Jon Kyl

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I object simply for this reason: Can we go in the order we agreed to? People are confused when we bounce around. If we can go in the order on the list, then I don't think we will be confused.

Mr. KYL. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg) and the Senator from Texas (Mrs. Hutchison).

Mr. KYL. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg) and the Senator from Texas (Mrs. Hutchison).

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg).

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, if the Chair would please notify me when I have spoken 4 minutes, I will be, in fact, that brief. The Senator from Illinois quoted the Gipper, Ronald Reagan. That always gets Republicans' ears perked up. When he said: I am always happy to take 80 percent; I don't need 100 percent--Republicans would be happy to take 80 percent. We would be happy to take 50 percent. In fact, probably most of us would be happy to take 30 percent. But so far, virtually every Republican amendment has been defeated. So when there is talk about the President ushering in an era of good feeling by having us down to the White House and talking to us and listening to us, that is great. We have all commented on our appreciation for the President's efforts. At some point, however, since Republicans do have some good ideas, that has to be translated into some of our ideas being a part of this bill. I think the American people agree with us. A Gallup poll, a week ago, said 38 percent of the people would pass the bill; 54 percent would either reject it or require major changes in the bill. We are reflecting the mood of the Republic. According to a Rasmussen survey, a poll from February 4: Support for the stimulus has fallen now to 37 percent; 43 percent oppose. Two weeks ago, 45 percent supported it. Last week, 42 percent supported it. Now it is down to 37 percent, and 43 percent oppose it. So that is the reason Republicans are standing before this body asking that--because the American people want major changes in it, because a majority now oppose it--we should not have to take 100 percent or even 98 percent of the bill and then be accused of partisanship. Republicans have good ideas, and one of them is the amendment pending by my colleague from Arizona. Without going through all of the elements, since I am very limited in my time, let me just note one of the most important. The Democratic Speaker of the House has said over and over, this bill needs to be timely, targeted, and temporary. The Senator from Arizona is focusing on temporary. What he says, very briefly, is, when the economy begins to recover, then all of this spending that otherwise would be permanent should cease. So the amendment he has pending would require that once we have had two consecutive quarters of economic growth greater than 2 percent of inflation-adjusted GDP, then all of the stimulus spending would cease and the unobligated funds would return to the taxpayer. At that point, then we would need to reduce spending to accommodate the huge cost of this legislation. Now, that is a real test of where we are in this legislation. Is this a question of getting all of this spending we wanted for the last 8 years and we are going to spend out the majority of that spending after the year 2011 or is this truly a stimulus bill that is targeted at getting the economy moving again, and once that happens, then the spending for the future under this legislation ceases? There are 34 new programs in this bill, new Government programs. There is $180 billion-plus on mandatory--in other words, permanent-- spending. That is not temporary. One of the things Senator McCain's amendment stresses is, let's focus on the temporary. Once we begin recovering, then stop spending all of this stimulus money. Mr. President, there is a reason Republicans want an opportunity to have our amendments debated and, hopefully, accepted, and that is because the American people have told us they want this legislation fixed. That is why I support the amendment of my colleague from Arizona, which will go a long way toward that end.

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg).

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I would propose to modify the unanimous consent agreement by noting that the time between now and 4:30 be equally divided.

Mr. KYL. Madam President, I remind my colleagues to support the McCain amendment on which I spoke earlier. I also rise to say a word about the Thune amendment which deserves our support. According to the economic models developed by the President's economic advisers, this proposal would create twice as many jobs for half the cost, about 6.2 million new jobs for $480 billion, as opposed to the alleged 3 to 4 million jobs for $888 billion under the Democratic proposal. One of the best parts is a 7-percentage-point rate cut for small businesses done exactly the way we did for corporations under the FSC/ETI bill. This would apply to businesses with fewer than 500 employees, precisely the kind of businesses that create jobs. Finally, it contains a provision that expresses our policy that the United States should not increase its marginal income tax rates while the unemployment rate is above the level of 2008, and taxes should not be increased to pay for the impact this stimulus will have on the deficit which we know is large. That is precisely what caused the second half of the Great Depression and slowed down the economic recovery in Japan. I urge colleagues to support the McCain amendment and the Thune amendment.

