Trent Lott

Mr. LOTT

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I must say my patience is wearing thin. I have been going through this for several days now and have been assured by the Democratic leader himself that we would get this done this morning. I am expecting that to occur. I am going to be standing right here waiting for that signal from the Democratic leader. The people of the area that have been damaged by Hurricane Katrina cannot wait any longer. I expect this to be done momentarily, and if it is not, there is going to be hell to pay this day. I yield the floor. The Senator from Oklahoma.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I have a unanimous consent request that we have been working on, and I think we are ready to go with. We would like to get that done before we go to the hour of debate on the PATRIOT Act. I wish to see if we can confirm that with the minority.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, could I inquire what the anticipated time is on when we could get this done? I know the Democratic leader has indicated we are very close and should be able to get this done momentarily. Do we have any information on that?

Mr. LOTT

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to immediate consideration of Calendar No. 328, H.R. 4440.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I would like to thank Chairman Grassley and Senator Baucus for their commitment to enacting a long-overdue tax bill that will help get cash back into the pockets of businesses and individuals who are rebuilding their lives and their communities in the wake of hurricane's Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. By significantly lowering the cost of capital for small, medium, and large businesses alike, the provisions in this legislation will spur business investment on the gulf coast, increase the supply of affordable housing, and put dislocated employees back to work. Specifically, this legislation includes roughly $8 billion in tax incentives to help the gulf coast. These provisions: 50 percent bonus depreciation for property acquired in the GO Zone; double small business expensing for small businesses in the Zone; increase the amount of tax-exempt bonds Mississippi is allowed to allocate by $4.8 billion; allow for an additional advanced refunding for bonds previously issued by Mississippi and by all local issuers within the GO Zone; increase the amount low-income housing tax credits available to Mississippi; increase the allocation of new markets tax credits available for companies investing in Mississippi businesses and construction; allows for a 5-year net operation loss carryback for businesses in the zone; allows for a 10-year NOL for public utility disaster losses; allows public utility disaster losses to be carried back 5 years; increases reforestation expensing from $10,000 to $20,000 for expenses incurred in the Go Zone for 2006; allows small timber growers a 5 year NOL carryback for losses incurred in the zone; allows increased expensing for demolition and clean up costs through 2007; and makes the employees retention credit available to all employers in the zone. We have been at this for several months now. My constituents have been patient, and deserve action now. This is a vitally important bill. It is critical that we pass it today and that it is sent to the President for his signature before we adjourn. This amendment modifies recent legislation introduced by Chairman Grassley by making clear that the business tax incentives in this legislation do not apply to the construction of private or commercial golf courses, country clubs, massage parlors, hot tub facilities or suntan facilities, racetracks or other facilities used for gambling, or any store the principal business of which is the sale of alcoholic beverages for consumption off premises. However, it also makes clear that tax incentives do apply to the construction of hotels, restaurants, parking lots, and other attachments to gaming facilities. I would have much preferred a clean bill, but in the interest of my constituents, I am offering this amended legislation today. I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be adopted.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, because there is no committee report accompanying this legislation, I would like to engage Chairman Grassley in a colloquy to clarify the intent of two provisions contained in this important legislation. First, among the tax benefits contained in this package is the employee retention credit. This incentive will play a pivotal role in helping businesses retain their employees even it they are temporarily out of business while the gulf coast rebuilds. As I understand the committee's intent, the credit will apply both where a company is completely out of business, and where it did not suffer total devastation to its trade or business operations. For example, the credit would apply in cases where one part of the operation in the designated zone was rendered ``inoperable'' while another location of that same business continued to operate. Is that correct?

Mr. LOTT. Another provision of H.R. 4440 would make eligible for tax- exempt financing the costs of nonresidential real property located in the Gulf Opportunity Zone. It is my understanding that the intent of this provision is that nonresidential real property includes any tangible property other than fixtures and equipment that are movable, without regard to the class life of such property or its use as part of manufacturing, production, or extraction, or of furnishing services or property.

Mr. LOTT. I ask unanimous consent the substitute amendment at the desk be agreed to, the bill, as amended, be read the third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements related to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. LOTT. Briefly, I express appreciation to Senator Grassley, Senator Baucus, especially Senator Reid for his efforts, my colleague from Mississippi, Senator Cochran, the input and the help and the determination of Senator Landrieu from Louisiana, and Senator Vitter, Senator Hutchison and Senator Cornyn. I will have my additional remarks. I thank all those involved. This is important legislation. This is almost $8 billion in tax incentives and relief for the people in the hurricane areas. It means so much. Now we will be able to pass this back to the House, and hopefully they will take it up and send it directly to the President.

