Joseph Lieberman

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the last vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 2049

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, the next amendment on the list is Senator Mikulski's amendment. Senator Mikulski has decided not to introduce her amendment. I thank her for that, and we will go next to Senator Akaka's amendment numbered 2049.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I rise to support the amendment offered by my friend from Hawaii. The Postal Service is going to need the support of all its employees and managers to turn around its current decline. Postmasters and postal supervisors are a real and important human asset for the Postal Service and we should do what we can to foster productive and constructive collaboration between the Postal Service and the senior employees. The Akaka amendment just clarifies and strengthens existing requirements for consultation, not collective bargaining, for the scheduling of changes and terminations of pay and benefit programs. I urge my colleagues to support it.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I believe the next amendment in order is amendment No. 2025 by the Senator from Kentucky.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, it has been announced by the clerk that the Senate is now considering the motion to proceed to S. 1925, the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act. At 2 p.m. this afternoon, the Republican leader or his designee will move to proceed to S.J. Res. 36, a resolution of disapproval regarding the NLRB election rule. The time until 4 p.m. will be equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees. At 5 p.m., the Senate will proceed to executive session to consider the nomination of Brian Wimes to be a U.S. district judge in Missouri. There will be a rollcall vote on confirmation of the Wimes nomination at 5:30 p.m. Postal Reform Mr. President, as you and our colleagues know, after a lot of work and good-faith negotiations, we reached a bipartisan agreement last week to complete action on the bipartisan postal reform bill tomorrow, with an agreement that includes almost 40 amendments--39, I believe, is the number--to be voted on tomorrow. Although, we--and particularly our staffs--have been working with sponsors of the amendments, we expect that probably more than half of them will be negotiated to agreements, modified, and/or accepted. But there still will be a significant number of rollcall votes, which will begin tomorrow afternoon after the respective party caucuses. There was a good amount of debate on the postal bill last week. Tomorrow, once we go from S.J. Res. 36, the resolution on the NLRB election rule, to the postal bill in the afternoon to begin voting on the amendments, there will not be much time for debate. As announced last week, last Thursday after this agreement was achieved, Senator Collins will be here from now until 2 p.m. when we go to the NLRB rule. We will be here from 4 to 5, the next open block before we go to the judicial nomination, and we are prepared to stay this evening after the judicial nomination for as long as proponents or discussants of the various amendments want to come to the floor to engage in debate and discussion on them. I hope our colleagues will do that. As Senator Reid said, this is an important piece of legislation. Nobody denies that the U.S. Postal Service is an iconic American institution which millions of people depend on not just for the mail but for their jobs, both directly working for the Postal Service and indirectly--but not too indirectly because they work for related businesses that depend on the mail. We simply can't turn aside, do nothing, and let the Postal Service continue a fiscal spiral downward. The Postal Service, as we said over and over last week, lost $13 billion in the last 2 years. It is going to go over its debt limit later this year. The Postmaster has been very clear that if we don't give him some authority to find a new business model, to economize, he will have to take very aggressive action, potentially closing--on one list he put out there were 3,700 post offices and approximately 250 mail processing facilities, which would be extremely disruptive both to the post office and to the personal life and commercial life of our country. This bill Senator Collins and I, along with Senators Carper and Scott Brown, offered to our colleagues offers a sensible but tough way forward to preserve the U.S. Postal Service, but also to acknowledge that it has to change to stay alive forever, certainly through the 21st century. Because of the impact of e-mail, it has dropped the volume of mail in the last 5 years by more than 20 percent. When that kind of revenue is lost, we have to find ways to economize and a different kind of business model, including different ways to raise revenue, all of which is authorized in this bill. I know some people think our bill doesn't do enough. They are ready to basically close down a lot of the Postal Service as we know it. Some people think our bill does too much. We naturally think we have struck a sweet spot or a point of common ground. In fact, the Postal Service told us they believe if our bill is enacted, it would save--after fully implemented over the next 2, 3 years--between $15 billion