, the so-called Financial Stability Oversight Council. This is one of the entities that allow for these backdoor bailouts. It gives the Federal Reserve the authority to prop up any nonbank company that the council, this new council, deems to be a potential threat to systemic stability in our economy. This is a board based in Washington. It decides which institutions get special treatment. It gives these bureaucrats tremendous latitude to pick winners and losers, again resulting in a competitive advantage and disadvantage. What determines whether a nonbank is a threat to stability? What are the criteria? Among other possible considerations, ``any other factors that the council deems appropriate.'' That is pretty much an open book--``any other factors that the council deems appropriate.'' I would think, if Congress is going to try to legislate in this very complex and difficult area, we would try to give pretty specific direction to the Federal authorities, to whom we give great power, as to how we want it exercised, and I don't think this meets the test--``any other factors that the council deems appropriate.'' Take that out of the bill. Let's have a bipartisan negotiation to do that. If somebody can demonstrate to me why that would have to be left in, then great, but these are the kinds of things that lead me to the conclusion that, no, we should not agree to consider the bill that came out of the Banking Committee on a purely partisan basis because there are problems in it. Today, the Wall Street Journal says: The Dodd bill allows too much discretion to federal regulators to determine which firms to regulate and how, which firms to rescue or close down, and which creditors to reward and how. . . . Exactly what I was just saying. It goes on to conclude: The Dodd bill also extends the FDIC's resolution authority (subject to other executive approval) beyond deposit-taking institutions to any financial company deemed to be systemically important. And it gives the FDIC the discretion to discriminate among creditors as it judges who gets paid what as part of a resolution. . . .Recall how the White House exploited its authority under TARP to trash Chrysler's creditors and give unions a better deal. Now, that is not the only section. Section 1155 of the bill is entitled ``Emergency Financial Stabilization.'' This is another way in which the bill guarantees bailouts and puts them into the law and leaves the taxpayers on the hook. Under this section, the FDIC would be allowed to create a new program of unlimited size to guarantee the obligation of depositories and holding companies with depositories. What does this mean since there is no requirement that a company that receives, guarantees, and defaults on its obligations be taken into an FDIC receivership, bankruptcy, or resolution? The FDIC and Treasury can prop up whatever company they choose. This authority can be exercised without congressional approval. It is one of the reasons I have said I think there needs to be some element of bankruptcy or other process prior to the instigation of this particular kind of authority. We cannot say this bill ends taxpayer bailouts as long as we have all of those sections in it. Finally, there is much said about consumer protection. Does anybody know anybody who does not favor consumer protection? I think we all do. There are questions about how to intelligently do it. We can create a lot more cost to consumers if we make the regulations so costly and inefficient that they end up paying more money than they would have otherwise. That is, I fear, what can happen here. It happened with the credit card legislation we passed. I think it is predicted that it can happen here as well. It could easily happen with businesses we do not even intend to cover. I know I have heard from dental offices and car dealerships. When we think about Wall Street bailouts, we do not think about our next-door neighbor who sells cars, or maybe our neighbor who is a dentist. But if they have an installment plan where it takes 4 months-- where you can get up to 4 months to pay your bill to them, boom, you can be covered by provisions here. Then all of the consumer protections apply and so on. Let's be careful that in an effort to make sure Wall Street handles its affairs properly that we do not impose conditions on Main Street, the folks we would like to see thrive, particularly in times of recession, in a way that would end up either causing them more expenses or, at worst, even making them uncompetitive with these so-called bigger guys. Restraining credit is a big way to do this, requiring that they have to apply capital not to building their businesses but to somehow backing up their credit issuance, even though that is not the main part of their business. Just quoting briefly from the New York Post: New restrictions on credit . . . are likely to cost our economy tens of thousands of jobs a year. And: Reductions in credit-- Which would result here-- means declines in job creation. Many small business start-ups use home equity debt or credit cards as their source of funding. There is not a lot of home equity debt to be had these days. A lot of our homes are not mortgageable at the present time, so credit cards are maxed out and so on. Well, that is a difficult way to do it. But we have to make sure if small businesses are doing this that the credit flows are not stopped because of provisions of this bill. In an op-ed in the New York Post today, Mark Calabria pointed out: The bursting of the housing bubble largely eliminated the first option. That is the mortgaging of your home to get additional credit. Now Washington is trying its best to kill the second. That is the credit card provision. [The Dodd bill's] proposed ``consumer protections'' would reach beyond credit cards and restrict the availability of all forms of credit, while raising costs. Now, nobody intends this result. I do not think anybody in this body wants to impose additional costs, especially on smaller businesses or on startup businesses. It is simply an inevitable result of a policy that is written too broadly. We need to be careful how we do it. We need to ensure we do not write it so broadly that friends we want to protect are not adversely impacted. They have been coming to my office. Folks you never dream of who would be covered by this act are coming in and saying: Here is how this bill could affect me. Please make sure it does not. All I urge my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to do is, take these concerns on board--they are not partisan concerns--and make sure when these negotiations figure out how to amend the bill, that we take into consideration the things we are raising. They are not partisan concerns. They are concerns of everyday Americans, and we owe it to our constituents to think these things through and, if need be, change the bill. I am sure even Senator Dodd would say the bill is not perfect. If there are things we need to see changed in it, then let's do that. The last point has to do with another element of consumer protection. A lot of folks do business in more than one State. In fact, some of the larger companies do business in all States, and it is cost efficient for them if there is one rule, if there is one regulator, so that they do not have to, for example, figure out what every single State requires in terms of different consumer protections or notice or whatever it might be, and then have to comply with all 50 States, some of which may be contradictory, as well as a Federal regulator. So up to now we have pretty much had a Federal regime that has preempted the State jurisdiction in some of these areas. Well, as I understand it, the legislation does away with a significant component of that and would allow the State regulators to impose individual requirements on these companies that are doing business throughout the United States. So we could have the anomalous situation where we have lots of different requirements. Some of you have seen ads on TV. It says: Call now to get your $29.95 knife. If you call right now, you will get another one thrown in for free. Then the last 10 seconds of the ad has some guy reading in very fast language: Offer not valid in New Mexico, New York, Arizona, Tennessee, Oregon, and so on and so on. You cannot even follow what he is saying. But the reality is, there are a lot of different requirements. So what we would like to try to do is have things be as uniform as possible to keep the costs down because the greater the costs, the more the cost to the consumer. Unfortunately, as I said, however, this bill creates a patchwork of regulatory regimes that expand the number of regulators by 50 in certain areas. As a result, it is going to be much more difficult to comply with and much more costly. If we believe we understand what is necessary in consumer protections, then let's provide for it. If we think we do not, that we need to leave this to a lot of other regulators, then let's not try to make the rules ourselves. Just let them do it. But we should not do both. In addition to that, the chairman talked about safety and soundness. This is a technical term that essentially has regulators requiring banks and other financial institutions to carry a certain amount of reserves so that if people want their money back out of the bank, the bank has enough money to give to them. No bank believes every day 100 percent of its deposits are going to be called back by its depositors. But they have to have a certain percentage of those funds on deposit so if you go and say: I want my money out of the bank, they have enough money to give it to you or, if they have loans go bad, they have enough to carry those loans, and so on. That is what the safety and soundness requirements of the regulators do. It is a good thing. Those same people can also provide for consumer protections, and say: Look, we know the bank needs to reserve a certain amount of money, and we also know, consistent with that, they need to ensure the protection of their consumers in a certain way. What is difficult is when we separate these two functions, as this legislation does, so we have one group saying to the bank here is what you have to do for safety and soundness purposes, and we have another totally independent group saying, we do not care anything about that, but here is what you have to do for consumer protection. We can end up with duplicative, overlapping, costly, and sometimes even inconsistent requirements, all of which make it more difficult for these institutions to give a cheaper product, a better loan, a credit card with a lower interest rate, or whatever it may be. I just urge my colleagues, everyone is for consumer protection. Everyone is for safety and soundness. Let's try to do this in a way that does not impose such great burdens, especially on the smaller folks, that they are not able to be competitive and provide their consumers, about whom, after all, we should be mostly concerned, with the cheapest product that is backed by the safety and soundness of the institutions. Incidentally, on this last point, some who are a little more cynical have said: Well, maybe this is being done for a more nefarious purpose. If every single attorney general in the country can go out and hire trial lawyers on a special contract to bring class action lawsuits because of a violation of State laws, then we have a brandnew cause of action for the trial lawyers to do even better than they have done in the past. I am not going to suggest that is the motivation, but I am going to suggest that I see nothing in the bill that will prevent that. As long as that is a potential, then, Katey, bar the door. So, again, there are many things in this legislation that are not partisan in terms of we all want to protect the same folks. But there are questions that have been raised that need to be dealt with. I think it would be far better to take the time, to have Republicans and Democrats sitting down and going through all of these issues carefully, writing up a bill on which they can agree, bring that bill to the floor so the rest of us can then look at it, and hopefully we would all say: Gee, that is a lot better product than we thought. It is not exactly as I would have done it. It looks like there are some compromises in there, but after all, that is what the process is when we have little more than half of the body of one party and less than half of the other party. That is how we get things done. I can assure you this and assure my colleagues on the other side, Republicans want to work with our Democratic friends to get a good bill that all of us can support and that will be good for our country. I think if we can work in good faith toward that end, we will be much happier with the result than if it is the result of a partisan or a near-partisan vote in this body and likewise in the House of Representatives. I thank my colleagues for their patience and am happy to yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Franken.) The Senator from Ohio is recognized.

Mr. KYL. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Utah (Mr. Bennett) and the Senator from Nebraska (Mr. Johanns).

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander), the Senator from Utah (Mr. Bennett), and the Senator from Nebraska (Mr. Johanns). Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander) would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Reserving the right to object, might I ask my colleague to restate the request?

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I appreciate my colleague restating the request. Reserving the right to object, and I will object, as I think my colleagues are aware, the two leaders have worked out a process for consideration of at least some of the judicial nominations. My understanding is, there is another agreement on at least one circuit court nomination that they are working out a time agreement on right now and that would occur, I presume, later this week. I think it is important to let the two leaders work out those agreements. As a result, reluctantly, I have to object to my colleague's request.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, for the same reasons as noted earlier, I object.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, for the same reasons stated before, I object.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I have no objection.

Mr. KYL. Reserving the right to object, I will make the same brief statement I made with Senator Whitehouse. Some of these nominees are subject to discussion between the two leaders, working out time agreements for their consideration--at least some of the court nominees. Now, I don't know about this specific nominee. I would say that I have no secret holds on anyone, so this is not on my own behalf. But in order to preserve the deliberation between the two leaders, on behalf of the minority I would object.

Mr. KYL. Reserving the right to object, I am trying to follow the numbers as my colleague is going down through the unanimous consent requests, and I think my colleague skipped over the name of John J. Sullivan, of Maryland, Calendar No. 208, to be a member of the Federal Election Commission. Is there some objection on the other side or might we have an explanation as to why that name was skipped over?

Mr. KYL. I would be happy to object to that.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. KYL. For reasons stated earlier, Mr. President, I object.

Mr. KYL. I object, Mr. President.