Joseph Lieberman

Mr. LIEBERMAN

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

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to bring my colleagues attention to the excellent work being done by an important international organization--the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Since 1961, when it was founded, the OECD has worked to open up and help develop the world economy, not only for its member states but also for those nations outside the OECD area. We live in an era when the term global economy is redundant. There is one economy, and it is global. And one of the things we need as a nation to keep us competitive is accurate, up-to-date information. We also need a forum in which to work with other nations equally committed to economic openness to achieve the highest sustainable growth and standard of living. That is what the OECD is all about: helping its member nations achieve a better standard of living and higher sustainable growth rate by providing a forum for the exchange of information and policy prescriptions. While the OECD has 29 member nations, its reach is global. For example, for a number of years, the OECD had in place the Center for Cooperation with the Economies in Transition (CCET). The CCET was initiated by the U.S. as a result of an amendment I introduced to the SEED Act. My colleagues will recall the SEED Act was designed to help the economies of Central and Eastern Europe build market economies. Well the work of the CCET was so successful, that three nations from that region--Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic--have become members of the OECD. Now, the OECD has revised its approach to helping non-member nations to reach beyond the CEE nations. For example, the OECD does a lot work with Russia. It is also closely following the Chinese economy. It has been part of the team of international organizations and governments who have been working on what to do about the economic crisis in Asia. The OECD's work is not limited to handling macroeconomic issues. It works on a number of other key economic areas. The Convention to combat Bribery and Corruption is an example of an important OECD initiative. It is also taking the lead on helping governments can best respond to the rapidly changing world of electronic commerce. It is involved with issues relating to regulatory reform, corporate governance, and sustainable development to name a few. But perhaps what really distinguishes the OECD from other international organizations is its internal reform efforts. The OECD has undertaken on its own, a significant reform effort. Specifically, it has pledged to cut its overall spending by 10% during the three year period beginning in 1996. It is well on its way toward reaching this. So far that has meant a loss of 180 staff, more than 10% of its total. It is my understanding that the subcommittee has decided to use a formula to cut the budgets of international organizations that have administrative costs above 15%. But the data it is using is based on a 1997 State Department study that only goes up to 1995. The OECD has told me that it has brought down administrative costs to about 12.4% of its budget. I agree with the committee's goal of trying to get international organizations to make necessary reforms and reductions. The era of big government ought to be over not only at home but with international organizations as well. The OECD is a good story. It has reformed on its own. My fear is that if despite all its efforts to enact cuts, the Congress calls for further arbitrary cuts of the OECD based on data that is not up-to-date, then it will undermine the reformers in the organization who share our goal of getting international organizations to be ``leaner and meaner.'' I, therefore, urge the committee and the Administration to fully fund the OECD at the request level made by the Administration. Let's show that we are willing to reward and encourage organizations like the OECD that make real reforms. Mr. LOTT addressed the Chair.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am proud to join Senator Coats in introducing this important bill. We have become accustomed in the past couple of years to hearing a great deal of positive news about crime trends in this country. Thanks to many factors, including a number of innovative crime-fighting strategies and the return of community policing, most of our cities are experiencing a decrease in violent crime. But the news on the crime front is far from all good. Indeed, as my colleague from Indiana already has noted, there still is far too much violence--and desensitization to violence--among our nation's youth. And, if what demographers tell us about the future is correct, we all should begin now to brace ourselves for what is to come as this group grows in both size and age. We can attribute much of the problem of youth crime to the environment--both local and national--in which many of our children are now being reared. For too many children, the things on which previous generations relied to support and teach them simply no longer exist. From the family unit to the local neighborhood to the surrounding community, many children have no where to turn for the support structure necessary to help bring them into adulthood with proper values, commitment to society and, most importantly of all, hope for the future. Without that support, they too often accept a falsely appealing invitation to break their bonds with society and enter a childhood of crime. If we are to combat all of this, if we are to stop youth crime, we must come up with a way to revitalize traditional support structures and to reconnect our nation's youth to our nation's communities. The bill Senator Coats and I are introducing today will, we hope, offer one step in that direction. The National Youth Crime Prevention Act would authorize $5 million for the National Center for Youth Enterprise to establish demonstration projects in eight cities, including the city of Hartford in my home state of Connecticut. In these projects, the National Center will build on success it already has had in doing precisely what I just described: working on a grassroots basis within communities to help heal those communities, and with them, their children. Mr. President, I am hopeful that with the funding provided by this bill, the National Center's demonstration projects can create model programs that can be replicated across the nation in our war against youth crime. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I want to take a few minutes today to talk about the mounting evidence of climate change. No one is saying that there will be an end to the four seasons or that the oceans are about to start boiling. But as we consider the new data, it is becoming increasing clear that we are being warned about the enormous power of humanity to affect our environment. We can either respect our surroundings and work in concert with nature, or we can pollute at our peril. Here are some of the facts from data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: June 1998 was the warmest June on record. Temperatures averaged more than 1 degree Fahrenheit above the 1880-1997 long-term mean. Temperatures over land were even more astonishing--averaging nearly one and three quarters of a degree above the long term mean, exceeding the old record by several tenths of a degree Fahrenheit. June continued an unprecedented string of record breaking temperatures. Each month this year has set new all-time record global near-surface temperatures. The period January-June 1998 was the warmest on record. Even though there was a cooling of the Central Pacific Ocean temperatures due to the end of El Nino, global ocean temperatures during June were still at record high levels. Given the high degree of persistence of ocean temperature anomalies, scientists tell us it is quite possible that during July we will experience the warmest monthly temperatures ever observed on the planet for the past 600 years. What has this trend meant for the United States? Essentially, throughout our country we have been experiencing patterns of weather extremes. The South experienced record dry conditions, with the driest April through June period on record for New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. The drought was most severe in Texas and Florida, where it adversely impacted crops, ranges and pastures, and contributed to the burning of nearly one-half million acres of Florida land. The drought and heat wave has resulted in a number of new records. For example, Amarillo Texas had 13 days in June where temperatures were over 100 F. With a stable climate, the probability of this recurring is once in 200 years, but with continued increases in greenhouse gases, the probability would change to a 1 in 6 year event. On the other hand, there have been unusually wet conditions in the northeast and parts of the midwest during June. For example, rainfalls of 5 to 22 inches were observed across most of the central and northeastern states with totals exceeding 200 percent of normal across the Ohio Valley, New England the upper Mississipi Valley. Parts of the Midwest have experienced above normal rainfall since April, and the rains frequently fell from strong to severe thunderstorms, leading to abnormally frequent episodes of tornadoes, hail, managing winds and flash floods. The National Severe Storm Prediction Center reports that 372 tornadoes were recorded during June in the country, which is nearly 200 more than average. NOAA's National Hydrologic Information Center reports 63 flood-related fatalities for 1998 so far. Numerous rainfall records have been broken. For example, more than 17 inches of rain fell during June at Blue Hill Observatory in Massachusetts, breaking all records. For the April-June period as a whole, rainfall totals were the highest in the historical record dating back to l895 in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the third highest in Tennessee, and the fourth highest in Iowa. Rivers in 17 states were near or above flood state as of July 6. Mr. President, I believe this new data is additional evidence that we must act to invest in an insurance policy to reduce the threat of global warming. President Clinton has proposed to Congress a balanced program to arrest greenhouse gases over 5 years through tax credits for energy- efficient purchases and renewable energy investments, and through new research and development programs targeted towards building, industry, transportation and electricity. It is a well-conceived plan, and I'm disappointed that the Senate bill on EPA appropriations reduces the President's request for EPA's portion of this initiative by $91 million. Unfortunately, the efforts of many here in Congress seem to be aimed at preventing the government from taking any action on climate change-- even for programs that would be good for our environment and public health regardless of whether you believe that climate change will happen. The report accompanying the House EPA appropriations bill would even prohibit EPA and the Council on Environmental Quality from ``conducting educational outreach or informational seminars on policies underlying the Kyoto Protocol'' until or unless it is ratified. Mr. President, let me take a final moment on the floor today to take some pride in the path that Connecticut's largest employer, United Technologies, is taking in this area. Some of you may have seen the full page ad in July 16's Roll Call by UT entitled, Responding to the Challenge of Climate Change. ``Our generation's challenge,'' declares the ad ``is addressing global climate change while sustaining a growing economy--a challenge that demands a serious response from government, as well as industry and the public.'' United Technologies has taken a major step forward to reduce emissions. By 2007, the company commits to cutting its energy and water consumption per dollar sales by 25 percent below 1997 levels, with approximately the same reduction in its emissions that cause climate change. I congratulate United Technologies and its president George David for this great leap forward and urge us all to accept the challenge the company has put forth.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair. I rise to join with my colleagues from Arizona and Kentucky, who have just spoken, with a certain sense of reluctance about opposing the amendment of the Senator from Indiana because of the respect I have for him, because of the thoughtful way in which he goes about matters generally and particularly matters of foreign policy. But to echo what has just been said, this is a very complicated and controversial subject, an important exercise of one of the major options that the United States has in carrying out its foreign policy. The bipartisan Senate leadership has created a task force that has been referred to. As has been said, we only had an opportunity to hold our first meeting yesterday. So I think for us to act on this quite comprehensive piece of legislation, which will dramatically alter the landscape in which the United States, Congress, can impose economic sanctions, is a rush to judgment before we have had a chance to hear from all sides, as the task force will do--a public hearing is going to occur--to reason together and then to come up with a proposal. As the Senator from Kentucky said, the end proposal may contain major parts of the amendment offered by the Senator from Indiana. But I think we would do much better and serve our national interest better if we worked this out over a period of time. There is no emergency now that I can think of, that I know of, that requires us to adopt this wholesale change in what has been a fundamental part of our foreign policy for a long time now, deriving, incidentally, from a constitutional premise of the ability, Congress' ability, to regulate commerce with other nations of the world. So I think this is premature, though probably thoughtful. But I say ``probably'' because this is a detailed amendment which I, frankly, have not been able to absorb in the time it has been in the Chamber, to make a reasoned judgment, even if there was not a task force that had been appointed on this very subject. I hear the Senator from Indiana; his intention is for its effect to be prospective, not to affect any sanctions that are in law now, and yet there are sections of this that begin ``notwithstanding any other provision of law'' and impose procedural requirements that make me wonder whether they would affect, for instance, the President's ability to impose sanctions in an emergency situation which, if we adopted this amendment, he might be limited from doing. So there are questions. And I think we should step back, acknowledge that there is a chorus that has risen rather rapidly in the last period of months questioning the extent to which we have applied sanctions, the manner in which we have done it, and listen to that chorus but not rush to act in response to it before we have had a chance, each of us, to deliberate and do what is right. Now, I want to offer one other set of thoughts here, Mr. President. Why is this so important? Well, let's all begin with the fact that most of us acknowledge, as the Senator from Kentucky said, we have not, most of us, been consistent in our votes on these matters. It is hard to be consistent in our votes on matters of sanctions, that they have been used too much. I think most of us in this Chamber would say that. That is why the leadership created the bipartisan task force, to begin to set some guidelines. But in all the criticism that we are heaping on ourselves, I think it is important not to lose sight of the value of sanctions. They are, roughly speaking, one of three options that a government has to protect its strategic interests and uphold its ideals--diplomatic, economic, and military. If I may say so--and I know people sometimes say that we are foolish to do this, that it is self-defeating--we have to consider the impact some of the sanctions have had not just on farm States. I can tell you, some of the sanctions regimes have had an effect on manufacturing, high tech and industrial, from my State. And I am not reaching judgment on the net effect. Let's just say a word for the fact that there is a part of our national character that, as Americans, is prepared to say we care so much about what is happening in another country, about the way that country is suppressing its people, or the threat that that country represents to our security because they are threatening their neighbors, who are our allies, or they are building missiles, that we are prepared, if our allies will not go along with us, to impose economic sanctions on them to affect their behavior. In an age when a lot of people question, well, all we care about is materialism, I am speaking respectfully of the impact of sanctions on people. This is in its way an expression of American idealism and principle and values. And while we may have overused it, we should not diminish its utility and its substance. Finally, Mr. President, there is a very important question to ask: Have they worked? I think the record is mixed, but that is something I would like to have our task force study and, at least as one Member, learn more about. I don't know enough about it. I know most people cite South Africa as a case where sanctions worked. Those were multilateral. More recently, sanctions we imposed on Colombia did work to alter the fundamental policy of the Government on an issue that matters to us. We have sanctions against Iraq and Libya. Well, I