Joseph Lieberman

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair and my colleague from Washington. I rise to support her amendment. Mr. President, once again we are here on the floor of the Senate debating opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling--a debate that began in 1985 and that has always been answered before now with a definitive ``no'' on this Senate floor. Today's debate is on a motion to strike language permitting drilling that has been placed in the budget reconciliation bill--a back-door maneuver to avoid true, unlimited debate on a decision whose consequences will echo for generations with the fracturing of a unique ecosystem. The language in the Budget Reconciliation Act fails its own two tests for success. It will not raise significant revenue for the Treasury and it will not lead us to energy security. This is both the wrong way to make this decision. And it is clearly the wrong decision to make. I strongly urge my colleagues to vote for the motion to strike. If this vote fails--and drilling is approved--then for that reason alone, I will vote against the Reconciliation bill. Let me begin by explaining why it is wrong to even be debating drilling in the Arctic Refuge in the context of this reconciliation bill. This past summer we debated and passed comprehensive energy legislation. Drilling in the Arctic Refuge was not even brought up in that thousand-page bill that we were told represented comprehensive energy policy. The fact that the Senate spent no time whatsoever debating drilling in the Arctic Refuge as part of energy legislation, but now deals with it in budget legislation, tells us everything we need to know about the motive of its proponents. They know they don't have the votes needed to authorize drilling if this proposal came to us in a proper debate in the proper context and are using this device of the reconciliation bill to get around Senate rules. Is there anyone in this Chamber who believes that the purpose of this provision is to generate revenue for the budget? That in the context of a $2.6 trillion budget, we must force the opening of a wildlife refuge to get $2 billion in new revenue over 10 years? Of course not. The real purpose of this provision is to frustrate the rules of the Senate--rules that protect the minority and the process of judicious deliberation--in order to jam through a provision through reconciliation that its proponents have been unable to pass for years. Section 401--the Arctic Refuge Title of the reconciliation bill-- flagrantly usurps the jurisdiction of the Environment and Public Works Committee, EPW. EPW has sole jurisdiction over matters relating to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the management of the National Wildlife Refuge System--as well as over the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, NEPA, and the National Wildlife Refuge Administration Act of 1966. For example, the title would virtually preclude the National Environmental Policy Act's requirement that environmental impact assessments be performed before any leases can be granted. Also, section 401 short circuits the all-important determination that the Fish and Wildlife Service is required by the National Wildlife Refuge Administration Act to make that drilling is compatible with the purposes of the refuge. I ask my colleagues to consider that if this procedural sleight-of- hand can be used to stymie open and unlimited debate on drilling in the Arctic Refuge, what other areas now closed for drilling will be opened up under the pretext of generating Federal revenue? The Great Lakes? Our coasts? And what will we get in return for putting this fragile Arctic wilderness area at risk? Will we achieve energy independence? No we certainly won't. The Energy Information Agency tells us that peak production in the Arctic Refuge will be fewer than 1 million barrels per day. And that peak will not be reached until 2025 at the earliest. At that point, if we continue our current oil-consumption trends, the refuge will be contributing no more than 4 percent of U.S. oil consumption. Meanwhile, 70 percent of our oil needs will be met by imports, with our national security and economy remaining every bit as vulnerable to the economic dynamics and geopolitics of the global oil market as it is today. If we were serious about facing up to the reality of our energy security challenge, we would be committing ourselves to changing the trend of ever-rising oil consumption. That is why I will shortly be introducing--with colleagues from both sides of the aisle--legislation that will lower our national dependence on oil by reinventing our transportation system from the refinery to the tailpipe by using hybrid vehicles and homegrown biofuels and electricity to power our vehicles. Destroying perhaps one of the greatest wilderness areas in the United States under the twin but barren banners of energy security and Federal revenue is unacceptable when you consider what is at stake. On February 14 of this year, 1,000 leading U.S. and Canadian scientists called on President Bush to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling and to ``support permanent protection of the coastal plain's significant wildlife and wilderness values.'' The signers categorically rejected the notion that the impacts of drilling could be confined to a limited footprint, as pro-drilling forces claim. The effects of oil wells, pipelines, roads, airports, housing, processing plants, gravel mines, air pollution, industrial noise, seismic exploration and exploratory drilling would radiate across the entire coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge. Given those inevitable environmental intrusions, is it any wonder, then, that the authors of this measure included provisions that would stymie the environmental protections that would normally apply under the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Wildlife Administration Act? And because they have all but eliminated these protections, drilling will go forward with virtually none of the environmental protections that the public expects to be in place for such activity on other federal lands. It just makes no sense to destroy the Arctic Refuge for oil that won't lower prices to our consumers or give us true energy security. The mark of greatness in a generation lies not just in what it builds for itself, but also in what it preserves for the generations to come. Drilling in the Arctic for some short-term convenience in our time, will shortchange the legacy we should be building for the time of our children. I urge my colleagues to vote to adopt the motion to strike. I believe this is both the wrong way to make this decision, and it is clearly the wrong decision to make. I urge my colleagues to vote for the motion to strike. I say for myself, if the vote fails, for that reason alone I will vote against the reconciliation bill. I want to add this one procedural point to the very strong arguments I think my colleagues have made in support of the motion to strike and about why this is an end run on the rules, and why this is not about a budget matter. This will raise a few billion dollars over 10 years; whereas, the annual budget of the United States projected for the next fiscal year is $2.6 trillion. This is about drilling in the Arctic, not about the budget, and it doesn't belong here. I want to make this additional procedural point, which I think strikes at the heart of some of the key provisions in this section. Section 401--which is the Arctic Refuge title--flagrantly usurps the jurisdiction of the Environment and Public Works Committee in contravention of the rules. The EPW Committee has sole jurisdiction over matters relating to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the management of the National Wildlife Refuge System, as well as over the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and National Wildlife Refuge Administration Act of 1960. For example, the title that would be struck would greatly limit to the point of preclusion the National Environmental Policy Act requirement that environmental impact assessments be performed before any leasing can be granted. Also, section 401 shortcircuits the all-important determination that the Fish and Wildlife Service is required by the National Wildlife Refuge Administration Act to make sure the drilling is compatible for purposes of the Refuge. I intend, at the proper time, to raise these procedural questions. I thank my colleagues for giving me these few minutes. This is a critical debate that I have been involved in since I came in 1989. I regret that it is happening this way. It is happening this way because the votes are not there in a full debate and in the parliamentary-appropriate context of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Jeffords' staff member, Brian Keefe, be granted floor privileges during the debate on the Cantwell Arctic Refuge amendment. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Senator Specter and Senator Harkin and their staff on moving the avian influenza amendment forward in a bipartisan manner. They have done a tremendous job on coming to an agreement. Senator Harkin and Senator Specter's amendment includes my proposal for funding for migratory wild bird surveillance which I would like to take a moment to outline more thoroughly. As we all know, the potential for an influenza pandemic is increasing as the H5N1 virus has now moved swiftly across Asia, Russia, Turkey and now the EU, killing millions of domesticated poultry and over 60 humans to date. History and science tell us that wild birds are the ones that spread deadly avian influenza viruses. It happened before during the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed an estimated 40 million people worldwide. We must act now to ensure that this does not happen again. We have the tools. We just need to increase and strengthen them. My proposal seeks to provide funds supporting an early warning system for global influenza that starts with wild birds. This is a major gap in our flu tracking system. The proposed warning system would track and monitor avian viruses and their mutations carried by wild birds by expanding the Centers of Disease Control's wild bird surveillance efforts which are currently not extensive. The CDC's efforts must be tied together with the network of global organizations, including nongovernmental organizations that have the capacity to expand and comprehensively collect and disseminate these tracking data from around the world. Just as we track hurricanes as they begin as a tropical storm, we must track wild birds and the viral storms they carry over oceans and continents and share that data with the world. The purposes of my proposal are to support efforts: to more rapidly and efficiently detect, verify, and report on the presence of H5N1 and other highly pathogenic avian influenzas and infectious diseases in migratory wild birds and waterfowl; to use information on viral strains found in wild birds to better delineate any mutations in the virus; to use information on when and where highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses and other infectious diseases are identified in migratory birds to better guide preparedness in the U.S. and around the world, to carry out a comprehensive migratory bird surveillance program that will provide early warning to specific areas to enhance poultry biosecurity and