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg).

Mr. KYL. And what I suggest is that we proceed on this basis and not try to interject the TAA process, because I think that will cause this to grind to a halt here. We can discuss, as I told you, the appropriate proceeding on TAA. I am certainly not trying to tie proceeding to TAA to a date certain to vote on Colombia, but I do think it is appropriate that a plan be worked out, with the President, as you have noted, and the Members of Congress who are concerned about this to try to find a way to go forward, as we originally did, so everyone can be assured that both Trade Adjustment Assistance and the Colombia Free Trade Agreement can proceed to a successful conclusion. Now is not the time to negotiate that, and that is why I object to the idea of going forward with this at this time. In order to keep this process moving forward tonight, and get as many of the Democratic and Republican amendments up and voted on, I suggest we keep proceeding as we have been, in good faith, and not confuse it with this extraneous issue.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I wish to respond to Senator Baucus. First, I think the staff on the majority and minority side are attempting to put together a tranche right now of perhaps six--four amendments, two on both sides?

Mr. KYL. Well, I will complete my thought. They are trying to put together a list of at least four amendments that would be equally divided.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an editorial in the February 4 edition of the Arizona Republic be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

Mr. KYL. I will refer to that editorial, because it sets the stage for what we need to do to fix this bill. The Gallup poll yesterday said that 56 percent of Americans believe that either this bill should not be passed or that it should require major changes before it is passed. That is not only what most American people believe but also what most of the people on the Republican side of the aisle believe and I know some Members on the other side as well. This editorial is titled ``Senators should just start over in fixing fiscal mess.'' They say: Far too much of the stimulus bill is simply unserious as ``economic stimulus.'' The Senate would do us all a great favor if it started again from scratch. In a different part they write: When the Congressional Budget Office analyzed the stimulus bill in its original configuration, it found that just 25 percent of its content might have any effect on the economy this year. A similar analysis by the Wall Street Journal concluded that just 12 cents of every dollar spent would have a chance to create immediate stimulus. They conclude: Make the measure look like a stimulus package rather than a pork package. That is what most of us believe we should do. You build the bill from the bottom up. What actually stimulates the economy, what actually creates jobs, you put that in the program. There may be a place for extending unemployment benefits, though that probably should be in a separate bill, because it is clearly not stimulative even though it helps people who are hurting. I doubt that there would be any objection to doing it. But we ought to focus the stimulus on exactly that; Otherwise the American people are going to be cynical when they look at a bill that is $1.3 trillion in size, and the experts are saying a very small percentage of that actually does anything to create jobs or stimulate the economy. Let's go back to last December. In the Washington Post, Lawrence Summers, head of the President's National Economic Council, said: Investments will be chosen strategically based on what yields the highest rate of return for the economy. The Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, projects that in fiscal year 2009, the deficit is going to total $1.2 trillion, and that doesn't include any of this stimulus bill which is about $1.3 trillion. Add those two together, we are talking about $2.5 trillion. So we need to take Lawrence Summers' advice and only spend money that will yield the highest rate of return for the economy. If we do that in building this bill from the bottom, we can actually do something that is great for the American people and still not be wasting taxpayer money. It might take 2 or 3 more days, but this is the most important economic bill this Congress will have considered in decades. It is the biggest bill in the history of the United States. We spent yesterday, Tuesday, on it, today, tomorrow, probably Friday, perhaps Saturday. We spent 5 weeks on an energy bill a couple years ago. Surely on a bill of this magnitude and with the emergency facing the country, if it takes us 3 or 4 more days to do it right, we ought to do it right. That means constructed from the bottom up with things we know will stimulate the economy and create jobs, not just fulfill campaign promises, not just make good on 8 years of things we wanted to spend money on but have not been able to find any other bill to stick it in until we got to this bill. Let's try to do this in a bipartisan way that will achieve the objective. The President himself, on Super Bowl Sunday, in a nationally televised interview on NBC, said: There will be no earmarks in