and $20 billion a year, to be conservative--probably closer to $15 billion. That is a significant amount of money. It creates a series of incentives to alter the business model of the post office, including authorizing the post office to get into some businesses it has not been in before as a way to take advantage of its unique assets and raise more money. So this is a moment of truth for the Senate. In some sense, it is a somewhat smaller version of the larger moment of truth we are going to have to face sometime about our Federal budget overall, but here is a great American institution that is in real fiscal trouble. We have the ability with this legislation to get it back on a path of balance, stability, and even growth. Some post offices will be changed under this bill. Mail processing facilities--some of them will be closed. The Postmaster says he wants to have that happen. We have authorized a significant amount of money to be spent to incentivize 100,000 postal employees to retire. They are eligible for retirement with an incentive. We think they will, and that itself would save the Postal Service approximately $8 billion a year. This is not one of those bills that people enjoy voting on, but it is our responsibility. It is necessary we face the crisis the Postal Service is in and help it stay alive and flourish throughout this century. That is what is on the line in the bill. The amendments cover a range of topics. This was a very broad bipartisan agreement on the amendments. There are some that make the bill tougher, some make it softer. They all deserve a good debate, and that is what Senator Collins and I are here to do now. Measure Placed on the Calendar--S. 2327

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I understand that S. 2327 is at the desk and due for a second reading.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I object to any further proceedings with respect to the bill.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I yield for my distinguished ranking member, Senator Collins.

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

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank the Presiding Officer for liberating me from the chair so I may now speak in my capacity as a Senator from the State of Connecticut. First, I would like to thank my friend from Maine, Senator Collins, for what I thought was a very convincing, insightful description and really a critique of the CBO estimate of the financial impact of this bill. This is tough to follow. The two of us, Senator Collins and I, and others on the committee have been deeply saturated in this for probably too long. But the fact is, when the CBO estimate of the bill came out saying it was going to cost more than we were saving, I was shocked. As I read over it, part of it is because they are not simply considering the Postal Service budget, which we are out to save; that is, to cut a lot of money from it so it can be saved, and as Senator Collins said, the Postal Service is off-budget. It does not spend taxpayers' money except for those two little matters of paying for ballots for military personnel and others overseas, and I think the other is for blind people in this country, but the rest of it is all paid by the ratepayers. So as you go over, one by one, as Senator Collins did, the elements of the ``costs''--and I put quotations around them--they are just not real. This is form over substance. This is a kind of ``Alice in Wonderland'' accounting that does not relate to the reality of the Postal Service's budget or the Federal budget. The so-called FERS repayment that is coming from the Federal Government, everyone agrees--including Senator Sessions, who stated his intention of making a budget point of order on our Postal Service bill--the Postal Service did overpay this amount of money, just as if a taxpayer overpaid taxes. Well, if I overpay my taxes, that is my money I am asking back from the government. In this case, the Postal Service has overpaid to the Federal retiree pension fund, and it is asking for its money back. There is something else to be said here about the reality of accounting in the real world. When the approximately $11 billion--or maybe more--is paid back to the Postal Service, that only happens once, when that total is paid back. But what we have demanded in the bill be done with a part of that money, which is to get involved in this incentive for early retirement or retirement when members of the Postal Service are eligible, mandating that 18 percent--about 100,000 postal employees--retire, that saves $8.1 billion on a recurring basis every year. So you have the one-time--it may come in two or three payments but only one-time--$11 billion repayment to the Postal Service for the overpayment it made, and then every year it saves $8.1 billion, forever. That is a pretty good deal both for the taxpayers and the Postal Service. Secondly--and Senator Collins went on very effectively about this-- the prefunding of health benefits. The fact is in the Postal Reform Act of 2006--you might call it an excess of caution--the Postal Service was required to make payments into the retiree health benefits fund that are greater than most any other business or government in the country. We have just spread this out to a 4-year payment schedule according to the normal