surveillance, and other human protective measures as necessary; to create an open access database where information on highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses and other infectious diseases identified in migratory birds are shared in as close to real time as possible; to protect the health and safety of U.S. citizens and officials traveling and living abroad; and to protect the economic interests of the U.S. and its partners from threats to health, agriculture, and natural resources. It is the intent of my proposal that within 90 days of the appropriation, the Centers for Disease Control's influenza branch enter into a contract with one or more nongovernmental organizations chartered in the U.S. with extensive global wildlife health experience in tracking disease in wild birds, including free-ranging, captive, and wild bird species, with a proven ability in identifying avian influenza in birds, and with accredited zoological facilities in the U.S. The influenza branch and the contracting nongovernmental organization(s) will collaborate with appropriate Federal and State agency partners, including the Department of Agriculture acting through the Agricultural Research Service and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; various U.S. State wildlife agencies, multilateral agency partners, including the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, the Office International des Epizooties, and the World Conservation Union; conservation organizations with expertise in international and domestic bird monitoring surveillance; accredited colleges of veterinary medicine; and other national and international partners, as necessary. The contracting nongovernmental organization, in coordination with the influenza branch of the CDC, shall manage an international surveillance program in which all partners named above are encouraged: to monitor and test for the presence or arrival of avian influenza and other significant avian pathogens at important bird areas around the world and in marketplaces with intense trade in wild birds; to use trained professionals to collect samples and other data and send samples to appropriate diagnostic centers; to use the international surveillance network to conduct disease surveillance activities on migratory birds worldwide, domestic and international field investigations on migratory birds, training and capacity-building activities related to the relationships between human health, domestic and animal health, and wildlife health, and research on methods and approaches for the detection and enhanced surveillance of highly pathogenic avian influenza and other infectious diseases in migratory birds; and to send samples for avian influenza testing to certified laboratories that meet internationally established methods standards. These certified laboratories are located at the influenza branch of the CDC, the Office International des Epizooties, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the National Veterinary Services Laboratory of the Department of Agriculture, and the Agricultural Research Service. These findings should be reported back to the contracting nongovernmental organization and the international surveillance network partners. The CDC's influenza branch and the eligible organization, in coordination with the partners of the international surveillance network, will use surveillance reports and other formal and informal sources of information to identify and investigate local disease outbreaks of avian influenza; will develop a long-term baseline of regional data related to highly pathogenic avian influenza and pathogens in migratory birds for analysis between and across sites to create a system to identify when and where outbreaks might occur and paths of dispersal; will provide technical assistance for disease prevention and control programs based on a scientific understanding of the relationships between wildlife health, animal health, and human health; will provide analytic disease findings regularly to the influenza branch of the CDC and other international network surveillance partners to prevent and combat diseases; and will conduct other activities as necessary to support the international network and its partners. The surveillance network will be coordinated from the headquarters of the contracting nongovernmental organization. The CDC's influenza branch and the contracting nongovernmental organization, manage, map, and make available an online database containing all the results and information gathered through the international surveillance network. The database shall provide geographic data on wild bird populations and the movements of the populations. The laboratory test results will be available for viewing by any Federal agency, foreign country, multilateral institution, organization, or individual. The CDC's influenza branch and the contracting nongovernmental organization, will request accredited colleges of veterinary medicine and other partners of the international surveillance network to monitor important bird areas around the world and to test for the presence or arrival of avian influenza and other significant avian pathogens of zoonotic concern. Expanding the CDC's efforts by supporting an international surveillance network, allows us to focus limited resources and prepare communities in the infected wild birds' flight path. If we have this information, our menu of interventions can include: providing available antivirals or vaccines to those at-risk, protecting poultry farms, preparing hospitals to take on thousands of patients, and even keeping people indoors. By tracking wild birds we may even be able to produce an avian flu vaccine faster by understanding which influenza virus is the killer. The current H5N1 virus is not the one that could cause widespread devastation to humans because it hasn't led to sustained human to human transfer, yet. This amendment provides $10,000,000 in 2006 to the CDC to work with U.S. and international partners to strengthen a global wild bird surveillance system. Ten million dollars is a small sum in comparison to the tens of billions of dollars for vaccine research and antiviral stockpiling. Vaccines and stockpiling are our current focus and we should be thinking about them, but it is equally important to think about being prepared for outbreaks and trying to keep a pandemic from ever hitting. This funding would enable the CDC's influenza branch to contract with one or more expert organizations with the capacity to quickly put into place the tracking and analytical systems we need. As we speak, some countries and organizations have started to collect information in the U.S. and the world. But while we are collecting data, they are not being stored in any kind of organized manner to make it available for easy study and response. To summarize, we have a major gap now in avian flu preparedness. We are not adequately tracking the wild birds that will be the flu transfer agents. We need to have a stronger and much better tracking system right now. Second, we have to do a much better job collecting and analyzing the information we have and will get so we can prepare our communities. I thank Senators Harkin and Specter and their staff for their work preparing our Nation for a possible pandemic. My proposal, which they have incorporated into their amendment, is relatively small but addresses a big gap that no one is thinking about. It's the big bird in the room.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Addressing my distinguished colleagues from Pennsylvania and Iowa, the subcommittee Chairman and ranking member, I wanted to talk with you about the need to study further the issue of thimerosal in vaccines and whether there is any association with autism and other autism spectrum disorders. As you know, autism is a neuro- developmental disorder characterized by severe impairments in language development and socialization. The American Academy of Pediatrics, AAP, says that currently 1 in 166 children has autism or an autism spectrum disorder. Some in the autism community attribute this rise to changes in the vaccine schedule which began in 1990. Three of the four vaccines between 1990 and 2000 given to American children at the 2,4, and 6 month doctor visit contained thimerosal which is a vaccine preservative that is 50 percent mercury by weight. Mercury of course is a known neurotoxin.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I believe that we must at least consider an association between thimerosal exposure and autism. I understand the rate of autism has risen perhaps 800 percent since 1990 and although there could be a number of reasons including better diagnostics, this coincided with an increased exposure to thimerosal in vaccines, which again is 50 percent mercury by weight. I have talked to Director Gerberding at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, which is our Nation's premier public health organization. She said that there is room for further study. I note that thimerosal is still in our influenza vaccine. And we want people to get that vaccine.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Under the Senator's distinguished leadership, the committee has increased the NIH budget to 29.4 billion dollars, an increase of over $1 billion from last year. I applaud those efforts. Accordingly, under his leadership the budget of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NIEHS, has increased from $644 to $667 million. I would ask that the NIEHS lend its expertise in heavy metal toxicity and to work in cooperation with the CDC to study, using respected expert independent researchers, whether there is any association between thimerosal and autism. I note that we now have a Vaccine Safety Datalink, VSD, a computerized CDC database that has followed 7 million vaccinated children in 7 managed care organizations throughout the United States from 1990 on to see if they develop diseases of any type, including neuro-developmental disorders. Some experts suggest this database could provide answers regarding the thimerosal-autism link. The Institute of Medicine, IOM, regards the VSD as a unique data base with which the public should become familiar. I would expect that the VSD would be used in further studies. My staff and I have talked with two former NIEHS directors. They support additional effort to study the association between thimerosal and autism. They assure me that NIEHS would be able to administer a grant for carefully selected expert independent researchers to join in the study of the VSD with the CDC. And because transparency of research has been an issue in this debate, NIEHS cooperating with CDC would be able to put together a panel of toxicologists, doctors, expert representatives from the autism community, and public health advocates to advise the study. They did this with the NIEHS' Breast Cancer Research Centers Program. That is, they involved the affected community.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. If this issue is resolved it will be because all sides are comfortable with the science and epidemiology of thimerosal and autism. The science and epidemiology of thimerosal and autism is not clear up to this point. Can I have assurance that the chairman and ranking member will work to insert report language in conference that urges NIEHS to fund collaborative studies on the VSD between outside researchers and the CDC?