note that the heads of those regimes worked mightily in international diplomatic circles to get the sanctions off, so they must be having an effect on them. The same is true about the opposition of the Chinese to sanctions that we consider, and the Russians with regard to supplying components of missile parts to Iran. I know that Senator Lugar is not speaking against sanctions generally, and I appreciate that, and I share that view with him. We share that view because we understand, I hope all of us, that sanctions have value and have had effect. We are using them too much, but I think it requires more thought than we have had the opportunity to give before we vote on this amendment to change the ground rules so dramatically. So I intend to vote against the amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, I am proud to stand and join my colleagues from Arizona and Washington in voicing concerns about the spread of pornography on the Internet and the general direction in which the information superhighway is moving. Like my colleagues, I am very troubled by the story that USA Today carried this morning about a particular web site-- www.ourfirsttime.com_that is promising to broadcast a video feed of two 18-year-old high school graduates having sexual intercourse for the first time as it happens next month. As Senator McCain indicated, it may be that this site is a hoax, but it makes a statement about the Internet and the values in cyberspace which is all too real, because it shows that there are practically no stop signs on the information superhighway. The important point here is that two teenagers could quite easily decide to do this and invite every wired American child effectively to a live sex show, regardless of their age, which tells us that there are no recognizable boundaries in cyberspace, no common standards of decency or taste, or any shared sense of accountability. Anyone can do just about anything, and they often do. This is no revelation to experienced ``netizens'' who are well aware of the wide array of sites concerning bomb-making, bestiality, and many other expressions of antisocial behavior and deviancy. They know that the net, while offering incredible riches of information, education, and communication, has also managed to catch just about every form of depravity and antisocial behavior and put it on display for all the world and our children to see. Yet, for many nonwired Americans, the extremes of online perversity may be news, and these citizens, particularly the parents, have every right to be fearful about what is lurking around the net's next corner. What they will find, I am afraid, is not just more and more pornography for kids to latch on to, but less and less moral certainty, fewer bright lines of right and wrong, the kind that are critical to living in a free, decent, civil society. One of those bright lines we never used to question was our responsibility as adults to protect our children from harm, both physical and moral, which meant shielding them from violence and carefully setting sexual boundaries for them as they grow. In recent years, our commitment to this common value seems to have weakened, giving rise to a popular culture that is replete with gunplay and foreplay, with violence and public displays and comments on all forms of sexual behavior, and it teaches children the worst kind of lessons about what is acceptable. Today, unfortunately, this extraordinary development in our lives, the Internet, which has so enriched our lives in so many ways, has also become the highest tech distillation of this anything-goes mentality. Senator McCain and Senator Murray have been forceful advocates for drawing basic lines of online decency and setting basic standards of online behavior. I applaud their leadership on this front. In particular, I appreciate their efforts to promote responsible use of the Internet at schools and libraries. I hope we have a chance to consider their legislation on the floor soon. Mr. President, in the best of all worlds, which is to say what we hope this online world might be, the responsibility for drawing lines and setting standards really should fall to the leaders of the Internet community. I have said over and over again in my comments about television and video games and records, for instance, that I am extremely reluctant to resort to governmental restrictions on speech or any forms of expression and much prefer self-regulation. Also, given the sophistication of the net's underlying technology, I doubt that a legally mandated solution to the pornography problem will be as effective as we would want it to be in reaching our common goal of protecting children. It was for these reasons that I voted against the Communications Decency Act, and it was for those reasons that I recently began working with Representative Rick White of Washington State to push the Internet community to get moving on this issue. Nine days ago, we sent a letter to the major participants in last December's Online Summit expressing our concern about the industry's lack of action and calling on them to collaborate on a comprehensive plan to help parents keep their kids safe online. We made it clear that we did not want to pursue legislation but that we, along with a host of other Members of Congress from both parties, would have no choice but to vote for Government standards if the industry did not respond with an effective solution. So, in sum, Mr. President, we are still waiting for a response to our letter. My hope is that the news about the ``our first time,'' and the forcefulness of the statements we are making today, will help to focus the Internet community's attention on the seriousness of this problem and prod them to produce some tangible results. In the meantime, I hope our comments will raise the awareness of America's parents about the threat that the Internet can pose to children and encourage them to pay closer attention to their children's online activities. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am privileged to join today with my senior colleague from Connecticut, Senator Dodd, to offer an amendment to the fiscal year 1999 agriculture spending bill to correct an oversight which threatens the ability of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station to continue its important research activities. The Station has a long and proud history. It happens to be the first state agricultural experiment station in the country, dating from 1875, and also happens to be the only state agricultural experiment station not affiliated with a university. Consequently, it is not eligible to apply for competitive grant funds from the Fund for Rural America or from the Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems. The amendment we offer today makes a minor technical correction to allow the Station to compete for these grants just like every other experiment station across the country. We're not asking for any special consideration here. All we are asking for is an opportunity to compete. The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station conducts research on plant pathology, horticulture, biochemistry, genetics, as well as many other science-based research projects. It also researches important public health issues, as well, such as Lyme Disease, which is a particular problem in our region, and now, nationwide. This important research should continue, and that is why we have brought this issue to the attention of the Senate today. I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to express my strong opposition to S. 2271. On the face of this bill, it sounds like the proponents are seeking to make some ``procedural'' changes in federal court jurisdiction that do not go as far as last Congress' unsuccessful attempts to change the standards for granting compensation under the Fifth Amendment. But no one should be mistaken. This bill would dramatically change the standards--known as abstention and ripeness--which guide the resolution of claims for ``just compensation'' against local communities in local zoning disputes. The impact of these so-called procedural changes would be very significant, making it far easier to seriously undermine local land-use decisions. As a New York Times editorial stated with respect to the related House bill: ``(The bill) is a dangerous piece of work that would threaten local zoning laws, reshape time-honored principles of federalism and make Federal judges the arbiters of land-use decisions everywhere. It would be a dream come true for developers but a nightmare for rational community planning.'' I believe that conclusion would apply with equal force to the bill before us. That is why the bill is opposed by the National Governors Association, the League of Cities, the United States Conference of Mayors, the National Association of Counties, the Judicial Conference of the United States, 40 Attorneys General, major religious groups, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and a broad array of environmental and public interest groups. For my State, this type of proposal is particularly contrary to what our citizens are seeking. There is no bigger issue right now in the State than the desire to preserve open space from development. Our Governor, John Rowland, has initiated a major program to preserve open space and the State Legislature has strongly supported these efforts. Connecticut is not unique: all over the country, states and localities are making preservation of open space a top priority. This bill would seriously undermine these efforts by greatly expanding the volume of land-use litigation against local communities. Equally important, the heightened threat of litigation would significantly increase the leverage of developers over local communities in negotiations over land use issues. The existing authority of local governments to resolve local land use issues in their community would be undermined, and the ability of the public to participate in land-use decisions affecting their communities would be greatly diminished. In short, the end result of this legislation would be to undercut the ability of our nation's localities to protect zoning and land use regulations which average homeowners depend on to protect their investments. In reviewing the Committee and Minority views on the bill considered by the Committee, I was particularly struck by a comment by Senator DeWine during the markup. He stated: ``The bill would in effect, leave local land use planners with two bad options--acquiesce to developers by making lenient decisions, or do whatever they think necessary to protect the local community and then face multiple suits in Federal court without having much negotiating ability with property owners.'' Senator DeWine is right and with respect to the bill before us, too. What is striking about this bill is the direct attack it makes on the ability of local and state governments to determine what is best for their communities, despite the fact that there is no evidence that local governments are incompetent or routinely deal in bad faith with developers. Nor is there any record to support the proposition that state courts cannot deal fairly with local land use zoning disputes. Mr. President, I cannot see any reason why this Senate should pass legislation that is a wholesale attack on the ability of our localities and states to protect the values and fabric of the communities in which we live. I urge my colleagues to vote against the cloture motion.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, the distinguished leader's reference to the Constitution provides a transition for me today, and I appreciate it. Mr. President, 222 years and 6 days ago, our Founding Fathers issued what we today regard as America's birth certificate: the Declaration of Independence. We know well the significance of this date which we celebrated, once again, last weekend all across the land and the subsequent events that comprise the remarkable and unique story of our freedom. But sometimes, it seems to me, we have lost sight of the substance of the document itself, and its continued relevance to our polity. So today I would like to revisit this great statement of our American ideals to see what guidance it gives us about our current condition. Reread Jefferson's master work and you will see that it was not just the declaration of our independence, but also a declaration of our interdependence, a defining statement of the common conditions and values, the shared principles and purposes that would unite a diverse population of English and European pilgrims into a nation. The original Americans did not all come from the same land, but they all did agree that there are fundamental truths that are self-evident. They did not all hold the same religious tenets, but they did all hold an unerring faith that those inalienable rights that Jefferson enumerated in the declaration were endowed not by some benign king nor by the grace of a new government, but by their Creator. I was moved to reflect, Mr. President, upon the declaration's meaning as our latest national birth date passed last Saturday by the recent comments of two prominent contemporary political activists about the state of our values in America in 1998, comments which, when taken together, I fear show how we have lost some of the unity of our founders' national vision. The first came from Dr. James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, who for sometime now has been ringing a national alarm bell about the Nation's declining morality. It was just a few weeks ago that Dr. Dobson caused a stir by proclaiming to the national press that we are in the midst of a civil war over America's future, pitting the moral haves against the moral have-nots. Not long after, Jane Fonda gave a speech on teen pregnancy that actually echoed Dr. Dobson's martial proclamation, but from a very different perspective. Ms. Fonda attacked the views espoused by Dr. Dobson and others on abortion and sex education, accusing them of ignoring children that ``are not white, middle-class Christians'' and warned her audience that our society is in the throes of a ``holy war,'' pitting the forces of tolerance against the forces of intolerance. It would be easy to dismiss this apocalyptic talk, this talk that seems, in some words, certainly to be intemperate, as just another bout of the hyperbole that dominates so much of our political discourse these days if it were not for the accumulation of evidence suggesting that Dr. Dobson and Ms Fonda are each in their own ways on to something. Maybe, as the stark contrast and conflict of their views and the way in which they express them suggest, the values that have long held us together are coming unglued. Maybe we are on the verge of abandoning the declaration's premise of interdependence and sliding toward either individual isolation or open conflict. There is certainly a slew of public opinion polls showing that most Americans are gravely concerned about the condition of our values. There was a Gallup-USA Today survey released in March found that 49 percent of Americans believe that we are in the midst of a moral crisis. And another 41 percent said they believe we have major moral problems. What is driving these numbers, the polls suggest, is a swelling sense that our moral safety net, the interlaced norms of behavior we depend on to maintain a civil society, has become badly frayed, and that this fraying has contributed to some of our most pressing social ills, from the recent outbreak of children slaughtering children, to the ongoing epidemic of children giving birth to children, to the general coarsening of conversation, communication in our shared public places. Mr. President, then consider, if you will, the vociferous complaints of millions of American parents--I certainly hear them in Connecticut-- who feel as if they are locked in a competition with the immensely powerful, popular culture to raise their own children, a culture which more and more rejects, rather than reflects, the fundamental values we Americans have abided by for generations that have served us so well, a culture that glorifies murder, mayhem and drug abuse, promotes promiscuity and the latest perversion of the moment, denigrates authority with a numbing regularity, and wallowing in titillation and sensationalism and, it seems so often, all things scandalous. Or closer to home, here in Congress, consider what our investigation of the 1996 campaign finance scandal revealed. We live in a political system where the clear intention of laws governing campaigns are regularly violated, where we have defined political deviancy down so far that it seems the only relevant standard left is what is technically legal--which is another way of saying, ``What can we get away with in order to raise vast sums of money to run more television ads, to win more elections?''