the bill. He said he is going to be trimming out things that are not relevant to putting people back to work right now. My guess is he is fairly embarrassed with a lot of the earmarks that are in the bill. Most of my Democratic colleagues are meeting now. I hope they are talking about what can be eliminated from this bill, what kind of earmarks or wasteful spending can be eliminated from the bill. It has become an embarrassment. We would be very happy to have them join in some of our amendments which will eliminate that spending. Senator Conrad, chairman of the Budget Committee, knows what he is talking about in these matters. He told Fox News: There are other areas of the package that are really very questionable in terms of whether they would stimulate the economy. Some of the programs that are given money only have 10 percent spend out in the next two years. He is correct on that. On the same day Senator Dorgan also commented to Fox News that ``major chunks of the package do not spend out for years which is problematic.'' We all agree. We ought to start over and start by eliminating these programs. If we do that, then we can meet an objective which is far higher than either 12 percent or 25 percent in terms of the money we spend that will actually provide new jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, nonpartisan, says only 12 percent of the discretionary spending in the bill will be spent by the end of this year and that less than half of the total of the discretionary money will be spent by the end of the following year. So more than half of the bill starts spending in the year 2011. I hope the recession is over by 2011. If it is not, obviously, we can look at that time to see whether we need more stimulus. But having stimulus for 2 years, that is a pretty long time to be stimulating. Let's adopt the McCain idea that after 2 years we take a pause and see what else we might need to do. We could probably save a lot of money. We would make wiser decisions, and we would be stimulating in the short term which is what we want to do. The President's Chief of Staff said last year: You never want to waste a crisis. He was referring to the use of a crisis such as this to accomplish certain good. He was talking about reform ideas and so on. But we have to be careful that others aren't using this as an excuse to put spending in a bill that has been pent up for 8 years, that some of our colleagues wish to have done but haven't found a vehicle to carry it and, thus, stick it in this bill. That is what the American people are so upset about. If we will solve this problem, the American people will be a lot more generous in their support for the other things we want to do. I have talked about some examples. I don't want to go through a laundry list. A lot of this is oriented to Washington, DC: $9 billion for a Federal buildings fund; more money to help the auto companies, $600 million to buy more cars for Government employees; $248 million for USDA facilities modernization; $34 million to spruce up the Commerce Department headquarters; $125 million for the DC sewer system. All of these may well be important things to do. You can't argue that they are directly stimulative, though some people will have to do the work associated with them. But we have no idea whether these things are ready to go, whether they can be done in the first 2 years, or whether these are things that actually will be spent, as will the majority of the money, in the 2 years after 2010. In any event, we have a process, as Senator Cochran, the ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, has said, that enables us to vet all of this spending and prioritize it so we put the most helpful spending first, and those things that are not as justified then fall out of the spending for this year and maybe come back next year. But it is our way of determining what we really want to do as a country that, obviously, cannot just have everything we want, and we cannot pay for simply everything. So, as Senator Cochran said, we have the responsibility to be deliberate and consider these items carefully in the context of the President's formal budget request. It is a matter of making tough decisions, and I would hope we could do that. Now, let's assume--because I am sure our Democratic colleagues will agree to eliminate some of these wasteful programs--we still have the problem that if the money is not reduced, then the money is still in the bill to be spent by somebody somewhere. So it is not just a matter of taking earmarks out, but it is a matter of eliminating the funding categories those earmarks are in, or as soon as we authorize the money, it will come right back in and we will have the same projects. In this regard, I am very troubled by programs that would fund directly States and local governments because we have seen the lists they have sent to us--their wish list of things they would like to get. If we simply strike the exact delineation of where they want some of this money to go but leave the pot of money there, I ask you, where is it going to be spent? It will not take 5 minutes for them to get that list back out, put it on the table, and start going to town. Just some general categories here: There is $16 billion to repair and build