discount rate other Federal programs pay for their retirees' benefits. Senator Collins talked at length about the impact of the way in which the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, refuses to score--as we say, count--dollar-for-dollar the amount of money saved by early retirements, which does not make any sense because that is what will be saved. Now, I want to enter into the Record at this point--and speak to it-- the estimate of the U.S. Postal Service about what our substitute amendment to S. 1789 will save, and it is quite dramatic. I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. All along, our goal has been to get to a point, over 3 or 4 years, where we would save as close to $20 billion a year as we could. That is the number Postmaster General Donahoe gave to our committee as to what he needed, the Postal Service needed to get back in balance. On the current course, in fiscal year 2016 the U.S. Postal Service--I am reading now from the statement I have entered into the Record that the Postal Service has given us--will have a deficit of $21.3 billion. In 2016, under the passage of S. 1789 with our substitute amendment, the loss is reduced to $1.8 billion. That is from $21.3 billion to $1.8 billion. Well, of course, we want to get it to total balance, but we are clearly going to hit balance after that on the course we are on. That means, according to the Postal Service, passage of S. 1789 with our substitute amendment will save the Postal Service over $19 billion a year by 2016. That is exactly what the Postal Service needs to stay alive. We do it without compelling layoffs. We do it with incentives for retirement. We do it without mandating--as some of the amendments would that we will vote on tomorrow--the mass closure of mail-processing facilities or our post offices around the country, which, as Senator Collins said, would be a kind of shock therapy. It would so jolt the system that people would turn away from the post offices in increasing numbers. In fact, it would accelerate the loss of revenue. We do it without an immediate move from 6 days of delivery to 5 days because that is a tough one for a lot of people. We have given the Postal Service 2 years to essentially prove it can get back in balance without that move from 6 days to 5 days of delivery. We have added new sources of revenue. We have created a process here, which is not scored by the Postal Service, that we think can add more money because it will develop a new business model, a new way to use the assets the Postal Service has to make more money. The fact is--I want to emphasize this again--this saving of $19 billion, which will result by 2016 if this substitute to S. 1789 is passed, does not take any taxpayer funds. In fact, it properly returns certain overpayments to the Postal Service. The CBO score for S. 1789 is simply misleading--profoundly misleading--because of the kinds of accounting rules that do not relate to the reality of the budget for the Postal Service. I am proud of what we have been able to accomplish. It took a lot of work. As Senator Collins has said, if this point of order Senator Sessions intends to make at some point in the debate--hopefully after the amendments are voted on--is sustained, it will end this bill. Instead of, therefore, having passed a bill which, if it goes all the way to enactment, would save $19 billion for the Postal Service every year by 2016, the Postal Service's deficit and debt spiral would continue downward. I would predict there would be massive cutbacks in services and a loss of employment by people in the Postal Service but particularly among the 8 million people who are in jobs that depend on the Postal Service in the private sector for their livelihoods. So with all respect, I will vigorously oppose the point of order my friend from Alabama, Senator Sessions, will make. Mr. President, I note the presence on the floor of the distinguished Senator from Virginia. Does he wish to speak? I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank my friend from Virginia most importantly for focusing our attention--I know Senator Collins and Senator Akaka have also been involved in this--on this unacceptable situation, where Federal employees are retiring. Because of a lot of failures here, the failure to implement an effective--it is 2012-- electronic system for this purpose, this paper processing, meaning that people have to wait these very long times after they retire, while they are waiting, they are getting a significantly reduced benefit which causes real hardship. The Senator from Virginia is absolutely right. We mandate in this bill, the underlying bill, that the Postal Service accept the goal of 18 percent in reduction of workforce. The total number of career employees in the U.S. Postal Service is about 545,000, and 18 percent comes out to around 100,000, which is our goal for reduction. This has to happen if the Postal Service is going to get back in balance. Because as Senator Collins said earlier today, 80 percent of the operating budget of the Postal Service is personnel costs. Obviously, it is a labor-intensive operation. So we are going to have another 100,000 people. In fact, it keeps going. By 2017, we will have--from now, this year, we will have a total of 138,000 postal employees eligible to retire. The Postal Service is going to have to work to incentivize them to retire so the service overall can stay in balance. I wish to thank Senator Warner because we have worked very well together on a modification to his amendment, which I think most significantly will require the Office of Personnel Management to submit a report to Congress related to the completion of retirement claims for postal annuitants, to keep the pressure on them to end this inhumane-- in many cases, unacceptable--situation. I know when the proper time comes, we intend to support this modified amendment. It strengthens the bill. It does the right thing. I thank the Senator from Virginia for expressing his intention to support the overall bill. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of New Mexico.) The Senator from Maine.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, thanks to the Senator from Virginia. He makes a very important point: Of the $19 billion in savings that the Postal Service itself believes will result annually as of 2016, $8.1 billion will come from the reduction in salaries paid because of retirements that are incentivized under this bill. It is common sense that if a worker is thinking about retiring and hears there is such a backlog that they are only going to get half of what they deserve for their pension until the paperwork has cleared, they are probably not going to rush to retire, and, therefore, we are going to save less money. We are approaching the hour of 2. According to the unanimous consent that governs our activities today in the Senate, we are going to go to another matter, the NLRB rule. I wish to thank particularly Senator Sessions and Senator Warner who came to the floor to discuss their amendments. Senator Collins and I will return at 4. We will be here until 5, when we go to the discussion of a judicial nomination. Then, we will be here after the vote tonight as late as anybody is here to discuss and debate amendments before we go to the vote tomorrow. I thank the Chair. I thank my friend from Maine. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I just want to say briefly, thanks to my friend from Tennessee not just for his kind words, which mean a lot to me, but for coming to the floor to discuss his amendment. There are different points of view about this issue. I think, as I said very simplistically at the beginning of the debate, some think our bipartisan committee bill does too little. Some think it does too much. I think we have hit the right common-ground spot. And I repeat what I said earlier in the day: There is some due process in this. We don't allow for what might be called shock therapy for the Postal Service because we don't think it will work, and we think it would have the net effect of diminishing the revenues of the Postal Service by cutting business. But here is the report we received today from the U.S. Postal Service itself, just to indicate to my friend from Tennessee and others who may be following the debate. This substitute bill of ours, S. 1789, is not just fluff. The Postal Service itself estimates that over the coming 3 years; that is, by 2016 fiscal year, our bill, if enacted, will enable the Postal Service to save $19 billion annually. They were hoping for $20 billion, but $19 billion is pretty close. I think we have done it without the dislocation to the millions of people in our society who depend on the mail and depend on mailing industries for their jobs, as well as the hundreds of thousands of people who work for the Postal Service, 18 percent of whom we hope will receive incentives that will be adequate for them to think about retirement. But this is a bill that creates a transition that will keep the Postal Service alive--and we think even healthier--without the kind of sudden jolts the amendment offered by my friend from Tennessee would impose. So I would respectfully oppose the Corker amendment, and I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for just three moments to speak on this amendment.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I wish to thank Senator Akaka for coming to the floor and speaking on behalf of his amendment. He is one of the most hard-working, constructive members of our committee, the committee from which the underlying bill has come. He is one of the finest people I have ever met. I have the greatest admiration and affection for him. So unlike Senator Collins, it is with some reluctance that I must say I oppose this amendment. I will speak very briefly since Senator Collins has spoken well on it. I think the current system goes beyond taking care of those who need workers' compensation, and it has come to a point where it is unfair not just to those who are paying for the system but to others who are working in the Postal Service today. I thank Senator Collins. She has worked very hard and very thoughtfully. The proposal she made turned out to be so balanced and constructive that folks in the Obama administration who had been working on a similar proposal for all Federal employees asked that we extend the workers' compensation reforms in the Postal Service bill to all Federal employees. Dare I call this a Collins-Obama proposal? I don't know. I just raised that prospect. In any case, I support the underlying bill in this regard and very respectfully and affectionately oppose the Akaka amendment. I yield the floor, and I thank the Chair.