--and where hustlers cynically compare gaining access to the White House to dropping tokens into a subway turnstile. Or consider the hostile tone of the debates we often hear in this Congress about visceral, values-based issues, particularly such as abortion or homosexuality or school prayer. The rancor of these discussions, which is eagerly amplified by the news media, only reinforces the impression that values are something that divides us as Americans today rather than defining us. So there is ample evidence, I think, to suggest that something is deeply wrong with America's moral health today. Nor is it a stretch to conclude that Dr. Dobson and Ms. Fonda, together with the legions of other culture warriors who have seconded their respective convictions, raised some legitimate and consequential questions about what it is that ails us in our capacity to remedy it. Among them are, What has happened to the founding principles that undergirded the Declaration and, for that matter, the Constitution and have sustained us for generations? Have we, in some sense, taken tolerance too far? Is our commitment to a common moral code on a set of fixed points of right and wrong self-evident truths that we declared in the Declaration disintegrating? And if it is, can a house so divided against its own values stand strong for long? Mr. President, in my remarks today I will try to offer some answers that may add to our understanding of the controversial and complicated values debate, with the hope I may help to, in some small way, move it beyond the warped groove we seem to be stuck in these days. I do so convinced that America's moral Cassandras are on to something, that our Nation is in the grip of a crisis of values, that there really is a conflict at our core, and that the recent spate of school shootings and murders are a warning sign of even greater trouble ahead. But I also do so convinced that we are misdiagnosing this conflict by framing it as a civil war, and that those who do, in fact, make it harder to overcome the very divisions that they bemoan and we, as a people, must repair if we are to fix what is, indeed, broken in our society. Let me first try to say a bit more about what I mean by common values, because I know from experience that these words carry heavy baggage with them today and, as such, are often interpreted differently by different people which is, in itself, a symptom of the larger problem we face. The best reference point I can think of is the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, which are the great founding expressions of American values. What are those core principles? Equal opportunity, freedom of religion and expression, particularly individual autonomy, self-rule, personal and civic responsibility, tolerance, and a respect for the basic dignity and underlying pervasive respect for the basic dignity of human life. All of these are derived, I believe, and can be seen from the documents--the Declaration particularly--all of these are derived from our faith in God, in our belief in the existence of moral truth and a higher law, and all of which, I suggest, are essential to living and sustaining a free and democratic society. These Founding Fathers, we know, had their roots in the Judeo- Christian ethic, the Declaration's drafters, but the values are not exclusive to any one religion. In fact, over the years, they evolved into an American civic religion--principled, purposeful, moral, public, and not least of all inclusive--an American civics religion that cemented our common bonds as Americans for generations and made real the ideal of e pluribus unum--``one out of many.'' But there is a profound tension that I think we have to acknowledge in these founding values between rights and freedoms, which we, as individuals, have been endowed, as the document says, by our Creator on the one hand, and in the mutual responsibilities and common obligations we must accept to form a government capable of securing those freedoms on the other hand--in other words, the coinciding claims of independence and interdependence that Jefferson articulated so brilliantly in the Declaration. And it is in these tensions, I think, that we find the antecedents of the conflict that today engages Dr. Dobson, Ms. Fonda and so many others. It is, at its heart, not a conflict, I think, between warring camps of American citizens so much as a clash of competing fundamental American values--independence versus interdependence, the belief in moral truth versus the value of communal tolerance. It seems to me that we are not experiencing a wholesale repudiation of the basic common values I have described, but rather a shift in our national moral equilibrium in which tolerance has emerged as the more popular principle of the day. A great challenge we face in our time, given this shift, is how to sustain tolerance without inviting immorality and how to uphold moral truth without becoming intolerant. This tension is illuminated by the research that Boston University sociologist Alan Wolfe did for his recent book ``One Nation After All,'' which was based on interviews with 200 middle-class Americans from eight different communities across the country. Wolfe set out to test the conventional wisdom reflected, particularly in Dr. Dobson's comments that ``a deep divide existed between upholders of traditional cultural and moral values and those attracted to more modern themes of personal or group identity,'' end of quote from Alan Wolfe. What he found, to the surprise of many, is a high degree of agreement across ideological, theological, racial and ethnic lines on a core set of common values, on the basic questions of right and wrong that still bridge our many differences as Americans. But Wolfe also found a correspondingly high degree of reluctance to translate those privately held values into public expressions that hold others accountable to those shared standards. The common refrain Wolfe heard was that people did not want to appear intolerant and did not feel comfortable imposing their morality on their neighbors. Of course, in some ways this rise in tolerance has made us a much better country, much truer to our founding ideals of equality and opportunity. We have opened a world of new, more equal opportunities for women; for instance, working to eradicate many confining and misguided biases. We have made great progress over the last generation in fighting bigotry and discrimination against African-Americans, making more real for them after a terrible national history of inequality and persecution, the equality of opportunity the Declaration and Constitution proposed for all Americans. The same is happening with regard to our fellow Americans who are of Hispanic and Asian descent, or today who follow the faith of Islam, a group that is growing in number in our country. And we have begun to stamp out the prejudice long harbored against homosexuals and accept them as fellow citizens deserving of the same basic rights and respect as all other Americans. But the triumph of tolerance in our values in recent decades has also had a less constructive effect. The pendulum has swung so far and has become so wary of the label ``intolerant'' that I think we are increasingly unwilling, and in some cases incapable, of making moral judgments. This is evident in the evolution of public attitudes about the family, where we have gone from earlier times stigmatizing adultery, divorce, and particularly out-of-wedlock childbirth, to normalizing these behaviors, with little apparent consideration given to the damage these choices can do, particularly to children individually or to our society collectively. It is also evident in too many of our schools, where teachers and curricula avoid mentioning the word ``values'' or won't dare to instruct children in the meaning of right and wrong for fear that is too controversial or may offend some. It is particularly evident, I fear, in the influential entertainment media, where executives at multibillion-dollar conglomerates too often refuse to draw any lines that they will not cross to raise their ratings and revenues. These men and women produce a market to our children--records that find fun in cop killing, gang rape; even at the extreme, pedophilia; video games that reward young players for mowing down innocent people with weapons; homicidal hotrods and television talk shows that degrade the human spirit and delight in the exploitation of human misery and perversity. If criticized, the people who run the entertainment business often wave the first amendment around as if it were a constitutional hall pass that excuses their conduct, loathe to admit that the pollution they are dumping into the public square has much less to do with free speech than it has to do with higher profits. The media moguls are surely not the only business leaders who have suspended judgment and let the values of the market, or the inherent lack thereof, rule practically unfettered. Much as Alan Wolfe's research suggests, more and more business leaders seem to be checking their privately held values, which are strong and deep, at the office door and, by extension, at least when they are functioning in their businesses, their sense of social responsibility. As a result, it too often seems as if the bottom line is the only line and that raising consumption is a far more important priority than raising healthy children. The purest distillation of this ethos, I think, can be found in the new world of the Internet. Our shared enthusiasm for this exciting and immensely valuable new medium has, unfortunately, been tempered by the almost complete absence of boundaries or rules to guide online conduct. This is not just true of the criminals and the miscreants, the pornographers, pedophiles, and scam artists who, sadly, are taking advantage of the net's anonymity to do wrong, but also a distressing number of businesses that should know better. A recent report by the Federal Trade Commission on cyberspace privacy showed that many nationally recognized companies are using exploitive and manipulative marketing practices online to target web-surfing grade schoolers as potential customers. Specifically, an FTC survey of 212 sites aimed at kids found that 89 percent collect personally identifiable information and fewer than 10 percent provide any form of parental control over what information can be solicited. Now, one could argue that it is not fair to judge these companies by their conduct in cyberspace since it is such a new medium. But one could also argue, as I would, that the best way to gauge someone's ethics is to judge their conduct when no one is looking. Well, is anyone looking today in America? The founders of our country, the people who drafted the Declaration of Independence and signed it, believed that God was always looking--which is why they showed such deference to what they described as the Supreme Judge of the world in the Declaration of Independence and why they made religious freedom the first freedom. They knew that in this Republic that they were creating, where the power of the state was to be limited, where the state would not be all powerful, that faith in God, in a higher law, would be a necessary and powerfully constructive source of good behavior among the citizenry. Surveys done today consistently show that more than 90 percent of the American people say they believe in God. I can't think of another question we could ask on a poll in this country that would get that high a response. We exhibit levels of religiosity that are far greater than any country in the world. Yet over the last generation or two we have grown increasingly reluctant to allow that faith to be expressed in public, so much so that it seems at times we have banished religious values and religious institutions from our public policy deliberations and construct a discomfort zone for even discussing our faith in public settings, ironically making religion one of the few remaining socially acceptable targets of intolerance. If you look at the talk shows on television and see subjects that are being discussed there which go way over the line, think of how little we see similar discussions of matters of faith. In driving religion from the public square, we manage to slowly and significantly, I fear, dislodge our morality from its religious foundations and thereby have lost what I described a few moments ago as our unifying national civic religion. In some ways, the Ten Commandments became just another ``do and don't'' list that people feel free to argue with, negotiate, or ignore outright. Without the connection to a higher law, we have made it more and more difficult for people to answer the question of why it is wrong to steal, cheat, or lie, or settle conflicts with violence, or be unfaithful to one's spouse, or to be exploitive with children. We have often deprived our public life of what I believe is the best source of better behavior that the human race has, which is faith in God and a sense of personal accountability and responsibility that should go with it. The net result of the intertwined trends that I have just described-- the triumph of tolerance, the lionization of the market, the breakdown in authority, and the loss of public accountability that comes from faith--is that we have succeeded in creating a values vacuum in American life today. In this vacuum, where moral certainty fears to tread, there are fewer and fewer bright lines and more and more blurs of gray. The difficult balance of truth and tolerance, which for most of our country has sustained us, has been lost. And we are increasingly inclined to ask, ``whose values?'' when a question of morality is raised. How much does this really matter? Well, according to Harvard's Michael Sandel, the dissolution of our public morality, coupled with the lost sense of common purposes, has effectively crippled our Government's ability to resolve our most complicated issues in formulating public policy. Without a common vocabulary of values and basic moral assumptions that should form our policies and our laws, Sandel suggests that our most important public debates are doomed from the start because we lack even a shared framework for reaching agreement. Professor Sandel goes further, arguing in his recent book ``Democracy's Discontent'' that the breakdown in our common moral code has put the entire American experiment in self-government in jeopardy. Sandel says that in moving toward a value-neutral polity, we have abandoned what our colleague, Pat Moynihan, has so aptly called the ``central task'' of any society--to inculcate values and develop virtue in its citizens, its children. By turning our backs on this mission, we have depleted the public capital necessary for a democratic government to function effectively. The consequences? A public philosophy that Professor Sandel says, ``cannot secure the liberty it promises because it cannot sustain the kind of political community and civic engagement that liberty requires.'' This cause for concern was reaffirmed by an important new report released last month by the National Commission on Civic Renewal, chaired by our former colleague, Sam Nunn, and by former Education Secretary Bill Bennett, which found that we are increasingly becoming ``a Nation of spectators,'' passively disengaged from the duties and work of self-government. The commission examined 22 different trend lines, such as voter turnout, newspaper readership, and survey measurements of public trust, and determined that our civic condition has declined precipitously over the last generation. Now, these indices of our current moral and civic decline become even more rattling when we consider what is filling the values vacuum today and what that means for our future. As our traditional values transmitters have shrunk from the task, the omnipresent, powerful popular culture has stepped in to assume that vitally important role. That means that the people setting the norms of behavior in this country and the standards of right and wrong more and more are the television producers and syndicators, the movie moguls, the fashion advertisers, the record manufacturers, the software designers, and a host of other players within the electronic media-cultural complex that collectively exert a powerful hold on our consciousness. The work these people and many others are doing too often sends the worst kinds of messages. They teach our kids that the proper way to resolve a disagreement is with a fist to the face or a bullet to the brain, that sex is a form of recreational activity without consequences, and that parents exist either to be mocked or ignored. These messages are breeding more of the same values vacuum that created them in the first place, communicating to our children that standards are fungible and matters of right and wrong are negotiable at best, irrelevant at worst. Most entertainment industry leaders deny that they exert this kind of influence, but the evidence to the contrary is accumulating in such abundance that the media conglomerates, I think, are on the verge-- dangerous verge--of becoming the moral equals of the tobacco industry. Indeed, much like the link between cancer and cigarettes, the decidedly negative effects of prolonged exposure to violence on television has been proven conclusively by an overwhelming body of social science research, a conclusion embraced by the American people, yet continually disputed in public by producers of violent programming. There is also a recent, growing body of research to show a correlation between heavy viewing of sexual content and kids initiating sexual activity before they otherwise would have. A survey done by Time magazine last month showed that 29 percent of teenagers said they learned about sex mainly from television, second only to their friends as a source of knowledge, indicating that the small screen has become a big sex educator. Also, many child development experts have voiced concerns that the omnipresence of graphic sexual displays throughout the media and in advertising is helping to sexualize our children at an unhealthily early age. It was because of these reports that I sponsored legislation in the fiscal 1998 Labor-HHS appropriations bill directing the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to