schools. That has always been a local school function. It is not a Federal function. There is $5.5 billion for a brandnew discretionary program on transportation. There is $2.25 billion for a neighborhood stabilization program. That is the same kind of program that would have made funding available for groups such as ACORN that we took out of the housing bill in June of last year. I do not think people want this kind of money going to ACORN or groups like that. There is $500 million to upgrade fire stations. I know all our local fire departments would love to have money to upgrade their fire stations. Is that a Federal responsibility? There is $9 billion to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration for grants to provide access to broadband. There are huge chunks that would go to local projects specifically delineated by the Conference of Mayors. On January 17, they issued their fourth update of a report that details much of the spending they would like to accomplish. It is a stunning list of porkbarrel projects involving swimming pools, water slides, corporate jet hangars, skateboard parks, dog parks, equestrian trails, golf courses, parking garages, museums, bike paths, and so on. Some of those things might be perfectly appropriate; all of them should be local responsibilities. If people in the community want something like that badly enough, they will find a way to get the money to support it. Just to illustrate the degree to which this prospect of free money has motivated people to what I regard as silliness--again, some of these projects may be perfectly appropriate; if they are, local governments will find a way to fund them--there is $8.4 million--a lot of money--for a polar bear exhibit in Providence, RI. There is $6.1 million for corporate jet hangars in Fayetteville, AK. There is--a small amount of money--$100,000 to create one cop job in Sulfur Creek, CA. I do not know what kind of community Sulfur Creek is, but surely California could come up with $100,000 to get a police officer on the force for that community, I would think. There is a lot of money here for California. There is money to rehabilitate a skateboard park in Alameda, CA; $500,000 for Sunset View Dog Park in Chula Vista, CA. There is money for an equestrian park in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and so on. The bottom line is, these things ought to be subjected to the usual appropriations process. I guarantee you, the appropriators are pretty careful when they go through these items. Yes, some of this stuff slips in, but they try to prioritize these projects, and it is not just a giveaway to local communities. I think it is worthwhile noting what some of the money is specifically spent for in categories. Golf courses seem to be a big item. Golf courses. There are several million dollars for golf course renovations and construction in Shreveport, LA; Brockton, MA; Roseville, MN; Florissant, MO; St. Louis, MO; Lincoln, NE. There is an environmentally friendly golf course in Dayton, OH. That one might win the approval of the appropriators. There is the renovation of a golf course maintenance building in Kauai County, HI. Not to leave out my own State--there are a lot of museums that are apparently in need of some renovation or construction here--there is one in Scottsdale, $35 million for a museum of the West. I guarantee you that will be a great museum, but I would hope we could help the folks in Arizona generate the money for this museum. There are museums in Miami, FL; Meridian, MS; a Minor League Baseball museum in Durham, NC; a museum of contemporary science--there are several museums of contemporary science; that must be a new trend--in Trenton, NJ. There is a music museum in Puerto Rico; a music hall of fame in Florissant, MO. I may be mispronouncing the names of some of these communities, in which case I apologize. There is a local history museum at Imperial Centre in Rocky Mount, NC. I bet that would be fun to go to. In Trenton, NJ, there is another contemporary science museum--again, in Trenton, NJ. There is the Las Vegas Historic Post Office Museum in Las Vegas, NV, and the Las Vegas Performing Arts Center in Las Vegas. There is the Art Walk at the Rochester Museum and Science Center in Rochester, NY; Lima, OH; Puerto Rico--well, there are three more in Puerto Rico--four more; one in Green Bay, WI. You get the drift. Parking garages are a pretty big item, and I will not list them all here, but there are a lot of them in California, Colorado, Connecticut. There is a maintenance garage recycling and sanitation truck wash--let me say that again--a maintenance garage recycling and sanitation truck wash in Bridgeport, CT--I am sure that is necessary, actually--$27 million. I gather all other communities in the country find a way to pay for theirs, but Bridgeport needs some help on that. Structural repairs to Yankee Doodle Garage in Norwalk, CT. And that list goes on and on. In fact, the list goes on and on. I will refrain from reading about another 30 of these. Bicycles are a big item. Bike paths in Long Beach, CA; Miami, FL; Lewiston, ME; St. Louis, MO; Austin and Arlington, TX; Salt Lake City. Water slides are a pretty good item. There is one in Carmel, IN. There is one in Shreveport, LA. Pools--as