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I want to thank Senator Reid, and, of course, thank Senator Collins. We have again worked very closely together. I thank the staff on both sides who worked very hard, and I thank all of our colleagues. I know it took a lot of effort, because people have strong opinions about the crisis in the Postal Service of the United States, but we have ended with a process here that will allow a discussion and votes on a wide range of amendments on both sides. I would say based on the knowledge we have of this list that not all of these amendments listed will actually require rollcall votes. We will be working over the weekend trying to see if we can find common ground, accept some of these amendments or modify them. But bottom line, this consent agreement, though we are not there yet, gives me great hope that the Senate is going to prove that we are capable of taking on a crisis situation which the post office is in, losing $13 billion plus over the last 2 years. If we do not do anything, it is only going to get worse and a lot of people are going to lose their jobs and a lot of people who depend on the mail are not going to get it in the same way. This is a bill that will provide an orderly reform that will keep the post office not only alive but change it so it can survive throughout the 21st century. Senator Collins and I will be here at noon on Monday to debate any of the amendments people want to come to debate. I believe I am speaking for both of us in saying--I know I am--that after the votes Monday afternoon unrelated to this matter, we are prepared to remain here into the evening to continue debating amendments before the actual votes occur on Tuesday afternoon. Again, I thank everyone involved, particularly Senator Collins. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Acting President pro tempore. Madam President, I thank my friend from Oregon for his excellent statement, really. Senator Collins and I want to work with the Senator and the other cosponsors of the amendment. I want to say a couple things. The first is, the particular examples Senator Merkley gave of the importance of post offices in small towns and in rural America make a larger point to those who have said--those within the Senate and those outside--that in the age of the Internet, the Post Office is a relic we cannot afford, and we have to cut, cut, cut, cut. Well, there is no question that because the Postal Service is running big deficits--up to about $13 billion over the last 2 years--there has to be economizing and we have to look at a different business model. But to draw an easy conclusion that in the age of the Internet the post office and the Postal Service do not have a role to play and are not playing a role anymore is wrong. I think the Senator's examples, in very personal ways, show that. I said yesterday about three times--and I am going to say it again today--notwithstanding the drop in mail volume because of the Internet today, every day the U.S. Postal Service delivers 563 million pieces of mail, and a lot of the things the Postal Service is delivering are critically important to people. An awful lot of the prescription drugs people are getting today, in an increasing number, are coming through the mail. It is an example the Senator cited. The same is true for small businesses with a particular urgency or dependency in small-town and rural America. So the Senator makes a good point. That does not mean everything that exists has to exist forever. It means we cannot reach an easy conclusion that because the Internet exists we do not need the post office or the Postal Service anymore. The fact is, a lot of people depend on the Postal Service every day, and we want to respect that reality, which is important to the quality of life people live and to the health of our economy overall. I look forward to working with the Senator on his amendment. The existing bill tried to recognize this problem and contains within it, S. 1789, a number of steps that are aimed at ensuring the post offices in rural areas and towns are protected and appropriate weight and consideration is given to the importance of such post offices in their communities. This was done in large part in our committee thanks to a bipartisan amendment offered by Senators Tester and Moran. That was strengthened, we think, in the substitute amendment we are now considering. It includes retail service standards, standards for possible post office closings, and what the standards would be on appeal to the PRC. But I do not believe this is a perfect document and I accept, therefore, the Senator's amendment as a thoughtful attempt to do even better on what we are trying to do. I say to Senator Merkley, I look forward to working with you to see if we can reach common ground on this issue. I will say something else, to put this in a different sort of hard numbers context. The Postmaster General set as a goal at the outset to try to cut about $20 billion from the annual operating expenses of the Postal Service. That is a tough number. That is over the next 3 or 4 years. We think this bill--and the Postal Service seems to agree--does not quite do that, but it gets pretty close to it. It certainly is somewhere in the $15 billion to $20 billion