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Senators.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce, along with Senators Brownback, Clinton, Santorum, and Durbin, the Children and Media Research Advancement Act, or CAMRA Act. This bill is essentially identical to S. 579, which we introduced earlier this year, except that it houses our program within the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) rather than in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. We have reviewed the programs and activities within CDC that address issues relating to media's impact on children, and we believe that CDC is a logical home for our legislation. There is an urgent need to establish a Federal role for targeting research on the impact of media on children. From the cradle to the grave, our children now live and develop in a world of media--a world that is increasingly digital, and a world where access is at their fingertips. This emerging digital world is well known to our children, but its effects on their development are not well understood. Young people today are spending an average of 6 and a half hours with media each day. For those who are under age 6, two hours of exposure to screen media each day is common, even for those who are under age two. That is about as much time as children under age 6 spend playing outdoors, and it is much more time than they spend reading or being read to by their parents. How does this investment of time affect children's physical development, their cognitive development, or their moral values? Unfortunately, we still have very limited information about how media, particularly the newer interactive media, affect children's development. In fact, we have not charged any Federal agency with ensuring an ongoing funding base to establish a coherent research agenda about the impact of media on children's lives. This lack of a coordinated government-sponsored effort to understand the effects of media on children's development is truly an oversight on our part as the potential payoffs for this kind of knowledge are enormous. Consider our current national health crisis of childhood obesity. The number of U.S. children and teenagers who are overweight has more than tripled from the 1960's through 2002. We think that media exposure is partly the cause of this epidemic. Is it? Is time spent viewing screens and its accompanying sedentary life styles contributing to childhood and adolescent obesity? Or is the constant bombardment of advertisements for sugar-coated cereals, snack foods, and candy that pervade children's television advertisements the culprit? How do the newer online forms of ``stealth marketing'', such as advergaming where food products are embedded in computer games, affect children's and adolescents' purchasing patterns? What will happen when pop-up advertisements begin to appear on children's cell phones that specifically target them for the junk food that they like best at a place where that food is easily obtainable? The answer to the obesity and media question is complex. A committee at the National Academy of Sciences is currently charged with studying the link between media advertising and childhood obesity. Will the National Academy of Sciences panel have the data they need to answer this important question? A definitive answer has the potential to save a considerable amount of money in other areas of our budget. For example, child health care costs that are linked to childhood obesity issues could be reduced by understanding and altering media diets. Or take the Columbine incident. After two adolescent boys shot and killed some of their teachers, classmates, and then turned their guns on themselves at Columbine High School, we asked ourselves if media played some role in this tragedy. Did these boys learn to kill in part from playing first-person shooter video games like Doom where they acted as a killer? Were they rehearsing criminal activities when playing this game? We looked to the research community for an answer. In the violence and media area, Congress had passed legislation in the past so that research was conducted about the relationship between media violence and childhood aggression, and as a result, we knew more. Even though much of this data base was older and involved the link between exposure to violent television programs and childhood aggression, some answers were forthcoming about how the Columbine tragedy could have taken place. Even so, there is still a considerable amount of speculation about the more complex questions. Why did these particular boys, for example, pull the trigger in real life while others who played Doom confine their aggressive acts to the gaming context? We need to be able to answer questions about which children under what circumstances will translate game playing into real-life lethal actions. Investing in media research could potentially reduce our budgets associated with adolescent crime and delinquency as well as reduce real-life human misery and suffering. Many of us believe that our children are becoming increasingly materialistic. Does exposure to commercial advertising and the ``good life'' experienced by media characters partly explain materialistic attitudes? We're not sure. Recent research using brain-mapping techniques finds that an adult who sees images of desired products demonstrates patterns of brain activation that are typically associated with reaching out with a hand. How does repeatedly seeing attractive products affect our children and their developing brains? What will happen when our children will be able to click on their television screen and go directly to sites that advertise the products that they see in their favorite programs? Or use their cell phones to pay for products that they want in the immediate environment? Exactly what kind of values are we cultivating in our children, and what role does exposure to media content play in the development of those values? A report linked very early television viewing with later symptoms that are common in children who have attention deficit disorders. However, we don't know the direction of the relationship. Does television viewing cause attention deficits, or do children who have attention deficits find television viewing experiences more engaging than children who don't have attention problems? Or do parents whose children have difficulty sustaining attention let them watch more television to encourage more sitting and less hyperactive behavior? How will Internet experiences, particularly those where children move rapidly across different windows, influence attention patterns and attention problems? Once again, we don't know the answer. If early television exposure does disrupt the development of children's attention patterns, resulting in their placement in special education programs, actions taken to reduce screen exposure during the early years could lead to subsequent reductions in children's need for special education classes, thereby saving money while fostering children's development in positive ways. We want no child left behind in the 21st century. Many of us believe that time spent with computers s good for our children, teaching them the skills that they will need for success in the 21st century. Are we right? How is time spent with computers different from time spent with television? What are the underlying mechanisms that facilitate or disrupt children's learning from these varying media? Can academic development be fostered by the use interactive online programs designed to teach as they entertain? In the first six years of life, Caucasian more so than African American or Latino children have Internet access from their homes. Can our newer interactive media help ensure that no child is left behind or will disparities in access result in leaving some behind and not others? The questions bout how media affect the development of our children are clearly important, abundant, and complex. Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are in short supply. Such gaps in our knowledge base limit our ability to make informed decisions about media policy. We know that media are important. Over the years, we have held numerous hearings in these chambers about how exposure to media violence affects childhood aggression. We passed legislation to maximize the documented benefits of exposure to educational media, such as the Children's Television Act which requires broadcasters to provide educational and informational television programs for children. Can we foster children's moral values when they are exposed to prosocial programs that foster helping, sharing, and cooperating like those that have come into being as a result of the Children's Television Act? We acted to protect our children from unfair commercial practices by passing the Children Online Privacy Protection Act which provides safeguards from exploitation for our youth as they explore the Internet, a popular pastime for them. Yet the Internet has provided new ways to reach children with marketing that we barely know is taking place, making our ability to protect our children all the more difficult. We worry about our children's inadvertent exposure to online pornography--about how that kind of exposure may undermine their moral values and standards of decency. In these halls of Congress, we acted to protect our children by passing the Communications Decency Act, the Child Online Protection Act, and the Children's Internet Protection Act to shield children from exposure to sexually-explicit online content that is deemed harmful to minors. While we all agree that we need to protect our children from online pornography, we know very little about how to address even the most practical of questions such as how to prevent children from falling prey to adult strangers who approach them online. There are so many areas in which our understanding is preliminary at best, particularly in those areas that involve the effects of our newer digital media In order to ensure that we are doing our very best for our children, the behavioral and health recommendations and public policy decisions we make should be based on objective behavioral, social, and scientific research. Yet no Federal research agency has responsibility for oveseeing and setting a coherent media research agenda that can guide these policy decisions. Instead, federal agencies fund media research in a piecemeal fashion, resulting in a patch work quilt of findings. We can do better than that. The bill we are introducing today would remedy this problem. The CAMRA Act will provide an overarching view of media effects by establishing a program devoted to Children and Media within the Centers for Disease Control. This program of research, to be vetted by the National Academy of Sciences, will fund and energize a coherent program of research that illuminates the role of media in children's cognitive, social, emotional, physical, and behavioral development. The research will cover all forms of electronic media, including television, movies, DVDs, interactive video games, cell phones, and the Internet, and will encourage research involving children of all ages--even babies and toddlers. The bill also calls for a report to Congress about the effectiveness of this research program in filling this void in our knowledge base. In order to accomplish these goals, we are authorizing $90 million dollars to be phased in gradually across the next five years. The cost to our budget is minimal and can well result in significant savings in other budget areas. Our Nation values the positive, healthy development of our children. Our children live in the information age, and our country has one of the most powerful and sophisticated information technology systems in the world. While this system entertains them, it is not harmless entertainment. Media have the potential to facilitate the healthy growth of our children. They also have the potential to harm. We have a stake in finding out exactly what that role is. We have a responsibility to take action. Access to the knowledge that we need for informed decision-making requires us to make an investment: an investment in research, an investment in and for our children, an investment in our collective future. The benefits to our youth and our nation's families are immeasurable. By passing the Children and Media Research Advancement Act, we can advance knowledge and enhance the constructive effects of media while minimizing the negative ones. We can make future media policies that are grounded in a solid knowledge base. We can be proactive, rather than reactive. In so doing, we build a better nation for our youth, fostering the kinds of values that are the backbone of this great nation of ours, and we create a better foundation to guide future media policies about the digital experiences that pervade our children's daily lives. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce, along with Senators Brownback, Clinton, Santorum, and Durbin, the Children and Media Research Advancement Act, or CAMRA Act. This bill is essentially identical to S. 579, which we introduced earlier this year, except that it houses our program within the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) rather than in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. We have reviewed the programs and activities within CDC that address issues relating to media's impact on children, and we believe that CDC is a logical home for our legislation. There is an urgent need to establish a Federal role for targeting research on the impact of media on children. From the cradle to the grave, our children now live and develop in a world of media--a world that is increasingly digital, and a world where access is at their fingertips. This emerging digital world is well known to our children, but its effects on their development are not well understood. Young people today are spending an average of 6 and a half hours with media each day. For those who are under age 6, two hours of exposure to screen media each day is common, even for those who are under age two. That is about as much time as children under age 6 spend playing outdoors, and it is much more time than they spend reading or being read to by their parents. How does this investment of time affect children's physical development, their cognitive development, or their moral values? Unfortunately, we still have very limited information about how media, particularly the newer interactive media, affect children's development. In fact, we have not charged any Federal agency with ensuring an ongoing funding base to establish a coherent research agenda about the impact of media on children's lives. This lack of a coordinated government-sponsored effort to understand the effects of media on children's development is truly an oversight on our part as the potential payoffs for this kind of knowledge are enormous. Consider our current national health crisis of childhood obesity. The number of U.S. children and teenagers who are overweight has more than tripled from the 1960's through 2002. We think that media exposure is partly the cause of this epidemic. Is it? Is time spent viewing screens and its accompanying sedentary life styles contributing to childhood and adolescent obesity? Or is the constant bombardment of advertisements for sugar-coated cereals, snack foods, and candy that pervade children's television advertisements the culprit? How do the newer online forms of ``stealth marketing'', such as advergaming where food products are embedded in computer games, affect children's and adolescents' purchasing patterns? What will happen when pop-up advertisements begin to appear on children's cell phones that specifically target them for the junk food that they like best at a place where that food is easily obtainable? The answer to the obesity and media question is complex. A committee at the National Academy of Sciences is currently charged with studying the link between media advertising and childhood obesity. Will the National Academy of Sciences panel have the data they need to answer this important question? A definitive answer has the potential to save a considerable amount of money in other areas of our budget. For example, child health care costs that are linked to childhood obesity issues could be reduced by understanding and altering media diets. Or take the Columbine incident. After two adolescent boys shot and killed some of their teachers, classmates, and then turned their guns on themselves at Columbine High School, we asked ourselves if media played some role in this tragedy. Did these boys learn to kill in part from playing first-person shooter video games like Doom where they acted as a killer? Were they rehearsing criminal activities when playing this game? We looked to the research community for an answer. In the violence and media area, Congress had passed legislation in the past so that research was conducted about the relationship between media violence and childhood aggression, and as a result, we knew more. Even though much of this data base was older and involved the link between exposure to violent television programs and childhood aggression, some answers were forthcoming about how the Columbine tragedy could have taken place. Even so, there is still a considerable amount of speculation about the more complex questions. Why did these particular boys, for example, pull the trigger in real life while others who played Doom confine their aggressive acts to the gaming context? We need to be able to answer questions about which children under what circumstances will translate game playing into real-life lethal actions. Investing in media research could potentially reduce our budgets associated with adolescent crime and delinquency as well as reduce real-life human misery and suffering. Many of us believe that our children are becoming increasingly materialistic. Does exposure to commercial advertising and the ``good life'' experienced by media characters partly explain materialistic attitudes? We're not sure. Recent research using brain-mapping techniques finds that an adult who sees images of desired products demonstrates patterns of brain activation that are typically associated with reaching out with a hand. How does repeatedly seeing attractive products affect our children and their developing brains? What will happen when our children will be able to click on their television screen and go directly to sites that advertise the products that they see in their favorite programs? Or use their cell phones to pay for products that they want in the immediate environment? Exactly what kind of values are we cultivating in our children, and what role does exposure to media content play in the development of those values? A report linked very early television viewing with later symptoms that are common in children who have attention deficit disorders. However, we don't know the direction of the relationship. Does television viewing cause attention deficits, or do children who have attention deficits find television viewing experiences more engaging than children who don't have attention problems? Or do parents whose children have difficulty sustaining attention let them watch more television to encourage more sitting and less hyperactive behavior? How will Internet experiences, particularly those where children move rapidly across different windows, influence attention patterns and attention problems? Once again, we don't know the answer. If early television exposure does disrupt the development of children's attention patterns, resulting in their placement in special education programs, actions taken to reduce screen exposure during the early years could lead to subsequent reductions in children's need for special education classes, thereby saving money while fostering children's development in positive ways. We want no child left behind in the 21st century. Many of us believe that time spent with computers s good for our children, teaching them the skills that they will need for success in the 21st century. Are we right? How is time spent with computers different from time spent with television? What are the underlying mechanisms that facilitate or disrupt children's learning from these varying media? Can academic development be fostered by the use interactive online programs designed to teach as they entertain? In the first six years of life, Caucasian more so than African American or Latino children have Internet access from their homes. Can our newer interactive media help ensure that no child is left behind or will disparities in access result in leaving some behind and not others? The questions bout how media affect the development of our children are clearly important, abundant, and complex. Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are in short supply. Such gaps in our knowledge base limit our ability to make informed decisions about media policy. We know that media are important. Over the years, we have held numerous hearings in these chambers about how exposure to media violence affects childhood aggression. We passed legislation to maximize the documented benefits of exposure to educational media, such as the Children's Television Act which requires broadcasters to provide educational and informational television programs for children. Can we foster children's moral values when they are exposed to prosocial programs that foster helping, sharing, and cooperating like those that have come into being as a result of the Children's Television Act? We acted to protect our children from unfair commercial practices by passing the Children Online Privacy Protection Act which provides safeguards from exploitation for our youth as they explore the Internet, a popular pastime for them. Yet the Internet has provided new ways to reach children with marketing that we barely know is taking place, making our ability to protect our children all the more difficult. We worry about our children's inadvertent exposure to online pornography--about how that kind of exposure may undermine their moral values and standards of decency. In these halls of Congress, we acted to protect our children by passing the Communications Decency Act, the Child Online Protection Act, and the Children's Internet Protection Act to shield children from exposure to sexually-explicit online content that is deemed harmful to minors. While we all agree that we need to protect our children from online pornography, we know very little about how to address even the most practical of questions such as how to prevent children from falling prey to adult strangers who approach them online. There are so many areas in which our understanding is preliminary at best, particularly in those areas that involve the effects of our newer digital media In order to ensure that we are doing our very best for our children, the behavioral and health recommendations and public policy decisions we make should be based on objective behavioral, social, and scientific research. Yet no Federal research agency has responsibility for oveseeing and setting a coherent media research agenda that can guide these policy decisions. Instead, federal agencies fund media research in a piecemeal fashion, resulting in a patch work quilt of findings. We can do better than that. The bill we are introducing today would remedy this problem. The CAMRA Act will provide an overarching view of media effects by establishing a program devoted to Children and Media within the Centers for Disease Control. This program of research, to be vetted by the National Academy of Sciences, will fund and energize a coherent program of research that illuminates the role of media in children's cognitive, social, emotional, physical, and behavioral development. The research will cover all forms of electronic media, including television, movies, DVDs, interactive video games, cell phones, and the Internet, and will encourage research involving children of all ages--even babies and toddlers. The bill also calls for a report to Congress about the effectiveness of this research program in filling this void in our knowledge base. In order to accomplish these goals, we are authorizing $90 million dollars to be phased in gradually across the next five years. The cost to our budget is minimal and can well result in significant savings in other budget areas. Our Nation values the positive, healthy development of our children. Our children live in the information age, and our country has one of the most powerful and sophisticated information technology systems in the world. While this system entertains them, it is not harmless entertainment. Media have the potential to facilitate the healthy growth of our children. They also have the potential to harm. We have a stake in finding out exactly what that role is. We have a responsibility to take action. Access to the knowledge that we need for informed decision-making requires us to make an investment: an investment in research, an investment in and for our children, an investment in our collective future. The benefits to our youth and our nation's families are immeasurable. By passing the Children and Media Research Advancement Act, we can advance knowledge and enhance the constructive effects of media while minimizing the negative ones. We can make future media policies that are grounded in a solid knowledge base. We can be proactive, rather than reactive. In so doing, we build a better nation for our youth, fostering the kinds of values that are the backbone of this great nation of ours, and we create a better foundation to guide future media policies about the digital experiences that pervade our children's daily lives. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, today is Metropolitan District Commission Day in Connecticut and it is with great pleasure that I send my congratulations to the commission as it celebrates another year of impressive service to the people of Connecticut and our State's riverfronts. Seven years ago, Connecticut's Metropolitan District Commission took on a groundbreaking mission. Expanding its role of providing water and sewer services to the Hartford region, the commission made a historic step to partner with the organization Riverfront Recapture to maintain Connecticut Riverfront parks and provide funding for park rangers in each of the parks. Metropolitan District Commission believed then as it believes today that creating and maintaining an attractive waterfront environment is valuable to everyone in a community. Of course, the Metropolitan District Commission is no newcomer to civic engagement. For decades the commission has participated in enhancing the Connecticut River's water quality--making it possible to use the once-polluted river for a rich variety of recreational activities, including fishing tournaments, triathlons, rowing regattas, and dragon boat races. Metropolitan District Commission's partnership with Riverfront Recapture is only natural. The team has worked together skillfully to create a welcoming presence in the parks and attracting visitors as well as residents. Last year, more than 786,000 people visited the riverfront parks and as much as $4 billion worth of development projects are underway or planned within walking distance of the parks. The Metropolitan District Commission's funding efforts and maintenance capabilities are critical to making the mission succeed. Unsurprisingly, this exceptional partnership is attracting national attention as a model for urban parks management. By commemorating the contributions of the Metropolitan District Commission today, we honor the spirit of entrepreneurship that has profited the people of Connecticut and their guests so significantly. I am very happy to join colleagues in honoring the Metropolitan District Commission on this day, October 25, 2005.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, it is with regret that I oppose this conference report. I am a strong advocate of the need for the Department of Homeland Security and its work. And as the ranking member of the Department's lead authorizing committee, I do not lightly oppose this appropriations bill for the Department's vital work. But I feel I have no choice but to protest what I consider to be dangerous and misguided cuts in the vital programs that help America's first responders. Just weeks ago, we watched with horror as our fellow citizens in Louisiana and Mississippi suffered the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. It was inevitable that a hurricane of that size and intensity would cause hardship. But we know that the pain was far greater and the recovery far more daunting than it needed to have been if our Government had done all it could to prepare for and respond to the catastrophe. We know that preparedness planning was inadequate; that first responders lacked the equipment and communications they needed to respond; and that first responders and officials did not have the training and command structures they needed to work effectively together to help the many victims depending on them. And this for a catastrophic hurricane that had been predicted in advance. We can only speculate what preparedness and response to an unforeseen catastrophic terror attack might look like. We know, in short, that we have very far to go before we are as ready as we must be for the threats ahead. So why are we now are asked to approve dramatic cuts in the very programs that could help strengthen these essential capabilities? This conference report would cut the three core first responder programs--the State Homeland Security Grant Program, SHSGP, the Urban Area Security Initiative, UASI, and the Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program, LETPP--by 28 percent--nearly a third. The State homeland grants, which make up the backbone of most prevention and preparedness efforts, would be cut in half from fiscal year 2005 levels. And this comes on top of several years of cuts to these accounts. I know these cuts will leave unacceptable gaps in homeland security efforts in my own state of Connecticut, and I assume other States will also be unable to achieve their preparedness and response goals without more help from the Federal Government. By contrast, the Senate voted in support of S. 21, a bill sponsored by Senator Collins and me, to authorize a significant increase in funding for these core first responder programs. The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has also endorsed legislation to create a new dedicated grant program to help first responders obtain interoperable communications equipment. This vital need--so painfully apparent on 9/11 and again during Katrina and its aftermath--alone is estimated to cost billions of dollars. Currently, first responders must purchase interoperable communications systems with these general homeland security grants, making the pending cuts all the more distressing. I recognize that appropriators struggled with constraints imposed by the administration's budget and had to make difficult choices between many important homeland security needs. I appreciate that conferees fought to include dedicated money for rail, transit and port security grants, as well as for the Coast Guard's Deepwater program. But I reject the premise that we must accept this as the best we can do for our first responders. It is not the best we can do. It must not be the best we can do. We know that the threats--natural or manmade--are real, and that we are not yet ready to meet them. Katrina has just underscored that lesson. Two years ago, a distinguished task force chaired by our former colleague Warren Rudman told us that our first responders were ``drastically underfunded, dangerously unprepared'' and that we would need close to $100 billion over 5 years to meet critical preparedness and response needs. Yet in the time since, we have only whittled away at these critical programs rather than strengthening them. As I have said before, we have the best military in the world because we are willing to pay for it. We should not do less for our defenses here at home. I wish to go on record opposing this conference report because I believe we must find a way to do more for our first responders and the communities they serve.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, Judge Francis X. Hennessy is no stranger to public service. Since 1976, when he began his service on the juvenile court, to his service as an appellate trial referee today, he has distinguished the State of Connecticut with his example of integrity and honor. As remarkable as Judge Hennessy's record is, with service on the Connecticut Superior Court, deputy chief court administrator of the Judicial Branch, and as judge of the Appellate Court, even more impressive is his dedication to social equity. He has been a strong advocate for insuring equal access to the courts for women and minorities, co-chairing the Connecticut Task Force on Gender Justice and the Courts, and Connecticut's Task Force on Minority Fairness. Judge Hennessy's grandchildren Teddy, John and Grace and his children Maura, Margaret Mary, Matthew and Mark must be proud to have such an exemplar of achievement to look up to. His wife Mary Frances celebrates and shares in Judge Hennessy's accomplishments on this occasion of his 75th birthday. In addition to his legal career, Judge Hennessy served his country with bravery in the U.S. Army during the Korean conflict. He received the Purple Heart and Combat Infantryman's Badge. For this man, the call of duty extended beyond military service to enriching the community around him. He also served on Connecticut's State Library Board, on the Sheriff's Advisory Board, and the State Gaming Commission. Judge Hennessy was born on September 11, 1930, in New York City, and has been a faithful servant of the State of Connecticut for the duration of his career. We in the U.S. Senate are proud and honored to congratulate Judge Hennessy on his many years of public service and offer him best wishes on the occasion of his 75th birthday.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank my friend from Colorado for his very thoughtful and eloquent statement. I rise to speak on the President's nomination of John Roberts of Maryland to be Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. During my 17 years as a Member of the Senate, I have had the opportunity on four previous occasions to consider nominees to the Supreme Court--two from the first President Bush and two from President Clinton. On three of those occasions--Justices Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer--I carried out my constitutional responsibility by giving not only advice but consent. On the fourth, Justice Thomas, I withheld my consent. I must say that on each of those preceding four occasions, I was struck, as I am again now in considering President Bush's nomination of John Roberts, by the wisdom of the Founders and Framers of our Constitution and by the perplexing position they put the Senate in when we consider a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. As we know, our Founders declared their independence and formed their new government to secure the inalienable rights and freedoms which they believed are the endowment of our Creator to every person. But from their knowledge of history and humanity, and from their own experiences with the English monarch, they saw that governments had a historic tendency to stifle, not secure, the rights and freedoms of their citizens. So in constructing their new government, they allocated power and then they limited it, time and time again. Theirs was to be a government of checks and balances, except for one institution which is, generally speaking, unchecked and unlimited, and that is the Supreme Court. I understand that Congress can reenact a statute that has been struck down by the Court as inconsistent with the Constitution, but I also know that the Court can then nullify the new statute. I understand, too, that the people may amend the Constitution to overturn a Supreme Court decision with which they disagree, but that is difficult and cumbersome and therefore rare in American history. So the Supreme Court almost always has the last word in our Government. It can be, and has been, a momentous last word, with great consequences for our national and personal lives. Why then, in constituting the Supreme Court, did our Nation's Founders vary from their system of limited government, of checks and balances? I believe one reason is that they were wise enough to know that to be orderly, to function, a system must have a final credible point where disputation and uncertainty end and from which the work of society and government proceeds. But there was a larger reason, I am convinced, consistent with their highest value, and that was their understanding, again from their knowledge of history and humanity, that freedom can just as easily be taken by a mob of citizens as it can by a tyrannical leader. So they created a Supreme Court that was to be insulated from the political passions of the moment and that would base its decisions not only on transitory public opinion but on the eternal values of our founding documents--the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights--and the rule of law. They did this, these Founders and Framers, not just by giving the Court such enormous power but also by giving its individual members life tenure. The President nominates Justices, the Senate advises and decides whether to consent, and then the Justice who is confirmed serves for as long as he or she lives or chooses to serve, absent the unusual possibly of impeachment, of course; limited in that service only by the Justice's own conscience, intellect, sense of right and wrong, understanding of what the Constitution and law demand, and by the capacity of the litigants who appear before the Court and by the Justice's own colleagues on the Court to convince him or her. This gets to why I have described the Senate's responsibility to act on nominations to the Supreme Court as perplexing. It is our one and only chance to evaluate and influence the nominees, and then they are untouchable and politically unaccountable. But the Senate is a political body. We are elected by and accountable to the people. So naturally during the confirmation process we try to extract from the nominees to this Court, on this last chance that we have, commitments, political commitments that they will uphold the decisions of the Court with which we agree and overrule those with which we disagree; and they naturally try to avoid making such commitments. We are both right. Because the Supreme Court has such power over our lives and liberties, we Senators are right to ask such questions. But because the Court is intended to be the nonpolitical branch of our Government, the branch before which litigants must come with confidence that the Justices' minds are open, not closed by rigid ideology or political declaration, the nominees to the Court are ultimately right to resist answering such questions in great detail. I understand that I am describing an ideal which has not always been reached by individual Justices on the Court. But on the other hand, the history of the Supreme Court is full of examples of Justices who have issued surprisingly different opinions than expected, or even than expressed before they joined the Court; and also of Justices who have changed their opinions over the years of their service on the Court. That is their right, and I would add the responsibility the Constitution gives to Justices of our Supreme Court. Our pending decision on President Bush's nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court is made more difficult because it comes at an excessively partisan time in our political history. That makes it even more important that we stretch to decide it correctly and without partisan calculations, whichever side we come down on. Judge Roberts, after all, has been nominated to be Chief Justice of the highest Court of the greatest country in the world, and our decision on whether to confirm him should be a decision made above partisanship. Today in these partisan times, it is worth remembering that seven of the nine sitting Justices were confirmed by overwhelmingly bipartisan votes in the Senate. Justices O'Connor by 99, Stevens and Scalia by 98, Kennedy by 97, Ginsburg by 96, Souter by 90, and Breyer 89. So it was not always as it is now, and it is now hard to imagine a nominee who would receive so much bipartisan support. That is wrong and it is regrettable. One reason for this sad turn, is that our recent Presidential campaigns have unfortunately made the Supreme Court into a partisan political issue, contrary to the intention of the Founders of our country as I have described it, with candidates in each party promising to nominate only Justices who would uphold or overrule particular prevailing Supreme Court decisions. I know that is not the first time in our history this has happened. But it nonetheless today undercuts the credibility and independence of the Supreme Court, and I might add it complicates this confirmation process. Because President Bush promised in his campaign that he would nominate Supreme Court Justices in the mold of Justices Scalia and Thomas, an extra burden of proof was placed on Judge Roberts to prove his openness of mind and independence of judgment. All of that is one reason why earlier this year I was proud to be one of the ``group of 14'' Senators. I view the agreement of that group of 14 as an important step away from partisan politicizing of the Supreme Court. By opposing the so-called nuclear option, we were saying--7 Republicans and 7 Democrats--that a nominee for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be close enough to the bipartisan mainstream of judicial thinking to obtain the support of at least 60 of the 100 Members of the Senate. That is not asking very much for this high office. When I was asked during the deliberation of the group of 14 to describe the kind of Justice I thought would pass that kind of test, I remember saying it would be one who would not come to the Supreme Court with a prefixed ideological agenda but would approach each case with an open mind, committed to applying the Constitution and the rule of law to reach the most just result in a particular case. I remember also saying the agreement of the group of 14 could be read as a bipartisan appeal to President Bush which might be phrased in these words: Mr. President, you won the 2004 election and with it came to the right to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court. We assume you will nominate a conservative but we appeal to you not to send us an extreme conservative who will confront the court and the country with a disruptive, divisive, predetermined ideological agenda. Send us an able, honorable nominee, Mr. President, who will take each case as it comes, listen fully to all sides, and try to do right thing. Based on the hours of testimony Judge Roberts gave to the Judiciary Committee under oath, the lengthy personal conversation I had with him, a review of his extraordinary legal and judicial ability and experience, and the off-the- record comments of people who have known or worked with Judge Roberts at different times of his life, and volunteered them to me, and uniformly testified to his personal integrity and decency, I conclude that John Roberts meets and passes the tests I have described. I will, therefore, consent to his nomination. In his opening statement to the Judiciary Committee on September 13, Judge Roberts said: I have no platform. Judges are not politicians who can promise to do certain things in exchange for votes. If I am confirmed, I will confront every case with an open mind. I will fully and fairly analyze the legal arguments that are presented. I will be open to the considered views of my colleagues on the bench. And I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. I could not have asked for a more reassuring statement. During the hearings, some of our colleagues on the Judiciary Committee challenged Judge Roberts to reconcile that excellent pledge with memos or briefs he wrote during the 1980s or early 1990s, or opinions he wrote on the Circuit Court in more recent years. They were right to do so. I thought Judge Roberts' answers brought reassurance, if not total peace of mind. But then again, I have no constitutional right to total peace of mind as a Senator advising and deciding whether to consent on a Justice of the Supreme Court. From his statements going back more than 20 years, I was troubled by, and in some cases strongly disagreed with, opinions or work he had been involved in on fundamental questions of racial and gender equality, the right of privacy, and the commerce clause. But in each of these areas of jurisprudence, his testimony was reassuring. On questions of civil rights, Judge Roberts told the Judiciary Committee of his respect for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, as precedents of the Court, and he said they ``were not constitutionally suspect.'' He added that he ``certainly agreed that the Voting Rights Act should be extended.'' When asked by Senator Kennedy whether he agreed with Justice O'Connor's statement in upholding an affirmative action program that it was important to give ``great weight to the real world impact of affirmative action policies in universities,'' Judge Roberts answered, ``You do need to look at the real world impact in these areas and in other areas as well.'' He also told Senator Durbin that he believed the Reagan administration had taken the ``incorrect position'' on Bob Jones University. I have said, and I say again, that I found those answers to be reassuring. With regard to the right of privacy, Judge Roberts gave a lengthy and informed statement: ``The right of privacy is protected under the Constitution in various ways.'' He said: It's protected by the Fourth Amendment which provides that the right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, effects, and papers is protected. It's protected under the First Amendment dealing with prohibition on establishment of a religion and guarantee of free exercise. It protects privacy in matters of conscience. These are all quotes from Judge Roberts, and I continue: It was protected by the framers in areas that were of particular concern to them--: The Third Amendment protecting their homes against the quartering of troops. And in addition the Court--has recognized that personal privacy is a component of the liberty protected by the due process clause. The Court has explained that the liberty protected is not limited to freedom from physical restraint and that it's protected not simply procedurally, but as a substantive matter as well. And those decisions have sketched out, over a period of years, certain aspects of privacy that are protected as part of the liberty in the due process clause of the Constitution. I thought that was a learned embrace of the constitutional right of privacy, particularly when combined with Judge Roberts' consistent support of the principle of stare decisis, respect for the past decisions and precedents of the Court in the interest of stability in our judicial system and in our society. Regarding Roe v. Wade, Judge Roberts specifically said, ``That is a precedent entitled to respect under the principles of stare decisis like any other precedent of the Court.'' When asked by Senator Feinstein to explain further when, under stare decisis, a Court precedent should be revisited, Judge Roberts said: Well, I do think you do have to look at those criteria. And the ones that I pull from these various cases are, first of all, the basic principle that it's not enough that you think that the decision was wrongly decided. That's not enough to justify revisiting it. Otherwise there would be no role for precedent, and no role for stare decisis. Second of all, one basis for reconsidering the issue of workability (And) . . . the issue of settled expectations, the Court has explained you look at the extent to which people have conformed their conduct to the rule and have developed settled expectations in connection with it. Again, specifically with regard to Roe v. Wade, I found those answers reassuring. One of Judge Roberts' circuit court opinions on the commerce clause gave rise to fears that he would constrict Congress's authority to legislate under that important clause. But in his consistent expressions of deference to the work of Congress and his several references to the Supreme Court's recent decision in Gonzales v. Raich, Judge Roberts was once more reassuring. So I will vote to confirm John Roberts and send him off to the nonpolitical world of the Supreme Court with high hopes, encouraged by these words of promise he spoke to the Judiciary Committee at the end of his opening statement to that committee as follows: If I am confirmed, I will be vigilant to protect the independence and integrity of the Supreme Court, and I will work to ensure that it upholds the rule of law and safeguards those liberties that make this land one of endless possibilities for all Americans. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I pay tribute to the contributions of Yakov Birnbaum, an unheralded American freedom fighter, whose work helped free roughly five million Soviet Jews and tens of millions others persecuted for their faith under the former Soviet Union. In 1964, Birnbaum launched the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry at Columbia University to promote awareness of the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union. His movement ultimately led to the passage of the pivotal Jackson-Vanik Amendment a decade later, which starved the Soviet government of trade benefits in retaliation for its trampling on human rights. Birnbaum's efforts led to freedom for individuals like Natan Sharansky and the emigration from the Soviet Union of more than 1.5 million Jews since. His work also inspired other individuals, organizations and governments to decry the persecution of people of faith by the Soviet government. By drawing international attention to repression within the Soviet Union, Birnbaum helped remind us all that the defense of human rights and the freedom to worship had to be battleground issues in the Cold War. The final fall of the Soviet system and the flowering of religious freedom that followed were both thanks to the long and tenacious efforts of men and women like Birnbaum. For all his work in the cause of freedom we recognize him today.