Mr. LOTT

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be able to proceed to a piece of legislation before we go to morning business. I think we have it agreed to and worked out.

Mr. LOTT

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, let me say to Senator Reid, I have been working with the Senator and both sides of the aisle, and we are trying to make sure everybody understands what we are doing here. This is very critical legislation to aid the Katrina victims in all the affected States, including Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. I hope we can get this agreed to shortly before we get into the extended debate with regard to the other legislation, the PATRIOT Act. So as soon as we could get notification from the Democratic leader, we are ready to proceed. I will be standing by waiting for that opportunity because there are thousands of people waiting for this help, and they need it now. I thank Senator Reid. And since he has objected, I will withhold at this time but will be on standby ready to go momentarily. I yield the floor.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 328, H.R. 4440.

Mr. LOTT. It is, Mr. President.

Mr. LOTT

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, we will hear plenty of self-congratulatory statements on this floor today about this conference report. And I am sure that there are probably many provisions that in fact have merit. I cannot let the Senate consider this conference report, however, without highlighting some particularly egregious provisions which were literally inserted at midnight. These specific provisions were not included in either the House or Senate appropriations bills, they were never discussed during any of the meetings of the Conference Committee, nor were they subject to hearings by either the authorizing committees with jurisdiction, nor by appropriations committees. I think we should call these provisions the ``Leave the Victims of Unscrupulous Moving Companies Behind Act.'' Consumers have fewer rights in trying to seek recourse when they are victims of fraud or outright theft than when they deal with a dishonest interstate moving company. The consumer has no ability to use State or local laws or consumer protection regulations. That is because Federal law preempts State and local action in this area. The only recourse a defrauded consumer has is to try to enforce the Federal regulations by going to Federal or State court. This is expensive and in most cases extremely impractical. Let me explain. One of the most common forms of abuse is what is commonly called ``hostage goods.'' This abuse was described by the Department of Transportation's Inspector General at a hearing I held in the Commerce Committee to look at this problem. Let me quote from his testimony: . . . household goods moving fraud is a serious problem, with thousand of victims who have fallen prey to these scams across the county. Typically, an unscrupulous operator will offer a low-ball estimate and then refuse to deliver or release the household goods unless the consumer pays an exorbitant sum, often several times the original estimate. In one case, for example, a New York husband and wife in their seventies were quoted a price of $2,800 to move their household goods to Florida. Once the movers had loaded about half of the goods, the foreman advised the couple that unless they paid the new price of $9,800 they would never see their property again. Fearing that the moving crew might physically hurt them, the couple paid the vastly inflated fee. In such a case, trying to find an attorney and then proceed to courts while all your worldly possessions are on a truck heading to Florida is not especially practical. This is not an isolated incident. Since 2001, consumers have filed over 10,000 official complaints with the Department of Transportation. Since 2000, the Inspector General has investigated allegations of fraud associated with approximately 8,000 victims. In the recently completed highway bill, Congress included provisions to try to tip the scale back a little bit to the side of the consumer. The provisions that were included in the highway bill conference report were almost identical to the provisions in the Senate passed bill and to the provisions that were included in the highway bill that passed the Senate in the last Congress. The basic point of these provisions was to allow State attorneys general and State consumer protection officials to intercede on behalf of consumers and enforce Federal law and regulations dealing with moving companies. The appropriations conference report we are considering today basically puts these proconsumer provisions on a hold for a year, and allows State officials to intervene in only the most limited of circumstances. Finally, let me be clear. Most of the companies and individuals engaged in the moving industry are hard-working and honest. It is a small minority of companies that engages in unscrupulous behavior and it is these companies that need to be reined in. Unfortunately, this conference report allows unscrupulous movers to continue to defraud consumers with little practical recourse for our constituents that have been mistreated.

Mr. LOTT

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 2633 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I yield 4 minutes to the Senator from Nevada.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Oklahoma.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my time to the Senator from Oklahoma, Dr. Coburn.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, this is the amendment dealing with the resolution of the Senator from Oklahoma, and I just want to clarify that because it will be referred to as the Coburn amendment. I want to make sure everybody understands that is what we are talking about. Before I get into my remarks, I would like to yield, as a convenience to him, the first 2 minutes to Senator Hatch, or for additional time if he needs it.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, again, I know we will need to alternate back and forth. As a courtesy to a colleague, I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Pennsylvania, Mr. Specter.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I may consume so I can get into some of the specifics of the resolution. The resolution simply provides that a Senator who is a physician can continue to practice in his profession while serving in the Senate. However, there is an important caveat included in this resolution. A Senator who continues to practice medicine may not receive fees and other payments for medical services that exceed the actual and necessary expenses incurred by the Senator in connection with his medical practice. In other words, the Senator cannot make a profit from his practice. I have discussed this issue with a lot of our colleagues. There are those who are concerned that once we open this door, we will open it more and more and there will be more and more exceptions to the rule. That is not my intent here. That is a debate for another day, and maybe we should have it, in my opinion. This is narrowly crafted legislation that would allow for Senator Coburn to continue his practice. I think he should have that opportunity. I think it is fair to him, and I think it is needed in his community. In talking with him, it is not that he is an obstetrician/gynecologist, he is a general practitioner. He treats people who come to him for all kinds of problems. We have a need for more, not less, doctors. Also, there is a unique difference we have to remember. As lawyers, I guess as long as you keep your bar membership up, when we leave here, oh, yes, we are still lawyers because we got a law degree 40 years ago. But as a doctor, if you don't keep up your practice, you can't go back and say, Oh great, I will take care of your gynecological needs or deliver a baby. They need to keep their skills honed. Some people say he can practice, he just can't have any income to cover his expenses. Based on the Senate salary, he would not be able to pay for the expenses, primarily because of the exorbitant amount of money now that is involved in medical malpractice. I note that allowing a physician to continue practicing medicine to the extent of covering actual costs is consistent with an approach that was taken by the House of Representatives. I think it is a very critical point. We are going to have more of a disallowance over here than even the House. This matter was worked through a very lengthy process in the House, and they came to the conclusion they needed to have this exception. Moreover, the definition of compensation contained in the resolution is identical to the definition used in the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The resolution applies only to physicians who practice as sole practitioners and only when the Senate is not in session. So there is not going to be a conflict with his responsibilities. Knowing this Senator from Oklahoma, as we all do already, he would never do that. He wouldn't fly home and start delivering babies when we were having votes. It also limits it to a sole-practitioner role. The resolution retains the current Senate rule that prohibits a Senator from affiliating with a firm. In addition, the current rule that prohibits a Senator's name from being used by any affiliated firm or company is retained. Physicians need to continue to practice in order to maintain their skills, as I noted. Because we have not been able to get medical malpractice insurance reform, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, in many cases, to stay in practice. We all hear from our doctors about how difficult that is getting to be. I think it is probably even more difficult if you are an OB/GYN to pay the fees that are involved for providing this medical service. Should a Senator who is a physician have to be recertified to practice when he leaves the Senate because he has been unable to maintain his practice because of Senate rules? I don't believe he should have that additional responsibility. We are putting an additional burden on physicians who would serve in the Senate. We need more diversity here, not less, even though we have had doctors throughout history serve in the Senate. Most of them--in fact, I guess all of them until very recent history--continued to practice medicine. It was never a problem. I am sure the Senator from Oklahoma is going to give us a history of doctors and physicians in the Senate and what they did. I am sure he is going to give us the history of lawyers who continued to practice, great Members of the Congress and Senate who went on to become President. I think we are setting up a situation that is indefensible. It is not just about this Senator. I want to make the point, too, about why we are doing it this way. I don't want to take away the responsibilities of the Ethics Committee to interpret the rules. I hoped this would be worked out. We have a time problem now. At some point soon, the Senator from Oklahoma is going to have to decide what to do: Is he going to completely shut down his practice or what is he going to do? There are certain limits on how long he has to close out his practice. I would like the Rules Committee to have acted on this issue, but there is the issue of getting the matter through the Rules Committee and then getting it scheduled for time on the floor. We are doing it this way because it is the only way it could be done. I think the Senator at least deserves to have his case considered. The current Senate rules do not completely bar outside profit by Senators, I should note. Many Senators now are writing books, and they are able to keep the royalties. There is an ethics exception, I believe, for teaching classes, and that is earned income. Yet that exception is made. Of course, if you are a Senator and you marry a person with money or if you inherit money, that is fine. But if you have an ability, a talent that you can offer, a service that you can provide, even if you do it not for profit, no, you can't do that. I am very concerned about what we are doing to ourselves. I practiced law. I looked at staying affiliated with a law firm. I think I could have practiced estate law without running afoul of the ethics rules, but you could not do that. This is a narrow exception that I think is the fair way to allow this Senator to continue his practice without conflicting with the ethics rules or with his duties. This is a profession we need more of, I repeat. I hope my colleagues will seriously consider this modest exception to the rules of the Senate. This is a Senator who wants to continue serving the medical needs of his constituents without earning a profit. That is pretty magnanimous, it seems to me. I think we should do this. I think what we are doing to this Senator and the people he serves is wrong. At least he will have a vote, and I hope that maybe sometime later we will consider this whole issue in a broader sense. But for now, we should make this narrow exception, as the House of Representatives did in the past. I yield the floor, Mr. President. Do we want to alternate. How much time does the Senator desire? I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from South Carolina.

Mr. LOTT

Mr. LOTT. I thank the distinguished Senator from Georgia yielding me that time. Might I inquire, what is the time remaining?

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, first of all, I point out this is a classic example of how we can work together to get an agreement to move needed, necessary, balanced legislation. There have been a lot of glitches along the way, but there has been persistence by the Finance Committee and by the HELP Committee to report out the legislation, to have hearings, to listen to the arguments from the administration, from the private sector, from those who are experts in this field of the PBGC. I am very proud of the work that was done by the chairman of the Finance Committee, working hand in hand with the ranking member, Senator Baucus, to get the legislation passed and to allow an amendment in which I was very interested dealing with the airline pension situation. They could have said ``don't do it'' or ``we will do it later,'' but they allowed the process to work its way through. Then, also, I have to give tremendous credit to the chairman of the HELP Committee, Senator Enzi. He did not give up on it. He was dogged and he was working on trying to get this unanimous consent agreement on how we consider this legislation, and our leadership on both sides of the aisle were able to come together. There were a lot of people who had amendments they wanted. They had objections, there were holds here, holds there, yet here we are. So I hope we can look at this and see if we cannot do this again in the future. There is no question we need reform in this area. There is real exposure across the board. American workers all over this country, and management, and the leadership in the administration or in the PBGC are very worried about where we are headed with these pensions. Are we going to keep our commitment to the workers and to the people involved in these pensions? We have an exposure, according to an article this morning in the newspaper, this PBGC organization, of approximately $26 billion. Where are we heading in this regard? Part of the problem with regard to pensions is the requirements that the law places on them are inverted. If you get into difficulty, if you are losing altitude, your payments to the agency, PBGC, go up, making it more likely you are going to continue to plunge into the ground. Conversely, if you are doing well, you pay less. How did we ever allow the law to get into that shape? Reform clearly is needed. If we do not do it, and do it in the right way, more companies are going to go into bankruptcy and are going to wind up dumping their pensions. The people who earned these pensions or had agreements for their pensions are going to get less than they thought they would get or in some cases even less than they should be getting. We can debate whether or not these pensions have been too inflated, but we have to transition. I personally think we have to get away from these defined benefit plans. We have to go to the defined contribution plans. But I think this legislation is a good compromise. We need it and we certainly should get it done before we complete this session of Congress. I also congratulate Senator Coleman from Minnesota for working on the aviation provisions, and especially Senator Isakson, the great Senator from Georgia, for his efforts to stay behind this legislation and to offer the amendment that is going to be voted on before we complete the legislation. The language in the bill says airlines that freeze their defined benefit plans can amortize any funding shortfalls over a 14-year period. That was a compromise agreement. The chairman had some concerns about what that number would be. The language we have from Senator Isakson is slightly broader than that, broader than the base bill. It allows airlines that freeze their plans and airlines that prefund their plans 20 years over which to amortize their funding shortfalls. I think that is the right number. I would like to have seen it more than 14. I support this amendment. I must say that I know it is critical to some of our airlines that we have this language. I have worked on the language in the pension reform package on airlines. I have worked on supporting this amendment, and I have worked on checking the votes. I want the Record to show, in case there is a voice vote, that I believe there are probably over 80 votes in the Senate that would be for this amendment. I want to make it clear for the future and for the Record and for the conference that this amendment is going to be handled in the way it is going to be handled because of the overwhelming support it has. We could have a lot more resistance to it by the leadership, but they continue to be reasonable in their handling of this legislation. I support the Isakson amendment. I certainly believe it will be accepted by an overwhelming indication of support in the Senate, and that is the way it should be. I believe, as a result of this legislation, that companies-- particularly airline employees--the PBGC, and ultimately, most importantly, the U.S. taxpayer will be better off. This bill is not perfect. It will probably be better as we go along through the conference, but it will never be perfect. But it is a major step forward and one we should be proud of. It is not the kind of thing you will read about in the local newspaper or, congratulations, you did a good job, unless you are the hub of an airline. It is not something you are going to read a lot about in most places in Wyoming. But this is the right thing to do, and the exposure is cataclysmic if we don't deal with it. I am delighted to support the legislation and the Isakson amendment. I yield any remaining time at this point. I thank the Senator for yielding.

Mr. LOTT

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 2360.