range. Some of the elements in the bill that save a lot are the money we provide for incentivizing postal workers to retire early. That is an $8 billion annual savings. There are significant savings in terms of the mail processing facilities--in the billions. The reality is, interestingly enough, as I think my friend from Oregon knows, the amount of money saved if the Postmaster General actually closed the 3,700 post offices that he put on the list of possible closings is relatively small. It is not nothing, but we are talking about $150 million to $200 million if we closed all of them. So as compared to the billions in the other items we are doing, and in relating that number to what the Senator described in the examples he has given and what we heard in our committee, I think this is an area in which I personally believe we have to tread cautiously. I thank Senator Merkley for his thoughtful statement. I look forward to working with him. I know Senator Collins does too, and the other sponsors of the amendment, to see if we can reach an agreement so we can find a way to accept the Senator's amendment.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Senator. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Vermont for his statement but more broadly for his real steadfastness and the hard work he has done to improve the bill. It has been a pleasure to work with him. Before Senator Collins came to the floor, and not counting the occupant of the chair, I was reveling in the fact that the only Senators on the floor were Independents. Anyway, I thank Senator Sanders. We have tried to deal with this problem. In the postal reform of 2006, Senator Sanders is quite right, for various reasons which we need not go into the Postal Service was required to make payments into the retiree health benefit fund that were beyond what most any business or other governmental entity is doing, more than was necessary to sustain the payments and in a much shorter period of time, as the Senator from Vermont said. I would say, to state it as bluntly as I can, maybe too bluntly, the people advocating this were, frankly, concerned that the Postal Service might get to a point where it defaulted, it was no longer able to operate, and then the fear was that the government, the U.S. Treasury, the taxpayers would at some point in the future be forced to pick up the cost of the retiree health benefits. So this uniquely demanding responsibility for payment now was put on the Postal Service. I think everybody agrees, particularly in light of all the real problems the Postal Service has now, that is not sensible or fair. I do want to point out that in the underlying bill, S. 1789, we have attempted to ease the Postal Service's prefunding requirements for retiree health benefits by immediately beginning a stretched-out 40- year amortization schedule for these payments and we require the Office of Personnel Management, when determining how much the Postal Service has to put into the retiree health benefit fund every year, to use the same discount rate that is used to calculate the Federal Government's pension obligations to the Federal Employees Retirement System and the Civil Service Retirement System. The Postal Service thinks this accounting change will reduce their unfunded liability for the retiree health benefits plan by literally billions of dollars. The other change made here is that right now the health benefits of retired employees come out of the operating expenses of the Postal Service. That was going to be the case until a day later in this decade. But there is enough money in the fund that it can pick up money that the Postal Service has put in, that it can pick up the cost of health benefits for postal retirees now. So we require that. I want to state for the record we are trying to deal with that reality in the bill as it is and of course I state my intention to continue to work with Senator Sanders to make this bill as good as we can, both in accomplishing the purposes we all have, which is to keep the Postal Service alive and well because so many people depend on it, and to do so in a much more fiscally responsible way, in every way in which that term might be understood, including the fairness of payments under the retiree health benefits plan, than has been the case before. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Madam President, if I may just briefly, thanks to Senator Mikulski for her kind words but also for her directness about her concern about the processing facility she talked about and overall and to thank her for her willingness to work with us to see if we can work out something acceptable. As Senator Collins said, we have made some changes in this substitute that will still require overnight delivery--less broadly than before because we are trying to deal with how to responsibly react to the precipitous drop in mail volume because of the Internet, yet not reduce the quality of service so much that people leave the mail system even more. I used an analogy yesterday which is probably not exact, but way back when I was in the State senate in Connecticut, we had a crisis in the financing of our public bus system. One of the things that was done that seemed quite logical at the time was to raise the price of the bus fare. What does the Senator think happened in response to that?