initiate a broad-based research initiative on the media's influence on children's sexual behavior. That is now underway. Hopefully, it will provide us a clearer understanding of the relationship. What the experts tell us has recently been corroborated by an abundance of real-life experiences. Earlier this year, in Norfolk, VA, for instance, educators within the local public schools observed that a disturbing number of children who watched Jerry Springer's fight-filled talk show were often choosing to settle their disputes, as they explained, ``like they do it on the Springer Show,'' with punches and kicks. One principal in Norfolk was so concerned that she sent home a letter with each student pleading with parents not to let them watch Springer anymore. What can we make of the horrific bullets that children are firing with frightening frequency these days in the cafeterias, hallways, classrooms, and courtyards of America's schools? I am certainly not here to claim that the media is solely to blame for this spate of student gunfire. To do so would be unfair and would ignore the factual complexity of each case. Yet, it would be a far greater folly, I think, to ignore the pattern emerging that indicates that there is a connection between these violent acts and the culture of violence enveloping our children. According to a recent report in the New York Times, which reviewed the most well-publicized cases of student violence over the last 9 months, as well as a few earlier incidents, we can conclude that each of the attackers ``seemed to be obsessed with the violent pop culture.'' We know from various press reports that the boys in Springfield, OR; Pearl, MS, and Edinboro, PA, listened regularly to the nihilistic, hateful lyrics of shock-rocker Marilyn Manson. We know from the testimony of a teacher from Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, AR, that the older of the two shooters there was a devotee of vicious gangsta rap music, and that a favorite song of his by the group Bone- Thugs-n-Harmony plays out an open-field massacre of revenge quite similar to the plan the 13-year-old and the 11-year-old accomplice executed in March. And we know in some detail of the fascination a 14- year-old in Moses Lake, WA, who mowed down three students in his algebra class 2 years ago, had with Oliver Stone's ghoulish movie, ``Natural Born Killers,'' because two friends of his told authorities that the boy had confided to them that it would be ``pretty cool'' and ``fun'' to go on a killing spree like the movie's lead characters. To truly understand this connection, though, we need to know more. I am the first to say that, though I am critical of the entertainment media. Senator Brownback and I took one step in that direction earlier this week when we convened a discussion forum on Tuesday with several leading experts, including writers, social scientists, a district attorney, and a clergyman to explore in greater detail the roots of this deeply disturbing trend of student violence. The discussion we had produced a remarkably strong consensus that, in fact, the culture is a major contributing factor, and the dissolution of the family is clearly another factor. But culture, everyone tells us, is a contributing factor. That is why I am considering legislation that would ask the Justice Department to conduct a far-reaching study to examine the relationship between media violence and juvenile crime. It is an issue that has already been deeply politicized and, in some respects, oversimplified, and before it gets any more so, we need to see what the science can objectively tell us. But at the same time, I don't think we have to wait to conclude that something is deeply wrong in our society when our children are slaughtering each other, and that the enormously attractive and stimulating images of murder and mayhem so rampant throughout the electronic media are playing some role in this American nightmare. We can and also should talk about easy access to guns too many kids enjoy, which is evidenced by a recent study showing that nearly one million kids brought a firearm to school at least once this past school year, and nearly half of them did so at least six times. And we can and should talk about the need for greater parental involvement and faster intervention by counselors and other school personnel when kids show signs they are homicidal or suicidal. But I think we have to also talk honestly about the reality that boys in many parts of the country for a long time have had easy access to guns, that some have always been spurned by girls, and some have always had emotional problems, some have had reason to be angry with teachers or fellow students. Yet, to my knowledge, we have never before in our history seen a similar series of cases where some of these young men-- boys really--work out their problems by grabbing guns and massacring their teachers and classmates. So I think we have to ask, Where do they get such an idea? Maybe it is from the contemporary culture. Before this lunacy goes any further, we must ask the entertainment industry, which, notwithstanding my criticisms, really has done so much good by enlightening our minds and touching our hearts, but also confront the harm it can do, the effect the entertainment industry can have of pushing some troubled children, particularly, over the edge, that they hear our pleas to stop raining down so much death and messages of death on our children. Thankfully, we are beginning to hear cause for hope from the corridors of American cultural power, as more and more media executives have been willing to break the silence associated with the values vacuum. Both ABC President Bob Iger and former NBC Chairman Grant Tinker have given speeches at major television conventions this year decrying the Springerization of the airwaves as ``an embarrassment to our business,'' in Iger's words, and challenged broadcasters to ``stand for something,'' in Tinker's words. And Disney Chairman Michael Eisner made a forceful statement to the American Society of Newspaper Editors this spring in which he candidly criticized those in the industry who ``hide behind the skirts of the Constitution'' to justify marketing of ``vile programs'' like Springer. These are permissible under the First Amendment,'' he said, ``but they are not desirable if we aspire to call ourselves civilized.'' He then called on his peers to make the kind of moral judgments that they and too many of us have been reluctant to consider. ``Edit we must,'' he said, ``not to stife conflict or conviction, but to eliminate debasement.'' Also encouraging is what is happening outside the cultural epicenters of New York and Hollywood. In recent months, a political consensus has begun to take shape about the dire state of our moral and civic condition, bringing together disparate voices on the left and the right to cry out for renewing fundamental values in our public life. This consensus is expressed eloquently in an important new report, ``A Call to Civil Society: Why Democracy Needs Moral Truth,'' which was issued by a diverse collection of leading academics, theologians, social activists, civic leaders and politicians, from Harvard's Cornel West to UCLA's James Q. Wilson. This report, which Senator Coats and I were privileged to play a role in shaping, is particularly significant because it reassets the central premises of the Declaration's claim of interdependence, that there are moral truths that we as a people must uphold for our experiment in self-rule to work. This emerging consensus was also evident at the National Fatherhood Summit that was held here in Washington last month. This convocation was called to highlight the crisis of father absence we are experiencing in this country, in which the number of children living without a father of any kind that has quadrupled over the last two generations, and to mobilize a response. The day-long affair was thoroughly bipartisan, with the leaders of both houses of Congress serving as honorary co-hosts and Vice President Gore delivering the key-note address, and it produced unanimity about the critical importance of fathers in the raising of children and the need to strengthen the two-parent family. For the left and the right to reach agreement on this front represents remarkable prograss. A few years ago it was not just politically incorrect but politically dangerous to talk about the primacy of the two-parent family, as Dan Quayle learned, and to emphasize the critical role fathers play in the lives of their children. To do so was considered a knock against single mothers and perhaps all women. But the Fatherhood Summit and the Call to Civil Society suggest that we have turned an important corner in the politics of the family, and reflect a common understanding that to iterate the value of involved fathers is not to denigrate the value of single mothers who are often some of the greatest heroes in our society today. Perhaps the most telling indicator of how far we have come is the recent statement that Murphy Brown herself made about the subject. Candice Bergen, the actress who played the sharp-tongued television character, recently declared that Dan Quayle ``was right'' to talk about the troubling marginalization of fathers in his infamous speech in 1992--although she still holds firm that the former Vice President was wrong in his specific criticism of Murphy Brown's choice to have a child on her own. ``It was a completely logical speech,'' Bergen said in a newspaper interview. ``Fathers are not indispensible. They are vital to a family.'' Which raises an obvious question: If Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown can find common moral ground now, why then do we continue to hear the steady beat of the culture war drums echoing throughout the political arena? No one can deny here, nor do I think there is any question that these differences do reflect the broader philosophical schism dividing parts of our society, a moral fault line that generally separates--and here is how I would describe that fault line--it generally separates the champions of tolerance like Jane Fonda from the defenders of traditional values like James Dobson. But I suspect the values vacuum that overrides all has been represented to both exaggerate and exacerbate these divisions, making the extent of our moral disagreements appear far greater than Professor Alan Wolfe's research, and several other supporting polls, actually show them to be. It seems that the less we express our morality publicly, the more trouble we have finding a common vocabulary of values, which makes it even more difficult for us to discuss civilly and constructively those issues that divide us, or to identify those principles that unite us. This communications breakdown deepens the contempt and suspicion that each side already feels for the other. The news media, I am afraid to say, which itself has been infected by that anything-goes mentality--not always, but often infected by the anything-goes mentality pervading the entertainment culture--seems too often to fan the flames of controversy. The result is not so much an honest, engaged debate about values, but a culture war echo chamber that only heightens the average citizen's distorted sense that the country is locked in a mortal moral struggle. The conflict over homosexuality's place, the place of homosexuals in our society, I think, offers a contemporary example of this tension that is very real in our lives and in our discussions and debates. Let's start with the reality that many Americans continue to believe that homosexuality is immoral and not just because the Bible tells them so. In fact, Professor Wolfe's research showed that this is one of the few areas where Americans of all religious inclinations feel so strongly that they are willing to risk the tag of intolerance to express or hold to their points of view, although most of the people he interviewed tempered their disapproval by making clear that they did not support discrimination against gay men and lesbians. It is unfair, when you think about Professor Wolfe's research, then, for anyone to automatically conclude that people who express moral reservations or even disdain about homosexuality are bigots, or to publicly attack them as hateful. These are sincerely held morally based views. Yet the suspicions and concerns of the gay community are understandable when one considers the Senate's treatment of James Hormel's nomination as Ambassador to Luxembourg, which is now being blocked by multiple holds by Members of this Chamber. If we truly believe in the claim of equality and the universal principle of fairness of the Declaration of Independence, and if we want to talk more broadly about values with true credibility in this Chamber, I think we owe Mr. Hormel a chance to be evaluated by the same standards we have applied to other nominees. We owe him a chance to be judged by his career and competence, not by his sexual orientation. We owe him a vote on this floor. If we truly hope to repair the moral breach that separates us and prevents us from confronting what most Americans agree is a crisis of values, I think we have to start by recognizing that the tone of the debate matters as much as the substance. We need to declare a cease- fire in the culture wars, to lay down our rhetorical arms, step back and look at the person across the PTA meeting room or the abortion clinic or the affirmative action rally not as the enemy, but as a fellow American, deserving of the same respect and courtesy we all expect for ourselves, who happens to have a different, deeply held point of view. We need to build on the common moral ground staked out by the call to civil society and begin to reassert in public life those fundamental values that, despite the collateral damage of the culture warring, continue to connect our incredibly diverse populace. I think the largest responsibility, the first responsibility, falls on those of us who are concerned about the weakening of our common values and the ramifications for our society. We have to acknowledge that many of our fellow citizens not only feel uncomfortable talking publicly about matters of morality, they are also skeptical of those who do. Indeed, one of the great ironies of our time is that many Americans have come to regard morality as a code word for intolerance. So our challenge today is to persuade the skeptics that it is crucial for the future of our country to rediscover those common core principles that made our democracy possible in the first place--those common core principles that were described, declared in the Declaration of Independence--and to renew their strength. We in Congress have the opportunity and the responsibility to support the search for common moral ground. From those of us who have been privileged and honored to be elected to lead this country, the American people have a right to know that we hear their anxieties about the Nation's moral future, that we are striving to reflect their core values in our work and in our lives. But more than that, we have to recognize that so much of what we aspire to in this body, by passing legislation to serve the public interest and make this a better country, will ultimately be for naught if we do not fill the values vacuum in American life and rediscover, reclaim the high ground, the common moral ground. For those reasons, I hope, in the months ahead, to return to the Senate floor, this historic Chamber that truly serves as the American people's forum, to speak with my colleagues from across this great country about different aspects of the values crisis that I have discussed today and to try to offer some specific ideas about how, together, we can better secure, ``the Safety and Happiness'' that our Declaration of Independence promises us all. I thank the Chair and my colleagues for their patience. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the distinguished occupant of the Chair. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak without time limit as in morning business.