I said, that is a big item. There is lots of swimming pool rebuilding and refurbishing and so on: California: San Leandro, CA; Sulfur Creek, CA--a lot of California swimming pools. There are a couple here in Connecticut, Colorado. There is one to replace pools at city high schools in Meriden, CT; one to upgrade swimming pools and school restrooms in New Haven, CT. Florida has several pools. They are going to build a fishing pier in Savannah, GA. This one I do not understand, Mr. President: millions of dollars for propane heating replacement with solar water heating systems for county swimming pools in Maui, HI. I did not think they needed heated pools in Maui, but more power to them if they can go with solar. Again, the list goes on and on and on. This is the wish list. These are the kinds of things that when you make money free, people will line up to take part in. Even if we were to eliminate the pots of money here that these particular specific items would come from--let's assume all of the earmarks are gone but the pot of money is there-- there are still other pots of money in the bill worth billions of dollars that represent wasteful Washington spending, money that will not go to create jobs. I urge my colleagues here, as we talk about bipartisanship, as every one of us is struck by the absolute seriousness of the crisis that faces our country, we want to do something that works. And to ask somebody to support this is to say, in 6 months or a year or a year and a half, did it work? For those who support something that does not work, not only is that not in the best interests of the United States, but I think there will be a very high price to pay for wasting perhaps a trillion dollars. It is money we do not have, and we cannot afford to waste it. So what I would urge my colleagues to do: We have several amendments today and tomorrow that will be offered to try to end the wasteful Washington spending and relegate those kinds of bills to the Appropriations Committee, where they can make the tough choices, and then focus on the things which can actually create jobs and stimulate the economy. Our colleagues on our side of the aisle will have several important suggestions in that regard. We probably need to start with housing, which is where the problem started. Experts, as I read this morning, agree that until you solve that, you are probably not going to solve the rest of the problem. So if we can approach the bill from a commonsense standpoint, which is what the American people want us to do, we can create a very good piece of legislation. But as it stands right now, there are going to have to be fundamental changes in this bill, starting basically from scratch, in order for it to do the work we want it to do and to be supported by the American people. We can afford the extra time, if it is 2 or 3 days, to get it done right. I urge my colleagues, let's put the partisanship aside, the victory dances and all of that, and roll up our sleeves and try to see if we can follow the admonitions of the President when he laid out the original concept of this bill--timely, targeted, and temporary--and try to focus on those things which will do the job rather than simply to fulfill our spending wishes or those of many of our well-meaning constituents. Exhibit 1 [From the Arizona Republic, Feb. 4, 2009] Senators Should Just Start Over in Fixing Fiscal Mess In opposing President Barack Obama's economic-stimulus package--now ballooned to more than $900 billion-- congressional Republicans risk letting Democrats earn all the credit as stewards of a national economic revival. Unfortunately, their strategy looks to be a safe bet. Far too much of the stimulus bill is simply unserious as ``economic stimulus.'' The Senate would do us all a great favor if it started again from scratch. Congress now enjoys a public mandate to spend like the drunken sailor of its dreams . . . on one condition. That it allocate spending not to its beloved ``pork,'' but to spending projects that offer some promise, however slight, of sparking the economy. And just what constitutes an economy-igniting spending project? We know what doesn't. Smoking-cessation programs may be helpful, but they are not ``stimulus.'' Spending $870 million to combat bird flu may be a worthwhile investment in public health. But its prospects for kick-starting the 2009 U.S. economy are pretty much nil. When the Congressional Budget Office analyzed the stimulus bill in its original configuration, it found that just 25 percent of its content might have any effect on the economy this year. A similar analysis by the Wall Street Journal concluded that just 12 cents of every dollar spent would have a chance to create immediate stimulus. And there are outright dangerous provisions to the bill. The ``Buy American'' clause in the legislation, ensuring that only American-made steel and manufactured goods are purchased with stimulus money, is an open invitation to an economy-wrecking trade war. Europeans are rightfully infuriated by it. So are serious Democratic-leaning economists like Lawrence Summers. Make the measure look like a stimulus package rather than a pork package. Then, Democrats might manage to peel off some of the GOP support that the president deems so valuable.