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Assure Emergency and Interoperable Communications for First Responders Act of 2005--or EICOM--as a step towards improving emergency communications nationwide so no community experiences the communications failure we saw in parts of the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I want to thank my cosponsors, Senators Collins, Levin, Akaka, and McCain, for joining me in this effort. The attack of 9/11 dramatically showed how vulnerable our first responders are in an emergency when they are unable to communicate with each other. Four years after 9/11, solving the problem of interoperability remains the number one priority for our Nation's first responders. Whether responding to a terrorist attack, natural disaster, fire, a missing child, or a fleeing suspect, police, fire fighters, emergency medical technicians and other responders still all too frequently arrive at the scene with incompatible communications equipment and can't share crucial, life-saving information with each other. This puts at risk both the lives of our first responders and those they were sworn to protect. I have previously introduced legislation that addresses the problems of interoperability. But Hurricane Katrina spotlighted an even more severe problem--operability--the need for systems that themselves can survive a disaster, either natural or manmade. Katrina has shown us that without a working communications system a coordinated response to an emergency becomes close to impossible. This bill seeks to address the challenges of both interoperability and operability. Hurricane Katrina blew down power lines, knocked out cell phone towers and wiped out regular phone service in blasts of wind and water. In too many areas the result was no regular or cell phone service and portable radios that slowly went dead because there was no way to charge the batteries. What do you do when you are down to zero communications? Gulf Coast emergency officials were repeatedly reduced to using runners to communicate between command centers and first responders in the field. And this is not the first time this has happened in the United States. Some have suggested that the scenes out of the Gulf Coast had a third world quality about them. But runners? That isn't Third World. That is the ancient world. That is Athens in 490 BC when legend has it a runner covered 300 miles in a week to share information and coordinate the defense of the City of Marathon--thus the name of the race. But certainly between 490 BC and the 21st Century we've made greater advancement in communications technologies than better running shoes. This bill seeks to remedy the communications nightmare we saw in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast--and make sure we don't have the same nightmare in future disasters. This bill establishes an Office for Emergency Communications, Interoperability and Compatibility--or ECIC--within the Department of Homeland Security, replacing and strengthening the present Office for Interoperability and Compatibility. This new and stronger ECIC will be charged with finding ways to establish emergency communications capabilities when a terrorist attack, natural disaster or other large-scale emergency has damaged or destroyed usual communications and electrical infrastructure. This bill also tells the Secretary of DHS to establish a comprehensive, competitive research and development program to identify and answer the policy and technology questions necessary to sustain emergency communications capabilities and achieve interoperability. This includes promoting research through the Directorate of Science and Technology Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, (HSARPA) and considering establishing a Center of Excellence. The bill also directs the Secretary of DHS to establish at least two pilot projects to help us develop and test working emergency communications systems for first responders and government officials that will survive a natural disaster or terrorist attack where there has been damage to or destruction to critical infrastructure. Finally, this bill establishes a grant program for States and regional consortiums to develop and implement short-term and long-term solutions for emergency communications capabilities and interoperability. Total grant amounts would start at $400,000,000 for fiscal year 2006, rising to $1 billion by 2010. 9/11 showed us the danger of non-interoperable communications for our first responders and the people they try to protect. Lives were likely lost that day because some first responders didn't get the orders to evacuate. Katrina showed us the further peril that comes with zero communications. First responders tried to react to the disaster but didn't know where to go or what to do. And, again, we know lives were lost. This is 21st Century America, not ancient Athens. We've moved beyond runners. We have technologies at our disposal undreamed of even just a few years ago and breakthroughs still to come. Let's marshal our resources and summon our will and--with a sense of urgency--create communications systems that survive disaster so our first responders can do their jobs--helping others when lives are on the line and seconds matter. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the legislation be printed in the Record.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I call up my amendment if it has not already been placed in order. It is amendment No 1678.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. This amendment is an attempt to apply an offer of financial relief to victims of Hurricane Katrina in very personal ways to answer the questions that hundreds of thousands of people in the gulf coast region are now asking themselves, by extending current programs or creating a couple of new ones. Let me be more specific. This amendment would say to folks who suffered this hardship that they can meet their immediate needs for housing and other assistance because we are going to waive the caps and State cost-sharing requirements under the Stafford Program. It would allow survivors of Katrina to cover rent or mortgage payments, if they are suffering financial hardship; that is, by reinstatement of the mortgage or rental program. It would extend the time that these people can apply for unemployment insurance to 90 days. It would impose a moratorium on obligations for paying student loans and other payments on Federal loans in the immediate aftermath of a hurricane. It would authorize people to take money out of their retirement plans to keep themselves going without having to pay a penalty. And it would extend and expand eligibility for food stamps and WIC programs. Finally, for victims of Hurricane Katrina and survivors living in the area of hardship, it would extend the bankruptcy protections under current law that would otherwise soon go out of effect with the adoption of the recent Bankruptcy Act. This is the stuff of enabling people to put their lives back together. It is very human, it is very personal, it is real, and it is very urgently needed. I urge my colleagues to adopt the amendment.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, pursuant to the notice properly filed, I move to suspend the rule with respect to this amendment, No. 1678, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I offer my full support of the resolution and wish to thank Senator Leahy, Senator Collins and the other cosponsors of this resolution who joined Senator Leahy, Senator Collins and me in bringing it forward. One in 12 American women of childbearing age have mercury blood levels that put their fetuses at risk for developmental delays. Developmental delays are a human tragedy, often denying children their full intellectual and psychological potential. This human tragedy means that our schools and educational system face costs and burdens borne in meeting the special needs of these children, burdens that make it that much harder for our schools to achieve their overall mission of delivering the highest quality education to all Americans. At a time of increasing global economic competition in which human capital may be our most precious resource, we simply cannot afford to squander our people or divert the resources of our schools when we can prevent the problem in the first place. That is why in 1990, Congress passed and President George H.W. Bush signed, comprehensive clean air legislation that, among other things, put in place a mechanism for dealing with power plant mercury emissions aggressively. Unfortunately, the EPA's Clean Air Mercury Rule defies that clear intent of Congress and the first President Bush by failing to achieve anywhere near the full level of cost-effective and timely reductions in the emission of mercury from power plants, one of the critical sources of mercury in the environment. The EPA's mercury rule depends on the agency's decision to undercut the Clean Air Act's mechanism for addressing mercury emissions from power plants. This resolution explicitly disapproves that undercutting decision. The resolution should be adopted because the EPA must engage in a new rulemaking that is sound and that yields the proper level of reductions that the Clean Air Act contemplates and public health and economics demand. Findings from both the Government Accountability Office and the EPA's Inspector General suggest that the EPA has much to repair in the rulemaking that led to the current rule. The GAO found that the EPA did not adequately evaluate the health benefits that would be achieved from requiring more aggressive mercury reductions than called for under the current rule. The EPA Inspector General determined that the agency did not evaluate what level of emissions reductions were technologically achievable, as required by the Clean Air Act. In addition, the EPA ignored an EPA-funded study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis pointing to substantial additional cardiovascular-related heath benefits associated with mercury reduction. The Clean Air Mercury Rule was developed and promulgated at the same time that the Clean Air Interstate Rule was. The levels of mercury reduction expected to occur as a collateral result of reductions in sulfur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen under the Interstate Rule are almost exactly those required by the Mercury Rule. This seeming coincidence raises the strong suspicion the EPA suborned its entire analysis of the Mercury Rule to the preordained goal of requiring under the Mercury Rule to effect no additional reductions in mercury than would be achieved as a collateral effect of the Interstate Rule. The flagrant flaws in the EPA's Mercury Rule rulemaking that both the GAO and the Inspector General exposed only reinforce that suspicion. In contrast, the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to make a determination, after careful economic, technological, environmental, and public health analysis whether it was ``necessary and appropriate'' to regulate utilities' mercury emissions as a hazardous air pollutant under section 112. In December of 2000, the EPA, following the Clean Air Act's requirements, determined that power plant mercury indeed was a hazardous air pollutant, meaning that regulations under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act were ``necessary and appropriate.'' Once that determination was made EPA was required to put in place new technology- based regulations of mercury emissions from power plants, regulations that would call on each electric generating unit in the country to take technologically feasible actions to reduce its harmful emissions. In contrast to the clear letter and spirit of the law, the new mercury rule leaves hundreds of large coal-fired power plants with absolutely no mercury controls until after 2020--if ever. In fact, the Congressional Research Service estimated that only 4 percent of installed power plant capacity is projected to require control by 2020 under this rule. In addition, overall reduction levels under the new rule would be far below what can be achieved cost-effectively. In June, the GAO reported that the technologies exist for capturing 30-95 percent of mercury from coal. Recent tests have shown average removal rates of 70-95 percent for all coals, with those technologies applicable to the coals that account for 90 percent of power production showing mercury capture in excess of 90 percent. Currently, drastic reductions are underway in the State of Massachusetts, with mercury technology vendors working to meet a State-mandated 85 percent control level. Many, including vendors, state that 70-90 percent control can be achieved by the end of this decade. Associated costs to electricity consumers would increase by a mere 1-5 percent, according to the GAO report. These findings strongly suggest that the technology to control mercury is available now. By turning its back on a regulatory program that would achieve this level of control, the current EPA mercury rule turns its back on tens of thousands of children who will continue to be exposed unnecessarily to the development risks of mercury. The EPA puts great stock in the use of cap-and-trade in its rule, and, as my colleagues in the Senate know, I, too, believe that cap-and- trade is a valuable tool for emissions control programs. In this case, I believe that cap-and-trade is the wrong tool to use, at least without specific technology requirements and much more stringent reduction requirements. Connecticut suffers from deposition of mercury emitted from upwind sources, and many highly populated areas within range of power plants are seeing significant deposition. To deal with mercury emissions, the case is strong, and the Clean Air Act reflects this, for requiring plant-by-plant controls. At the same time, the EPA did next to nothing in its rulemaking to refute this case and to demonstrate that power plants' mercury emissions were only widely dispersed and yielded no local deposition. Instead, the EPA used an atmospheric model that masked, rather than revealed, whether mercury emissions have local deposition impacts. The EPA's model divided the Nation's atmosphere into a hypothetical grid of individual parcels that, at 500 square miles each, were so big that the model simply could not detect local emissions plumes and deposition even if it were occurring. When the model is run, the emissions of any large power plant within any of the model's grids are immediately dispersed by the model throughout the entire volume of that 500 square mile grid; the model simply cannot detect localized deposition occurring in any area smaller than 500 square miles! Thus, this technique cannot possibly reveal local effects occurring downwind of a large source. In effect, the model design itself created a self- fulfilling prophecy, which could only show the result that EPA wanted-- that power plants emissions were dispersed, with no local deposition. In these circumstances, EPA has failed to make its case that cap and trade is the right tool to achieve both overall reductions and prevent harmful local effects. Lastly, there is reason to believe that EPA overstated the role of global mercury emissions in high-deposition areas. If so, the case for plant-specific reduction requirements is even stronger. At the same time, even if one of the keys to addressing mercury deposition in the U.S. is inducing other countries to reduce their emissions, there can be no more effective way to accomplish that than if the U.S. itself adopts stringent controls on its own power plants and thus stimulates the development and widespread use of the technologies to achieve those reductions. If we want other Nations to follow our policies and use our technologies then we must act first. For these reasons, Congress must adopt this resolution and the EPA must go back to the drawing board and produce a mercury program that will truly protect the American people.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we return to the pending matter and that the pending amendments be set aside so I may introduce another amendment.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I have an amendment which I send to the desk.

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

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, this amendment is an attempt to make sure, to the best of our ability, that people, families, individuals already devastated personally, psychologically, and physically by Hurricane Katrina are not lastingly devastated financially as well. Where hundreds of thousands of people were forced out of their homes, forced out of their neighborhoods, forced out of their communities, forced out of work, our Government, it seems to me, must do everything it can to help them rebuild their lives from whatever they can salvage from this enormously powerful and destructive storm. This amendment that I propose this morning is based on title IV of the Katrina Emergency Relief Act of 2005, which has been introduced by my colleagues Senator Reid of Nevada and Senator Landrieu of Louisiana. This amendment has seven main provisions, all of which are aimed at enabling the Federal Government to extend a hand--not a handout--to the people who have been so shaken from their normal lives by this storm and give them the help to rebuild those lives in the best tradition of American community responsibility for one another, and individual opportunities. There are seven parts. Let me quickly enumerate them. First, this amendment will waive the caps and cost sharing under the Stanford Act, Individuals and Household Program, that provides aid to those whose needs cannot be met through insurance or other assistance. Presently, these grants may not exceed $26,200 per individual or household. This provision would waive those caps on home repair, rent, temporary housing, or home replacement. ``Other Needs'' assistance under this IHP, so-called Individuals and Households Program, also addresses medical, dental, and even funeral expenses. The States are required to provide 25 percent of the amount provided for some of these grants. Given the overwhelming nature of this episode and the terrible financial impact on the States, this provision would also waive the State contribution. This is an opportunity to take care of some basic human needs, get some help for dental, medical, funeral, and household needs. Second, this amendment will temporarily reinstate the Mortgage and Rental Payments Program, or coverage for rental or mortgage payments for those in danger of defaulting on their mortgage and losing their homes resulting from the financial hardship resulting from the disaster. The program had been eliminated in the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 because FEMA said the program was difficult to administer. But it was revived after September 11, with good cause, and it should be revived again with, unfortunately, a similarly good cause in the wake of Katrina. Three, the amendment calls for a 6-month moratorium on the imposition of any penalties or additional accrued interest for people whose lives have been shaken by Hurricane Katrina and who fail to make timely payments for student loans, Small Business loans, or other loans made, subsidized, or guaranteed by the Federal Government. This will allow a breather for these people whose lives have been totally altered, removed from their homes, from their workplaces, their neighborhoods, and it will give them a 6-month breather on any penalties or accrued interest if they can't make payments for that period of time. This amendment also authorizes the President to extend that moratorium for an additional 6 months. Four, this amendment eases bankruptcy provisions that otherwise are scheduled to take effect about a month and a half from now. History shows that bankruptcies often double in the wake of a disaster. This easing will go simply to people affected by Hurricane Katrina in the three Gulf States that were hit. Without this provision, many families hurt by this hurricane could wind up without access--not just hurt but devastated financially--to the bankruptcy laws under the new law. Fifth, this amendment would extend and expand benefits under the Disaster Unemployment Assistance Program. It would extend the application period from 30 to 90 days. I know the Department of Labor and State officials are trying very hard to tell people they have a right to apply for this special form of unemployment assistance, to get some money coming in to support their families. There is a 30-day period because everybody is spread so far apart. Normally in a disaster, the disaster occurs and people go back basically to where they were. Now they are spread all over the country. This would extend the application period from 30 to 90 days. In addition, it would expand the program to include individuals eligible for State unemployment insurance and those who suffer from the secondary economic effects of the disaster. Finally, it would extend the duration of benefits for victims who otherwise qualify from 26 to 52 weeks and create an enhanced minium benefit level. We have been reading stories that an amazing number of the people who were dislocated by Hurricane Katrina and now are in other States are already out looking for work and finding it. This is for the people who haven't been able to find it, and it will give them some assistance for their families. Estimates suggest that as many as a half million workers will be left jobless by Hurricane Katrina, and that unemployment may soar to 25 percent or more in some of the regions affected as a result. The families, therefore, will desperately need this extended lifeline this amendment will provide. Six, the amendment would suspend the tax and penalties on withdrawals from qualified retirement plans so that those who have suffered losses as a result of Hurricane Katrina can use money that otherwise would be in their retirement plans and for which they would be penalized for early withdrawal. They can now rebuild their lives and not suffer adverse tax consequences. Individuals who access funds in these accounts would have 5 years to repay the money to the account. In addition, the amendment calls on the Secretary of the Treasury to suspend tax payment, return filing, and other time-limited actions required of taxpayers for a period of not less than 6 months. In other words, it would give these people not a free pass but a little bit of space before they have to go back to fulfilling all the obligations required, without diminishing those obligations. I know by administrative action the Treasury Secretary has already said for people in these areas who would be paying estimated tax payments--I believe on September 15--they will not have to pay until the end of October. Seven, we must feed the victims. It is as elemental as that. We all saw the devastation this hurricane wreaked in terms of displaced families, destroyed livelihoods, and flooded homes. We also know how it affected the fundamental need for water and food. Across Connecticut and across America, I am sure the power of this act of nature was stunning. Of course, loss of life filled us with grief. But what really angered and in some sense embarrassed a lot of people across this country was to see our fellow human beings and fellow Americans trapped by this disaster without adequate access to food or water. This amendment provides additional funding to purchase and distribute food and temporarily suspend food stamp requirements that, frankly, don't make sense in the wake of this disaster. I am thinking of a requirement that says a victim has to show proof that his or her car was worth less than $4,600. It is probably hard for a lot of people who would otherwise qualify for food stamps to be able to make that showing. We ought to suspend it. Those are the seven parts of this proposal in this amendment. When all is said and done, the first step in rebuilding for most of these people will be to get back on a firm financial footing again. That is exactly the intent of this proposal. It is to give these people a breather, to give them a little temporary help. It is our Nation's way and our Federal Government's way of doing what neighbors and individuals are doing all over America, which is to reach out. I think it is the most generous expression of caring for one another I have ever seen in the history of this country, and it is our Government's way of trying to do the same so that people, once back on their feet, can begin to walk and then run to a better life. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

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