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to express my strong support for the teacher training amendment that Senator Bingaman has offered. I am proud to be his prime cosponsor, and I want to thank the Committee leadership for agreeing to accept this provision as part of the managers' amendment. The proposal we have put forward addresses an issue critical not just to the future of our public schools but to our nation as a whole--the quality of teachers who will be preparing our children to be productive 21st century citizens and to compete in the Information Age economy. There is growing evidence that many of the education schools charged with developing the next generation of teachers are failing at their fundamental mission. Our amendment seeks to focus attention on this problem, to push these seedbeds of teaching to set higher standards for their graduates, to hold them accountable when they don't, and ultimately to raise up the quality of the next generation of American teachers. To understand the importance of this problem, it is important to first put it into the context of today's education debate. We all recognize that we have many outstanding public schools and many outstanding teachers working in them, men and women who are heroes in every sense of the word, for their dedication to helping America's students to fulfill their potential and realize their dreams. But it is becoming readily apparent that there are also many schools that are not meeting our expectations, that are failing to provide many students with the academic skills they need to succeed in an increasingly knowledge-based labor market, and that in particular are denying a distressing number of inner city children any chance of escaping the poverty and hopelessness that surrounds them. We hear this over and over from parents, who tell us that they are deeply concerned about the health of our education system and who list improving our schools as their top priority. And we see this over and over in the mounting number of alarming studies and surveys that have been released recently, which taken collectively indicate that we remain a nation at risk even 15 years after that landmark report was issued. One of the most publicized and compelling warning signs came from the latest results of the TIMSS test, which showed that our 12th-graders ranked near the bottom of the world in their knowledge of math (19th out of 21 nations) and science (16th out of 21). Our advanced students did even worse, scoring dead last in physics. Another troubling indicator came from a broad Public Agenda survey of employers and college professors, the prime consumers of K-12 education in this country, which found profound dissatisfaction with the way public schools are preparing students. More than 60 percent of employers and three quarters of professors said they believe that a high school diploma is no guarantee a student has learned the basics, and nearly 7 out of 10 employers said the high school graduates they see are not ready to succeed in the workplace. With this heightened scrutiny, it is becoming clear that a big part of the problem is the caliber and performance of many of the teachers we count on to help our children meet the increasingly high standards we are setting for them. The fact is that many college students who choose to go into teaching today fall near the bottom of their peer group academically--a survey of students in 21 different fields of study found that education majors ranked 17th in their performance on the SAT. For those that go on to become secondary school teachers, a stunning member lack any expertise in their core field of instruction-- one national survey found 36 percent did not major or even minor in their main teaching subject. Also alarming is the dismal performance of many teaching candidates on state licensing and certification exams and other assessments of their qualifications. In Hawaii, for example, more than half of the 986 hires made in this past school year either failed to pass or complete certification tests that by all accounts have generous cut-off scores. In Long Island, only one in four teaching candidates in a pool of 758 could pass an English test normally given to 11th-graders. And most recently in Massachusetts, in a case that has received national media attention, 59 percent of the 1,800 candidates who took the state's first-ever certification exam flunked a literacy exam that the state board of education chairman rated as at ``about the eighth-grade level.'' The situation in Massachusetts has generated real outrage, and for good reason. Studies have shown conclusively that the quality of teaching is one of the greatest determinants of student achievement, and also that low-performing students make dramatic gains when they study with the most knowledgeable teachers. So we should be deeply troubled by the trends we are seeing, especially when we consider that the surge in student enrollment we're expected to face over the next decade will necessitate the hiring of up to 2 million new teachers. If we do not confront this problem now, we could be facing an incompetence boom in our schools that would doom our hopes of true education reform. A number of states have begun to respond to the crisis in teacher quality and reevaluate their standards for certification and the tests they use to judge subject knowledge. Texas in particular has been at the forefront of this movement, implementing a comprehensive teacher quality and accountability plan that among other things will crack down on education schools that continually churn out unqualified graduates. But this is truly a national problem that demands a national response, and the legislation we are considering today offers us a valuable opportunity to do something concrete to fix this problem. The underlying bill makes an important step in that direction through the new teacher training title it creates, which will encourage states and local school districts to: set tougher standards for their certification exams; expand efforts to recruit top-notch teachers in high-need content areas like math and science; improve their professional development programs for veteran teachers and mentoring programs for newcomers; and to create new partnerships that will draw on the expertise and resources of the business and higher education communities to produce better, more knowledgeable teachers. The amendment that Senator Bingaman and I have proposed, and that the Committee leadership graciously accepted, is meant to be a complement to that new title, in that it targets the problem of teacher quality at its source, the nation's education schools. While there are many excellent training programs interspersed throughout the country, there are also a surprising number of schools that are routinely graduating inept teaching candidates. Many of these aspiring instructors are incapable of passing even the most watered down certification or licensing exams--in fact, the pass rate at more than a few schools is below 50 percent. This situation is simply unacceptable, given the children's lives involved, and we believe our amendment will go a long way toward fixing it. Among other things, our proposal would force the states, local school districts and the general public to confront the severity of this problem. The truth is that most people don't know how poor some of these teacher training programs are, in large part because most ed schools do not disclose their pass rates as other professional schools generally do. Our amendment would change that by requiring education schools to widely publicize the results of their graduate's performance on state certification and licensing exams. It would also require each state to collect a broad array of data to produce a report card on teacher quality, which in turn would be forwarded to the Department of Education to compile a national report card, allowing us to measure for the first time the caliber of America's teaching force. But this amendment, which is comparable to a provision the House passed overwhelmingly, is not just about opening our eyes to bad programs. It's about closing the door on the worst of them, and holding those chronic underperformers accountable. Under our plan, states that receive funding under the Higher Education Act would be required to identify those teacher training programs that are failing and to then take action against them if they do not improve, including withdrawing state approval and terminating financial support. To show that we mean business at the Federal level, our amendment would disqualify any education school from participating in the Federal student aid programs if a state goes so far as to sever its ties with that program. Mr. President, we recognize that this legislation on its own will not magically turn every new teacher into Socrates. It is going to take a lot of hard work in each school district and each individual state to change the way we have been operating for many years. We are convinced that this plan will help to lay the groundwork for a new national effort to improve teacher quality, and will thereby make a significant contribution to our broader goal of lasting education reform. Our optimism has been reaffirmed by the broad bipartisan support this amendment has received here in the Senate and the House and by the welcome endorsement we received from both major teachers unions. Again, I want to express my appreciation to the bill managers for their willingness to accept our amendment, and I look forward to its passage. Thank you.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to offer my strong support for the pending amendment and for the substitute Product Liability Reform Act of 1998, S. 2236. This is a good bill, and I am proud to be one of its original co-sponsors. It is the product of incredibly hard work and tremendous dedication by Senator Rockefeller and Senator Gorton, and I want to congratulate--and thank--them and their staffs for what they have been able to achieve. I also want to thank the President for his willingness to work with us to come up with a package that now has his full support. I, frankly, would have liked a stronger bill, like the one we passed last Congress, but the President vetoed that bill. That is something that I think all those of us who support reform have to keep in mind as we move forward with this bill. Because even if it doesn't incorporate everything we wanted, this bill does offer much--together with the promise of the President's signature. The President's promise is important not just to those of us who have long supported legal reform. It also should be important to my colleagues who have not. I hope it prompts them to take a serious look at this bill--to put aside preconceived notions they may have of product liability reform, and to take a fresh look at what we have done. Many of the provisions they have complained about in the past are gone--the bill does nothing to limit joint and several liability, for example, and it does not impose any caps on punitive damages for any but the smallest of businesses.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to make a few very brief comments on the Product Liability Reform Act of 1998, which the Senate will soon be considering. I will make more lengthy remarks on this bill when we return from recess and move on to this bill, but I did not want to let the bill's introduction last night pass without comment. This bill is a good bill, and I am proud to be one of its original co-sponsors. It is the product of incredibly hard work and tremendous dedication by Senator Gorton and Senator Rockefeller, and I want to congratulate--and thank--them and their staffs for what they have been able to achieve. I also want to thank the President for his willingness to work with us to come up with a bill that now has his full support. I, frankly, would have liked a stronger bill, like the one we passed last Congress, but the President vetoed that bill. That is something that I think all those of us who support reform have to keep in mind as we move forward with this bill. Because even if it doesn't incorporate everything we wanted, this bill does offer much--together with the promise of the President's signature. The President's promise is important not just to those of us who have long supported legal reform. It also should be important to my colleagues who have not. I hope it prompts them to take a serious look at this bill--to put aside preconceived notions they may have of product liability reform, and to take a fresh look at what we have done. Mr. President, this bill offers meaningful--and fair--reform of our legal system to redress the system's abuses while at the same time protecting consumers' rights. And it contains the provisions of a bill Senator McCain and I have been working on for a couple of Congresses: the Biomaterials Access Assurance Act. The Biomaterials bill is the response to a crisis affecting more than 7 million patients annually who rely on implantable life-saving or life-enhancing medical devices--things like pacemakers, heart valves, artificial blood vessels, hydrocephalic shunts, and hip and knee joints. These patients are at risk of losing access to the devices because many suppliers are refusing to sell biomaterial device manufacturers the raw materials and component parts that are necessary to make the devices. The reason: suppliers no longer want to risk having to pay enormous legal fees to defend against product liability suits when those legal fees far exceed any profit they make from supplying the raw materials for use in implantable devices. Although not a single biomaterials supplier has ultimately been held liable so far, the actual and potential costs of defending lawsuits has caused them to leave this market. A study by Aronoff Associates found that 75 percent of suppliers surveyed were not willing to sell their raw materials to implant manufacturers under current conditions. That study predicts that unless this trend is reversed, patients whose lives depend on implantable devices may no longer have access to them. The Biomaterials title of the Product Liability bill responds to this crisis by allowing most suppliers of raw materials and component parts for implantable medical devices to gain early dismissal from lawsuits. At the same time, by allowing plaintiffs to bring those suppliers back into a lawsuit in the rare case that the other defendants are bankrupt or otherwise judgment proof, it ensures that plaintiffs won't be left without compensation for their injuries if they can prove a supplier was at fault. Mr. President, I have a summary of the bill here, and I ask unanimous consent that it be printed after this statement in the Record. I will have a lot more to say about the Biomaterials provisions and the entire bill when we return from recess. For now, let me just once again congratulate Senator Gorton, Senator Rockefeller and the President for their success in forging this compromise bill. I urge my colleagues to support it.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleagues, the original cosponsors of S. 1305, the members of the Senate Science and Technology Caucus, and Senator Breaux, as an original cosponsor of S. 2217, the Frist-Rockefeller Federal Research Investment Act. This is the next step in the effort to restore federal civilian R&D investments to their historical levels and assure American leadership in science, technology, and innovation into the 21st century. I was pleased to introduce last October, along with Senators Gramm, Bingaman, and Domenici, the National Research Investment Act of 1998, S. 1305, which now has 19 cosponsors. S. 1305 has been an important coalition-building vehicle that served to galvanize support for federal R&D programs within the Congress. It is time, now, to move forward with a new legislative instrument that can move through the committee process and onto the floor. The Frist-Rockefeller bill adds an important policy piece to the Senate effort to double federal R&D investments--based upon the work this year of the Senate Science and Technology Caucus, which I co-Chair along with Senator Frist--and adds performance-based accountability provisions to ensure the quality of programs funded with new monies. The policy piece is especially valuable because it outlines an investment strategy that can serve as a useful complement to the very important efforts of the House Science Committee in drafting a national policy for federal R&D programs. We must fund research and development at levels commensurate with their contribution to the health and welfare of our citizenry. America's research enterprise is the most competitive and productive in the world. The strength of our innovation system depends on the steady stream of discovery that flows out of our nation's universities and industrial and national laboratories. The creation of new knowledge, and the education and training that is part and parcel of the knowledge-creation process, are critical enablers of wealth creation and future economic growth. I believe that adequately funding R&D and advanced scientific and technical education are two of the most effective measures we can undertake to promote the health and prosperity of America's high-tech economy. I welcome the leadership of Senators Frist and Rockefeller. I look forward to working with them to assure the continued success of America's science and technology enterprise. I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the important work of the many people representing research and educational organizations who have labored long and hard to raise the level of understanding of those of us in Congress with respect to the contribution research makes to our national well being. They have helped to lay the groundwork for this legislation that was introduced today. Among those who have contributed to this effort are: Mike Lubell and Frances Slakey, American Physical Society; David Schutt and Melissa Kuckro, American Chemical Society; Greg Schuckman and Pete Leon, American Association of Engineering Societies; Kathy Tollerton, American Society for Engineering Education; Mike Matlack, the National Society of Professional Engineers; Raymond Paul, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers; Suzy Glucksman, American Society of Mechanical Engineers; Sam Rankin, American Mathematical Society; David Peyton, National Association of Manufacturers; Stephanie Stitzer, American Electronics Association; Taffy Kingscott, Coalition for Technology Partnerships, and the Semiconductor Industry Association; Betsy Houston, Federation of Materials Societies; Ron Kelley, Materials Research Society; Elizabeth Baldwin, Optical Society of America; Jerry Roschwalb, National Association of State Universities and Land- Grant Colleges; George Leventhal, Association of American Universities; Richard O'Grady and Jodi Kolber, American Institute of Biological Sciences; Brian Gottlieb, American Society for Microbiology; Nadine Lymn, Ecological Society of America; Peter Folger, American Geophysical Union; and Stephanie Beck, Research America!

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Yes, I will be glad to yield to my colleague.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Yes, I yield to the Senator from Michigan.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. If I may say to the Senator from Michigan, that is exactly the understanding of the impact of the amendment offered by the Senator from New Hampshire, which is that if there was a negative vote by March 31 of next year on our American involvement in Bosnia, that the only thing funds would be available for would be to withdraw our personnel.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Fine, Mr. President. The statement Senator Levin made was exactly my understanding and was what I saw in the draft. The direct effect of a negative vote next March would be to terminate funding of our operations except to withdraw. I await clarification on that, but I must say again, because I support this involvement, I support the command overseeing it, and I support the soldiers in the field, I don't want to set a date down for this kind of vote on our involvement in Bosnia. For those who are against it, they always have the option to try to eliminate funding for it through the appropriations process. I think to state a date by which we are going to vote next year on whether to remain involved in Bosnia or not hangs a sword of uncertainty in this case over the entire operation, over the American troops that are there, over our NATO allies who have said they will leave when we leave: ``We went in together, we are going out together.'' That is what I have heard them say over and over again. Again, it raises the prospect in the minds and hearts of those who are waiting to resume this conflict that they may well have the opportunity come next spring, because the U.S. Senate may vote to terminate this involvement. I do want to say about our troops there, I have had the occasion to be there now three times in the last year, as it happens: once last July in a delegation headed by Senator Lott, and the distinguished occupant of the Chair was with us; once in December, right before Christmas, when we went over with President Clinton to visit the troops; and then again in February when I went with a delegation headed by Senator McCain. One thing that struck me was the very high morale of American troops that are part of this peacemaking mission in Bosnia. I have had the opportunity as a member of the Armed Services Committee--the honor, really--to visit American soldiers in the field around the world. I must tell you that I have never met a group of American soldiers who had a better, clearer, more positive feeling about why they were somewhere around the world. It struck me as particularly interesting and encouraging, because right now they are not involved, certainly not involved in active combat. They are active, they are peacemaking, they are patrolling, but they are involved in a lot of civilian activity. They understand why they are there. One of them said to me that once a month, he went into an orphanage, somewhere around Sarajevo, as some of the troops there do, and visited some children who were orphans as a result of the war in Bosnia. He said, ``You know, when I go there, I understand why we are here. We are here to stop more children on all sides from becoming orphans; to keep people alive and to help this country to rebuild itself.'' And I fear that any of these amendments we pass here that incline toward withdrawal or state the necessity for a vote on withdrawal by a date certain puts a cloud over the mission of our personnel in Bosnia and runs the risk of diminishing the morale, understandably, of our troops there as well as those who have led them so ably. I do want to take just a moment, Mr. President, to explain, consistent with what I have said here, why I voted against the previous amendment offered by Senator Thurmond and Senator Levin, a worthy attempt to achieve consensus, and in fact it did achieve consensus since the vote was 90-5 on it. It was not an easy vote to vote against, to be one of the five. But I was concerned about it because on page 3, beginning in paragraph (2), it does say that: The President should work with NATO allies and other nations * * * participating in the NATO-led Stabilization Force to withdraw United States ground combat forces from Bosnia and Herzegovina within a reasonable period of time, consistent with the safety of those forces and the accomplishment of the Stabilization Force's military tasks. Well, it is not a direct withdrawal. It does condition it on the accomplishment of the stabilization force's military tasks, but, to me, it inclines toward withdrawal as a matter of policy. Because I am so proud of what has been accomplished as a result of the stabilization force that we have led, and because I am so committed to a withdrawal that occurs consistent with the achievement of the goals, the benchmarks that the administration and NATO have set down for this mission, I was troubled by that paragraph as well as the succeeding paragraphs which suggest the possibility that there might be a need for continued military presence there but that we should consider that it be a NATO-led force without the participation of U.S. ground combat forces. I think once we begin to do that, once we begin to separate ourselves from NATO, we begin to diminish the unity of that greatest military alliance in history and we begin to diminish our leadership of NATO. And I do not think any one of those is in our national security interest. The fact also is, as I mentioned briefly a moment ago, our NATO allies--the Brits, the French, Germans--all of them have said, ``We went in together. We're going out together. So when the United States departs from Bosnia, we're all leaving.'' So on a practical ground, I do not think we have that option. I think the option is to hang in there together, continue what has been a remarkably successful mission, and we can see the end in sight. But let us not force it. Let us let it come naturally as we achieve the benchmarks. So that is why I voted against the previous amendment No. 2975, and all the more so for the current amendment, because it puts us on a course to vote on withdrawal and sends a mixed signal. One of my favorite expressions from the Bible in cases such as this is--I am not going to quote exactly--``If the sound of the trumpet be uncertain, who will follow into battle?'' ``If the sound of the trumpet be uncertain, who will follow into battle?'' And I fear here that the sound from these amendments is uncertain and the effect will be to diminish the morale, the effectiveness, of the remarkably effective high-morale mission that American troops have carried out as part of IFOR and SFOR in Bosnia. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to oppose the amendment offered by my friend and colleague from New Hampshire. If I may respond in one sense directly to what the proponent of the amendment said about going on record, I want to make very clear that I oppose the amendment because I feel that America's involvement in the implementation force and in the stabilization force has been critically important to the return of peace to that region, has been critically important to American prestige and credibility militarily in the world, and has been critically important to the stature and force of NATO. That is about as unambivalently as I can express it. I think American involvement in Bosnia has been a remarkably successful involvement at a time when it was very important to draw a line in Europe against aggression, against genocide, and to indicate-- more than indicate, to make very clear at the end of the cold war that we were not going to stand idly by, that NATO was not going to stand back, idly by, and allow the disintegration of sections of Europe that could have led to a wider war. So I am unambivalently proud of the involvement that has occurred there, am supportive of it, and do not want to send any mixed messages. I want to oppose the Senate sending any mixed messages to our allies, to those who were previous combatants in the war in Bosnia--indeed, and most important, to our own troops there--not to send any mixed messages to any of them about the support of the Congress of the United States for the mission that our troops are performing there. Looking back to the early 1990s when this conflict broke out, it was my honor to work alongside the former majority leader, Senator Dole, first trying to urge an end to the arms embargo on the Bosnians who were being slaughtered and were the victims of genocide, and then to urge the United States to lead NATO into doing something to stop this conflict. We have been involved in three wars in Europe in this century, two world wars and one long, costly, dangerous cold war. It seemed to many of us that the lessons from those conflicts were to act as early as possible to contain just the kind of conflict that was occurring in Bosnia from spreading. And we battled, Senator Dole and I and others in both parties--battled the administration, first the Bush administration and then more directly, as the conflict in Bosnia became more desperate, the Clinton administration, to get involved, to exercise leadership, to be at least fair with the Bosnians and give them arms. Finally, the resolution to lift the arms embargo did pass in the early part of 1995, here, with bipartisan support. There was a significant Croatian offensive on the ground, which was making headway, which contributed to a changing strategic situation on the ground. And Srebrenica fell, with a disastrous loss of life which was exposed to the world. And then there were airstrikes on Serbian positions. The fear that we had was that this was an indomitable force, one that we could not stop. There were recollections of the futile attempts by the Nazis to suppress the Serbs. In this case, the power of NATO from the air had the effect of bringing the combatants to the peace table in Dayton, the State of the Presiding Officer, where a historic peace agreement was signed. This implementation force, followed by the stabilization force, in which the United States contributed troops, has been critical to implementing that Dayton agreement. Our presence there has always been less than half. The majority of the effort has been provided by our European allies and others. And, as success has been attained, the number of troops has been scaled down again. And yet it goes down again--now, I believe, below 7,000, I think maybe closer to 6,500. As a result of the effort of these troops in IFOR and then followed on by SFOR, the conflict has ended, hostilities have ended, and there is a slow, steady implementation of the Dayton peace agreement, the military and the civilian components of that. IFOR and SFOR have been charged with carrying out that agreement. The economy is up and beginning to flourish again. Elections have been held; common institutions are beginning to be developed. In the Serbian Republic, Srspka, an extraordinary turn of events has occurred as a result of, first and most important, I think, the desire of the Bosnian Serbs to have new leadership, not the leadership of indicted war criminals like Karadzic and Mladic, but to see new leadership. But that was assisted by some very aggressive, determined involvement by the SFOR, particularly by American leadership leading up right to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Wesley Clark, who has performed, in my opinion, with extraordinary skill and effectiveness in this arena of, first combat, and now peacemaking, followed by some very effective involvement by Ambassador Bob Gelbard in the political situation in Srspka, resulting in new leadership: President Plavsic now, Prime Minister Dodik, proud Serbian nationalists, but committed to the Dayton peace accord. The progress goes on. Benchmarks have been provided, civilian benchmarks have been provided to us by the administration to determine progress as we go along, all of it leading to a hopeful withdrawal and an end date. Mr. President, along the way, some mistakes have been made. The Senator from New Hampshire mentioned them; others have as well. As part of the earlier involvement, there were those in the administration who offered deadlines for withdrawal of American forces. I presume that some measure of the motivation for doing that was to reassure Congress that this involvement would be limited. But those deadlines were always, in my opinion, a mistake. They were a mistake because why would one want to state a date by which one would withdraw from an uncertain situation? Traditional policy would be in a conflict or in a peacemaking situation, one withdraws when one achieves the goals of the involvement. So the deadline was always a mistake. It was a mistake in another sense because it would send a message to those hostile to our involvement there in the first place, who want to reignite the conflict, that there is a date on which we are getting out. They could lay back and wait until NATO forces, IFOR and SFOR, including the U.S. leadership, left. I feel that the proposal here for a vote and the more indirect references in the amendment that was just voted on for withdrawal, head back in the direction of the setting of deadlines, and they have some of the same deficiencies that I think were part of the deadline which the administration set, which most all of us in the Senate condemned and see now as a mistake. My own feeling is that we are on the right course in Bosnia; that this is all moving in the right direction, both in terms of implementation of the Dayton accords and scaling back the number of American personnel who are there on the ground. I think if we now enter and say we are going to have a vote on whether to go forward, and if we don't vote to do so, in the middle of the next fiscal year, March 31, 1999, that we will withdraw, that puts a cloud over our involvement.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the President and thank my friend from Georgia. Mr. President, as the remarks from my friend from Massachusetts indicate, there is a broad and shared concern about the quality of education in our country today that is felt by every Member of this Senate. And I think the question is, What do we do about it? Can we go from that concern to making something happen that will improve the future of our children? There is no cure-all here. The way to begin is with a simple, small, but potentially significant idea such as that involved in these education savings accounts. The question is, Will we break out of our own sense that our idea is the only idea that will work and listen to those who have a different idea or get together on common ground to allow 1,000 flowers to blossom, to allow doors to open up, to allow a host of reform ideas across this country to be tried? That is exactly the spirit of the education savings account bill before us. This is not a bill that comforts the comforted. This is a bill that lightens the burden on the overburdened middle class families of this country who are struggling to enable their children to realize their dream of a better education and therefore a better life ahead of them. As the Senator from Georgia says, the income limits in this bill are exactly what they were in the bill that we all voted for. It had strong bipartisan support last year. The Joint Tax Committee analysis of this bill says that 70 percent of the tax benefit from these expanded savings accounts will go to families with annual incomes of less than $75,000. That is the middle class--working, struggling, trying to find a way to get their kids to rise on the ladder of American life, and knowing that the way to do that is with a better education. Mr. President, it is true, there are very few poor families who are going to be able to afford to take advantage of this bill. Some will. But I say to my colleagues who want to help the poorest families, support the school choice voucher scholarship bill that Senator Coats and I have put before this Senate and that we will offer as an amendment within the next month or two. This is a small step forward to encourage parents to do exactly what the President and the Secretary of Education have asked them to do, which is to get more involved in the education of their children, to save--most of the benefit of this bill will be used by parents of kids in public schools. And the truth is, because the benefits of this bill go right on through college and graduate school, most of the savings will be used for college and graduate school. Mr. President, I know the President of the United States has indicated that he will veto this bill. I appeal to him to reconsider that statement. This is a good bill that ought to be the basis of a broader agreement on how to give the parents and children and teachers and school administrators of our country some room to innovate reform and improve the quality of public education. I urge the President not to use that veto pen, but instead to ask my colleague from Georgia and others who support this bill to come up to the White House. Let us sit down and reason together and see whether we can use this bill as the basis of a broader agreement on education improvement in our country. The conference committee, the majority of whom were members of the Republican Party, took some steps in the direction of accommodation. They removed the school block grant and the testing amendments which were objectionable to most Democrats. That creates a spirit of compromise. I urge the President to respond to that by moving toward the sponsors of this bill and seeing if we can attach to it, in some fashion here legislatively, some of the school construction and reduction of school size proposals that are good proposals that the President has made. The point is, this conference report offers us an opportunity. Let's not respond to it defensively and rigidly. Let's keep in mind not the status quo, those with a vested interest in the status quo of our education system, but the millions of our children who are not receiving a good education in our schools today. Let's give them the opportunity to dream and realize their dreams. I thank my colleagues. I urge a vote for this conference report. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to honor one of America's earliest diplomats and a distinguished native of Connecticut, Joel Barlow. On June 28, in a modest ceremony, a bronze biographical tablet will be dedicated to Barlow in the churchyard of the tiny village of Zarnowiec, Poland, where Barlow died and was laid to rest in 1812. The event is organized and the tablet donated by the Joel Barlow Memorial Fund, in cooperation with the American Center of Polish Culture and DACOR, Diplomatic and Consular Officers Retired (of the U.S. State Department). Joel Barlow was born in 1754 and raised in Redding, Connecticut. His ancestors were among the earliest settlers of the region. After graduating from Yale University in 1778, he took an additional Divinity course and joined George Washington's army as a chaplain, serving for three years until the end of the Revolution. He slipped home from his army duties long enough to marry Ruth Baldwin, the sister of a Yale classmate. They married in secret because of her father's initial objection. At the close of the war in 1782, the couple moved to Hartford, where Barlow helped publish the magazine ``American Mercury,'' writing political pamphlets, satires, and poetry. He was one of a group of satirical writers, mostly Yale men, known as the ``Hartford Wits.'' At that time, he also completed and published the first version of his American verse epic, ``The Vision of Columbus.'' It is said that in this work, he was the first writer in English to use the words ``civil,'' ``civic,'' and ``civilization'' in their modern senses. He also envisioned a future international council very much like today's United Nations, dedicated to peacekeeping, cultural exchange, and development of the arts. In 1786, Barlow studied law and was admitted to the Bar. He worked as a promoter for the Scioto Land Company. In 1788, Barlow went to Paris to promote the sale of the Scioto Land, a huge tract of Ohio wilderness opened by the government for settlement, to European emigrants. A large group of bourgeois French refugees traveled to Ohio to settle in the land, but the American promoters had not made any preparations for their reception, and they met terrible privations in the wilderness. By the time Ruth joined her husband in Paris in 1790, American organizers of the Scioto company were exposed as profiteering frauds; Barlow, however, was proven innocent. The colony, called Gallipolis, survived despite the hardships, but Barlow's reputation with his countrymen had been seriously damaged. Barlow was in Paris during the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. He was a friend of Thomas Paine and other Revolutionary sympathizers, English and American. He wrote his major tract ``Advice to the Privileged Orders'' and his verse-satire ``The Conspiracy of Kings'' in London, where he and Ruth had gone to avoid the Jacobin disorders. The ``Advice'' so offended the British government that it banned the book and tried to arrest Barlow, who fled into hiding in Paris. His ``Letter to the National Convention of France,'' a proposal for a new French constitution, so impressed the Assembly delegates that in 1792, they made him an honorary citizen of the new Republic, an honor he shared with Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Paine. In the final throes of the Terror, when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed in 1793, Barlow was in southeast France helping organize the Savoy, newly captured from Italy, as a political division of the new Republic. Fluent in French, sympathetic to the Republic, and successful in business, the Barlows were popular with the reformers and intelligentsia, as well as such scientific innovators as the balloonist Montgolfier. They were also close to Robert Fulton, who arrived in France in 1797, and worked for some years on prototypes of his steamboat, torpedo boat, and other engineering projects. Fulton later did the illustrations for a large, handsome second version of Barlow's epic, heavily revised and retitled ``The Columbiad,'' published in Philadelphia in 1807. In 1796, during Washington's second term, Barlow resolved our first hostage crisis. He was sent to Algiers as consul to help with implementation of our peace treaty with that state and to secure the release of over one hundred American seamen, some of whom had been held captive by Algerian corsairs since 1785. This required great patience and diplomatic skill on his part, not to mention payment of substantial sums to local officials, but he succeeded where others had failed. He stayed on as consul for a year after the hostages were freed before returning to Paris in 1797. After 18 years abroad, the Barlows returned to America in 1805, hoping to spend the rest of their lives at home. Thomas Jefferson wanted Barlow to write an American history, and in 1807, at Jefferson's urging, the Barlows moved to a house and small estate in Washington that Barlow named Kalorama, ``beautiful view'' in Greek. However, in 1811, President James Madison appointed Barlow as Minister to France. His task was to negotiate for compensation for French damages to American shipping and to make a trade treaty. Reluctant, but always ready to serve his country, Barlow took his wife, as well as his nephew Thomas as secretary, and returned to France in 1811. Once there, however, Barlow met nothing but delays because of Napoleon's wars in Europe. Finally, the Emperor, engaged in a winter campaign against Russia, summoned Barlow to meet with him in Poland, in Wilna (now Vilnius). But the French armies were utterly defeated by the Russians and the winter. Napoleon fled south, ignoring his appointment. With Thomas, his staff, and other diplomats, Barlow fled through the freezing weather toward Germany to escape the pursuing Cossacks, missing Napoleon, who hurried straight to France. Barlow died of pneumonia in Zarnowiec, between Warsaw and Krakow, on December 24, 1812. (There is a disagreement about the date; the existing church tablet in Poland gives it as December 26.) It took his nephew more than two weeks to bring news of his death to Ruth in Paris, and it was three months before the news reached America. Joel Barlow was mourned widely in France, but back at home, President Madison was more distressed by the loss of the treaty than of the man. Perhaps this diplomat, patriot, and man of letters had stayed away for too long.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, with respect, I object.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair. I thank my friend from Virginia for the statement he has made. I know all Members of the Senate will be on notice accordingly. I take this moment to speak generally to the amendment that is before the Senate regarding China policy and the overall question before the country about China policy, as President Clinton prepares to leave for China later this week. Mr. President, this debate is nothing new. Nonetheless, it takes on a special meaning and intensity, because it happens in the week in which the President will go to China. I understand the Senator from Arkansas, who is the proponent of most of the amendments, has stated over and over again that it was not his intention that these amendments be brought up in the week in which the President was going to China, and I know that is absolutely the fact. These amendments were filed earlier. He had discussed them earlier. It just happens that here we are on this bill, and they are coming up. I hope that we will proceed, may I say, with an appropriate sense of respect for the mission that the President will carry out on all our behalf, because, though we may have different sides of this American policy towards China that we speak to on the floor, I know that we all hope and pray that the President's trip will be successful, in the sense that it will not only strengthen our bilateral relationship with China, but will do so based on honest exchange and principle, including the very principles that are the subject of some of the amendments that are before us, most particularly human rights, proliferation, which is to say security, and trade policy, and the others as well. Mr. President, this question of our relationship with China is, in some ways, the most difficult, complicated and yet the most important of our foreign and defense policies because of the size of China, the enormous changes that are occurring in China, and the significant role that China will play in the next century as a true military, economic superpower. The question of our policy is often described as a choice between engagement or nonengagement, which is to say engagement, on the one hand, or isolation and containment on the other. Well, I favor engagement. I think that the truth is when you come down to it, there are very few people here that I have heard in the Senate who really want to isolate China, or that is the stated intention of their policy. The question then becomes, I believe, not whether or not to engage; China is too big for us not to engage with; we are too sensible for us to try to isolate or contain this great country with such a long and proud history. The question then becomes, How do we engage? And do we engage in a way that works together in an honest, principled fashion to not only improve our relations--military, economic, ideological, philosophical--but to improve the lot, the plight, the lives of people in China consistent with our own principles. My fear is that some of the amendments that are offered here on this bill, and some of the statements of intention that have been made regarding American policy toward China, while they may want a form of engagement or they may acknowledge the inevitability of engagement with China, they do so in a way that is confrontational, in some sense is punitive, perhaps without justification for all the punitive qualities, and in the end will put us in a course of conflict with China which many of us feel is not necessary. That, I think, is the issue drawn by these amendments. Yes, engagement, but what kind of engagement will it be? On the other side there is an engagement that would be so devoid of honesty and principle that it would sacrifice America's national interests and our traditional values, human rights being at the top of them, which is to say it would be engagement for the sake of engagement, to yield, if you will, to the People's Republic of China in any point of conflict between us. That is as unacceptable as the policy on the other side of isolation and attempted containment. I think we have to see if we can work together here to find a common ground on which we engage honestly and consistent with our principles and interests, which is to say we have an interest--military, economic, philosophical--in engaging China in the world community, in building peaceful relationships and prosperous relationships with her, but that engagement must be honest in the sense that we do not conceal our differences, and principled in the sense that we do not yield on the principles that make us uniquely American. I hope out of the kind of debate that--though it is awkward to have it the week that the President is going to China--but I hope that out of the debate that is occurring here on these amendments, and the debate that I am sure will follow on MFN as the days and weeks go by, that we will be able to find a common ground. It is not surprising that this debate is occurring. China is not only a big country and an important country, but it is a country with a different culture and history from ours. It is a country that lived under a remarkably rigid, ideological, Communist dictatorship for a long period of time that has seen outbursts, spasmodic alterations in the political status quo, and it is different from us. So these differences about how to engage China, what to expect of China, are not surprising. And we express those in the debate that is occurring on this bill. My own strong support for the policy of engagement--honest, principled, direct engagement; one that I think is in our national interest--is premised on a conclusion which is that that policy of engagement, begun 26 years ago by President Nixon, followed by every President since of both political parties, has worked. We have had tough times, crises in the relationship--cultural revolution two decades ago; and very fresh, still stinging for us, the tragedy on Tiananmen Square a little less than a decade ago. But overall, if you look at the changes, the revolutionary changes within this country, China, I believe the facts indicate that the policy of engagement has produced a China today that is significantly different than the China of two decades ago of the cultural revolution, and one decade ago of the Tiananmen Square tragedy--an atrocity--that it is a country today that is moving in exactly the direction we would want it to, remarkably toward a market economy--and I will speak in a moment more to that--and also more in the direction of human rights than before, though, God knows, not enough. But remember, again, we are dealing with a culture and a country very different from ours, a culture and a country during communism and before so large that it lived with the constant fear of the leadership, of the disintegration of this enormous national entity, a country in which leaders have traditionally portrayed themselves as riding on the back of a tiger. But the changes have most assuredly occurred. It has been fascinating in the last month or so just to pay a little bit of extra attention to the newspaper reports from China, not so much the political reports, but what might be called feature stories in the press. And they showed a China that is dramatically different, much more like us than it was before. There was a story a while back in one of the papers about the fact that half of the villages in China have held elections. It was a concerted effort by the leadership--not unlimited; that is for sure-- but a concerted effort by the leadership of China to introduce some form of participatory electoral system in half of the villages in China, almost 500,000 villages. There was another story about a professor at a university in Beijing, a brilliant man, from the article, who had an idea for a new technology; this kind of thing that happens around America, particularly in places like Silicon Valley. It did not happen in Communist China. But he found his way to some capital, started a company, and is doing brilliantly. He is excited about his stock options. Wow. That is not one of Mao's--I do not remember stock options being in Mao's little red book. There was a different kind of story about a change in the use of the media. Remember, under Mao the television or the propaganda instruments only had one--it was all straight ahead. It was all: ``Support Mao. Support the State.'' There was a story about a gentleman who is producing the most popular sitcom on television in China. He had been, I am proud to say, in my own State of Connecticut, in Waterford at the Eugene O'Neill Theater for a period of months studying and saw ``The Cosby Show'' and was inspired by it. I take some license here, but he went back and created the Chinese version of ``Cosby,'' the most popular show in China at this point. There was an announcement of the sale of 3 million state-owned residences to people, to citizens of China, property ownership fundamental to our view of the world, not theirs; tens of thousands of State-owned enterprises about to be privatized or closed down because they are inefficient. Under the leadership I would describe as revolutionary, of the new Premier, Zhu Rongji, one of the ways in which the Communist State controls the lives and political behavior of all of its citizens is by employing all of its citizens. Once you take these tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of State-owned enterprises, privatize them, and people are not working for the State any more but working for private owners, you have the conditions for a whole new expression and experience of freedom--remarkable, remarkable changes. Let me talk about religion, because it is of real interest to me. I worked with colleagues and cosponsored one of the two bills before this body that try to put religious freedom and protection from religious persecution and discrimination at the center of our foreign policy and impose penalties on countries or at least alter our relationship with countries that don't respect the bedrock American principle of freedom of religion. Last March, Senator Mack, a colleague and dear friend from Florida, and I went to China. It happened to be Holy Week, the week before Easter. Senator Mack went to mass each day. The churches were more or less full. Let me read from a New York Times article of just less than a week ago, June 17, so you can get a flavor of the changes that are occurring, and yet the enormous changes that have not yet occurred that we need to have occurring. I will read briefly from the New York Times of June 17, an article by Eric Eckholm, from Nanjing. The article begins with a report that: New Bibles stream forth from a computerized printing press in this onetime southern capital at a rate of two and a half million a year for sale to Christians all over China. [Bibles in Chinese, of course.] * * * * * Critics in the West point to the restrictions and repression as evidence of systematic persecution, while the Government's defenders here point, instead, to the relative freedom most Christians now enjoy. Paradoxically, the rising outcry abroad comes as Christianity in China, especially evangelical Protestantism, is growing explosively. The Rev. Don Argue [many of us are privileged to know in this Chamber], recent president of the National Association of Evangelicals in the United States, says China may be experiencing ``the single greatest Revival in the history of Christianity.'' Much of that growth has occurred with official acquiescence, and though they remain a small minority in a giant country, millions of Chinese people like Zhang Linmei, a 32-year-old worshiper at St. Paul's [in Nanjing], find the same comfort in religion that Christians do anywhere, without worrying much about politics. ``I feel life is meaningless in society at large,'' Zhang said after services as she picked up her 5-year-old daughter, dressed in her finest, from Sunday school. ``This is the only reliable place in my life,'' Zhang added. ``The situation for religion is in many ways the best it's been since 1949,'' [the year of the Communist revolution] said Richard Madsen, an expert on Chinese religion at the University of California at San Diego. Though the Government still controls their growth and closely monitors their activities, he said, the official churches enjoy more autonomy [today] than [ever] in the past. Even the illegal churches--[of course, here we get to the problem] unregistered Protestant churches and openly pro- Vatican Catholic groups--function without serious trouble in many places, Dr. Madsen and others say. But those who refuse to pledge support to the Government and its apparatus of religious control, and those with unorthodox or ecstatic styles of worship, can face harsh repression. The situation is similar for other major religions here, including Buddhists and Muslims. Many believers now enjoy relative freedom, but Tibetan Buddhists who consider the Dalai Lama their leader face repression. Finally, a few more paragraphs which I think express the explosion in belief and freedom to believe, and yet the repression that still exists for those who trouble and offend particularly provincial administrators, administrators of the various Chinese provinces, or touch a vulnerable cord in the Chinese experience, which is the fear of a loyalty to a force outside of China and beyond the Government. I read again from the New York Times article of June 17 last week: Officials say Catholics now number four million, while outside researchers say the true total may be closer to 10 million, with many secretly accepting the Pope as the true head of their church. The peculiar hybrid state of Christianity here reflects the obsession of the Communist party with control: virtually any organization, whether political or social or religious, must gain party approval. The party is an officially atheist organization that asserts that religion will eventually wither away. But in a policy spelled out in the early 1980's, the Government officially guarantees freedom of religion--within prescribed boundaries including a required allegiance to the state, adherence to certain styles of worship and limits on church construction, evangelizing and the baptism of children, among other rules. Of course, those are all unacceptable to us. For those willing to accommodate, the 1990's seem a golden time. ``From our perspective, now is the best time ever for implementing the policy of religious freedom,'' said Han Wenzao, who as president of the China Christian Council is the national leader of the official Protestant church and a prime link to the Communist Government. ``The criterion should be, is the word of God being propagated or not? [And Mr. Han Wenzao says] It is and it's good.'' Well, that is a rational report, sobering and disappointing in the continuation of official sanctions, repression, anxiety about religion; and yet, clearly, the momentum is all in favor of faith. That, too, represents a maturing, a changing and development within the mind and outlook of the leadership of China. I think it is at least in part a reaction to the centrality that we have placed on religious freedom, absent persecution, in our relations with the People's Republic of China. So, I hope we will pass one of these bills that set up a system in our Government to rank and report on the state of religious freedom in all the countries of the world. Of course, I don't favor a specific action regarding the People's Republic of China, because that tends to scapegoat them and it tends to create a confrontation between us separately that is not necessary. They ought to be part of the overall policy that I hope this Senate will adopt, that Congress will adopt, before this session ends and, most particularly, to the events of this week. I hope and believe that when the President meets with Jiang Zemin, when he speaks with the people of China publicly, he will raise this question of religious persecution in a way that he couldn't do if he were not engaged and wouldn't do if we were not honestly and principally engaged; he will speak directly to why it is so important to us in America that countries with which we have normal, bilateral relations respect the right of their citizens to worship God as they choose. That was the initial, primal motivation for those who founded this country. It is right there in the first or second paragraph--first substantive paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, in the first amendment to our Constitution, the beginning of the Bill of Rights. It is what we are about. If we are not directly and principally engaged with that, if our President of the United States does not go to China, the kind of progress that I have described in which I say the glass is certainly half full and getting fuller, the opportunities for that will be lost. I want to say just a word more about national security, because these amendments, after all, are attached to the Department of Defense authorization bill, S. 2057. In a literal sense, a parliamentary sense, it seems to me personally that these amendments are not germane. That is a matter of parliamentary conclusion, which I will leave to others. But I want to say that the question of our relations with the People's Republic of China, the question of how we engage and whether we engage with the People's Republic of China is at the center of our national security policy, of our defense policy today and, even more so, in the next century. We have many important security relationships in the world, beginning with our allies in Europe, and in Japan. Our ability to manage our relationship with the People's Republic of China will, in my opinion, as much as any other relation we have, determine whether or not we will live in a world that remains secure in our time, but whether our children, and whether the pages here, as they grow to be adults, will live in a world that is secure. That is the destiny of China--with 1.2 billion people who are building a military, it is strategically located, an enormous country. Look at the situations in the world which worry us now--most recently, the explosions of atomic weapons by India and Pakistan on the Asian subcontinent. Our ability to work with them, as we have been doing since those explosions, greatly strengthens our capacity to limit the possibility that the conflict on the subcontinent will break into a worse conflict, and a nightmare would be a nuclear war. Consider where we would be today in implementing the policy on the Asian subcontinent if we were not engaged with China, if we could not work with the permanent five members of the Security Council and with China on a problem such as that. Take the Korean peninsula. We have in excess of 30,000 American soldiers there. It is probably the most heavily armed border in the world. Our ability to keep the peace there and, in fact, to begin to move beyond, in the absence of conflict, to better relations between the parties there is very important to us. It is materially helped by our engagement with China--our ability to work with the two Koreas, China, and the United States to try to create more stability and ultimately, perhaps, a reunification of the two parts of Korea. Take our interest in the Persian Gulf, in the Middle East--an interest so clearly vital to our national security that we sent a half million troops there about 7 years ago in the Persian Gulf war. China and United States will begin to have shared interests--and perhaps even if we are not engaged, a shared competition, as China grows economically--for the energy resources in the Persian Gulf area, for the oil. We have to have a good relationship with China to be able to manage that competition for energy in a way that doesn't break into conflict. More immediately, the Middle East, Persian Gulf--always a tinderbox in our time--we deeply fear the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of ballistic missiles, particularly in Iran. My sense is that the engagement with China has assisted us materially in cutting down the flow of component parts to the Iranians for the development of nuclear weapons, which is not so with missile proliferation, as far as I can tell. I hope and trust that the President will discuss that directly with the leadership of China in the summit that is to come later this week. But, again, an engagement with China offers us the prospect, in return for what China seeks in our bilateral relationship, including not only economic gain but recognition, stature, involvement in world organizations--in return for that, hopefully, we will be in a position to convince the leadership in China to cut back on any of the component parts of ballistic missiles, which they are selling to Iran, or any other countries that threaten our security, because that is part of what it means to be engaged. Incidentally, Mr. President, in this regard--and I know there are some amendments that maybe have been put forth that deal with proliferation--this Chamber, a short while ago, passed the Iran Missile Sanctions Act, also passed by the House, on its way to the President. The concern expressed about that bill had mostly to do with its impact on Russia as a major supply of component parts for missile construction in Iran. But Russia is not mentioned in that bill. That is a generic bill. That is the way we ought to deal with problems like proliferation--not to single out the Chinese, but, you know, the PRC, People's Republic of China, will be affected by that legislation, and entities within it will be deprived of doing business with the United States if there is evidence that they are contributing to the ballistic missile capacity of the Iranians. We would not have those opportunities if we were not engaged honestly and in a principled way. So I draw the conclusion that though these amendments may, in one sense, parliamentary, be ill placed on this bill, that they touch a larger issue. It is the right issue and the right point, which is that our ability to manage our relations with China in our time, and particularly as we head into the next century, will substantially affect the national security of the United States. Let us say we stopped engaging and we attempted to isolate or contain China. Think of the turmoil that would cause to our allies in Taiwan, our great, dear friends and allies in Taiwan. Think about the prospect of an independent--disengaged from the United States--People's Republic of China, growing stronger in the next century. Could our allies in that region--even our best ally, Japan--maintain as close a relationship with us when China was an emerging strength and was hostile to the United States because we attempted to contain them? I think not. So, Mr. President, I hope we can find a more constructive course to go forward with than being unnecessarily punitive about everything that happens in the People's Republic of China that doesn't please us. A lot will happen there that doesn't please us. But it is in our overriding national interest, militarily, economically, and ideologically, to continue to be engaged in an honest and direct way. In my opinion, there is ultimately no choice. And I hope we can find ways--short of some of the amendments that have been put onto this bill--to reason together and come up with common approaches because, as I said at the outset, as much as I support engagement, engagement cannot allow us to become spineless. I don't think it has been in our time. Since President Nixon, and since Tiananmen, and President Bush, and on into President Clinton, I think we have been strong and demanding. It is an appropriate role for Congress to continue to work with the administration to make sure that is the case. Finally, I will offer for the review of my colleagues, at some point, a bill I was privileged to introduce last fall, in October, with three colleagues, which constituted two Republicans and two Democrats, including myself; Senators Bob Kerrey of Nebraska; Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, and Frank Murkowski. I believe it is Senate bill 1303. It is an attempt to create a legislative expression of support for a policy of honest, direct, tough principled engagement with China, that is in our interest, and to create some bilateral entities, commissions, and working groups to work through in a demanding way--and some of them including Members of Congress --these points of conflict that we have with China to see if we cannot build on them instead of striking down and undercutting the relationship as a result of those areas in which we disagree. I hope at some point to be able to bring this bill to the floor and to either in whole or in part as an amendment ask my colleagues to consider it as an expression of a policy, but also as evidence of a particular way to express that policy to establish a United States- China trade and investment commission, to establish a bilateral energy committee, to establish a bilateral food committee, to establish a U.S. human rights commission to not only create a bilateral dialog on human rights, but for us to have an opportunity directly to speak to the Chinese about how important it is to us, but also to create an opportunity to review the Chinese, province by province, in these areas of concern to us--human rights, proliferation, trade, environment--and to use a carrot instead of a stick, and to offer to those provinces that measure up closer to our standards and ideals: OPIC insurance financing backing, clear access to Eximbank financing that is not available now but only through a Presidential waiver to move constructively, honestly, forward; an understanding that both peoples and both countries have to gain from this involvement, and particularly understanding that the people of China for whose freedom we work and pray and from whose increasing freedom we take great joy. They are the ones that I think will ultimately suffer as much as we will from a policy of isolation and containment, and will gain from a policy of direct and principled engagement. I thank my colleagues for giving me the opportunity to speak. It would be my intention on the motion to table that the Senator from Virginia has said he will put in tomorrow to vote to table, because while I think this has been a constructive debate, I don't think this is the week to be taking action in the way that some of these amendments would, and I don't favor most of the amendments as expressing the kind of policy of engagement that I think is so much in our American national interests. I thank my colleagues. I yield the floor. Mr. INHOFE addressed the Chair.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I know my friend from Arkansas has been waiting. I just want to say very briefly in response to my other friend from Arkansas, the question, I think, and we will debate this more tomorrow, is whether things are better today for the people of China than they were at the time of Tiananmen. I say much better. Are they where they ought to be? No. Absolutely not. Is it moving in the right direction as a result of our engagement? Yes.