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg).

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, if I may respond to the Senator from Tennessee, I appreciate his focusing laser-like on this subject because, in many respects, we are treating the symptoms of the problem rather than the cause of the problem. While treating the symptoms can have some salutary effect, we are not going to ultimately solve the problem until we get to the root cause. I think virtually everybody agrees on what the root cause of our current problem is: the collapse in the housing market. That caused a cascade of other effects, and some of those can be dealt with simultaneously, but the bottom line is, as the Senator from Tennessee noted, we have to fix housing first. Because until that is done, all of these other symptoms are going to remain. There are a lot of smart people whose comments I am going to quote in a moment because they are well-respected--they are Democrats, they are Republicans--but I would like to turn, first, to my folks in Arizona, whom I like to go to for advice. So last weekend I met with Marge Lindsey and her group of realtors from Arizona. I started out by saying: All right, tell me how it is. She said: It is not good. They went on to point out that between 40 and 50 percent of what they are doing right now is dealing with foreclosed homes, or what they call the short sales--getting ready for foreclosure--and that the rest of the market has virtually collapsed. She said something has to be done to prevent the continual decline in housing values. My home is in a perfectly good neighborhood, I pay my mortgage and all, but it is out of my control because all around me others are having problems first, and because they are having problems, it is drawing down the value all around. So the people who play by the rules and are not doing anything wrong are along for the ride down. Until that is arrested somehow, all of these other symptoms are going to exist. That was their analysis. Now, if I can quote some other really smart people, if the Senator would allow me? The New York Times editorialized toward the end of last year, November 11: Clearly, the [financial] system won't stabilize until house prices stabilize, and banks won't lend freely until losses on mortgages abate. . . .All roads, into and out of this crisis, run through the housing market. Exactly the point the Senator from Tennessee is making. Very recently, January 28, the new CBO Director, Director Elmendorf, said this in testimony: Turmoil in the housing and financial markets is likely to continue for some time, even with vigorous policy actions and especially without them. Most economists think that to generate a strong economic recovery in the next few years, further actions to restore the health of the housing sector and the financial system are needed. A lot of folks rely on the advice of Warren Buffett. I probably should have relied more on the advice of Warren Buffett in my investments. I wouldn't be where I am today. Here is what he said in April of last year: Things connected with housing, whether it's in brick or whether it's in carpet, those businesses have shown no uptick at all. His point is that once housing is affected, everything else that has anything to do with it is affected. He made this comment as well: The market won't really come back until you get a close to normal ratio of vacant homes, homes up for sale, compared to current sales, and that's a ways off. We all listened with interest to Alan Greenspan. Here is what he testified to in October of last year before Congress: A necessary condition for this crisis to end is a stabilization of home prices in the United States. Here is how I conclude all of this. The experts back home agree. They are seeing it on the ground. The experts who look at this from an economic standpoint, from a national macroeconomic standpoint, all agree. We need to heed their advice and address the housing crisis first. We cannot wave a magic wand and stop housing prices from falling further. Would that we could--we would do that. That is the market, and we cannot stop it. What is happening is that home values, in a ratio to mortgages, are declining. So the other point the realtors told me was a lot of folks, through no fault of their own, are now paying mortgages on homes that exceed the value of the homes. That is the upside-down element. We can affect that part of the equation. That is to say, we can't stop home values from going down until we do something else first. The thing we can affect is that ratio--what people are paying in their monthly mortgage payments. I am going to leave that to my colleagues. The Senator from Nevada is here. The Senator from Georgia is here. They will talk about a better Republican idea of how we can address the costs people pay every month in their mortgages as a way of making them more healthy, able to pay the mortgage, not going to foreclosure, and ultimately fix that value of homes, and then we are on the road to recovery. The last thing I wanted to say is that the secondary market is a big part of this. When people lend money, they want to then be able to sell that mortgage to somebody. That has been the whole cause of this, the toxic loans in the secondary market. In the Financial Times of August 26 of last year, Dr. Martin Feldstein said: Mortgage-backed securities cannot be valued with any confidence until there is more certainty about the future of house prices. That is precisely what this better Republican idea will get to. As my colleagues discuss these ideas of how to relate to this, remember what the original cause of the problem is, what we can affect and we cannot affect, and how we want to focus laser-like on fixing housing first. I appreciate the efforts of my colleagues.

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg).

Mr. KYL. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg).