George LeMieux

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, today I pay tribute to one of baseball's great athletes. At the end of this baseball season, Floridian Mike Lowell will hang up his glove and bat and retire. From hitting a single his first time up at bat in the Major Leagues to being named Most Valuable Player of the 2007 World Series, Lowell has proven his excellence and consistency on the field throughout his career. Mike Lowell began his 13-year professional career with the New York Yankees but soon returned to his home State to play for the Florida Marlins where he was an integral part of the 2003 Championship team. Having grown up in Miami, he had the opportunity to play in front of family and friends. Later, he joined the Boston Red Sox, where he spent the rest of his career. His time as a baseball player did not transpire without obstacles. Months into his first season with the Marlins, Lowell was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He missed 2 months of the 1999 season while he underwent treatment. But he survived and went on to have a tremendously successful career. Both on and off the field Mike Lowell has gained the respect of his fellow players. With his two World Series rings, four-time All-Star participation, Gold Glove, more than 220 home runs and nearly 1,000 RBIs, he is a player to be admired. He has also proven his leadership in the clubhouse by utilizing his bilingual background to bridge the gap between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking players. Many young boys dream of growing up to play baseball in the Major Leagues. Mike Lowell achieved that dream and is an inspiration for today's youth to continue to reach for their goals. While his career as a professional ballplayer will soon come to a close, Mike Lowell will always be remembered as one of baseball's greatest. I wish him many years of happiness with his wife Bertha and his two children, Alexis and Anthony.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Massachusetts. Before I walked down to the floor tonight, I was watching him on television as he gave his remarks. I know he is more than a little bit under the weather. I thank him for his comments, and I thank him for his refreshing point of view because he comes here as a common man to try to do the best he can for the people of Massachusetts and the people of this country, and he knows in the short time he has been here that this system is broken. It is not working for American families. It is why Americans are so upset at their government. It is not America that is broken. It is the government that is broken--a government that is now saying: We do not want you to profit. We do not want the business to succeed, sending all the messages that say America is not open for business, with too much regulation, too much taxes, too much spending, too much uncertainty, too much of Congress pulling these big levers on government and on the economy that stops job creators in their tracks. When I visit businesses in Florida, as I often do, they tell me: Look, Senator, we do not know--actually, they call me George--we do not know, George, what is going to happen with our business. We do not know what this 2,000-page health care bill is going to do for our business. Are we going to hire one more employee and fall under some new fine or mandate? Is this financial regulation bill going to make business more expensive? Small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and the few large businesses we have in Florida are frozen in their tracks. They will not hire. Worse still now, we have these tax cuts that are set to expire at the end of the year, and these businesses do not know what their taxes are going to be. Is their tax on their dividends going to go up? Are capital gains going to go up? Are they going to be paying a higher tax rate themselves because they file as if they are an individual because they are a subchapter S corporation? All of this uncertainty, all of this regulation, all of this taxing, too much debt, too much spending, too much borrowing freezes business in its tracks. Now we have this Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act. I am new here too. I have been here about a year. But you can mark my words, when you hear a title like that, you better read the details. Boy, it sure sounds good. We want to end the offshoring of jobs. Who would not be for that? It sounds great. But the truth of it is, you are going to tax American corporations that are doing work in foreign countries. You are going to double tax them under this proposal and make them uncompetitive. So when Caterpillar sends bulldozers to India, they are going to be taxed more, which is going to hurt the folks in this country who are building bulldozers. You can apply that to any business that is doing work overseas. We do not need to be discouraging exporting. We need to be encouraging exporting. We know when we invest in exporting we get a huge return on investment. That is what we should be doing. But that does not make a nice sound bite. That does not sound good right before an election. We should not be imposing more taxes on businesses that are trying to create jobs overseas which employ more people in this country. That is uncompetitive. That does not make any sense. What we should be doing is reinstating these tax cuts that have been around for 7 and 9 years respectively and not raising taxes in the middle of a recession. Can you imagine that we are going to go back for the next month and businesses in our country are not going to know what their tax rate is next year. And people wonder in this Chamber why people are not hiring. Because there is too much uncertainty. They do not know what their taxes are going to be. Do you know what businesses want? They want a level, fair playing field, and they want predictability. All this government does, all this Congress does, is change the rules every couple months to make things unpredictable. I heard my colleague from New York talking about the fact that the last decade was lost to the middle class, that they lost wages, that they actually went down, not up. That is something that appeals to all of us. But government is not going to be the solution to that problem. Government is not going to fix that. The private sector is going to fix that. Why are we demonizing business? Why are we demonizing profits? This has never been a country where we said we are going to bring you up by pulling other people down. This has been a country where we said we will give you the opportunity to succeed, and then you can be rich too someday. That is the American dream. That is what separates us from every other country in the world. We look on these other countries such as India and China and say, look, they are going to overtake us. They are more competitive. They are not playing by the rules. They are doing things cheaper in those countries, opening call centers, stealing American jobs. Let me tell you, I have had the opportunity to travel to some of these countries in my stead as a Senator. And on its best day, India is not as good as we are on our worst. There is nothing America can't do. There is nothing Americans can't do. The thing that is failing America now is this Congress and this government. What we should be doing is creating certainty. What we should be doing is approving the three free-trade agreements that we still have outstanding with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. That would get Americans back to work. What we should be doing is cutting the payroll tax across the board for every employee and every employer. Let's cut it temporarily by 3 percent. Let's give every employee a 3- percent pay raise and every employer 3 percent more that they can use to hire new employees, buy new equipment, and get Americans back to work. People in this Chamber are willing to work across the aisle to be problem solvers. I did that on the small business bill because it was the right thing for Florida, and it was the right thing for this country. Let's not demonize each other. Let's not demonize American business because we know American business is what creates jobs. We don't need to create more government jobs. We need to create more private sector jobs. That is what is going to get this economy back up and running. What I fear is what Senator Brown talked about and his notion of why you get up in the morning. Is the next Bill Gates who started Microsoft, is the next Hewlett Packard who started that company in their garage--the next innovator, the next entrepreneur--just going to say: Look, there is too much taxes, too much regulation, too much uncertainty; I am not going to go pursue that idea. Have we taken away the American dream? As someone just recently said to the President in a townhall meeting: Is this my new reality? Is the American dream lost? It is not. We will get through this. But we are only going to get through this when we realize that government is not the creator of jobs, the private sector is the creator of jobs. Our obligation is to have regulation for it to be fair, to make sure people don't cheat; otherwise, our job is to get out of the way and let business succeed to employ our people and allow them to achieve their dreams. This bill doesn't do that. It makes us less competitive. It will hurt jobs. What we should do is reinstate the tax cuts to create certainty and not raise taxes in the middle of a recession. We should cut payroll taxes, we should approve the free-trade agreements, and we should focus every day we are here on jobs, not on campaign election laws, not on this frolic, not on this detour but on jobs. The American people are hurting. The people in my State are hurting badly. It is the worst recession that anyone can remember in Florida-- the worst recession that anyone can remember. Unemployment is near 12 percent. In some cities it is 14 percent. When we figure in the underemployed, it is more than 20 percent--people who want to work but can't. Let's give them certainty. Let's not raise taxes on them, and let's make sure we have a level playing field for business so business can do what business does best, and that is create jobs. With that, I see my time has expired. I yield the floor.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, we are having difficult times in this country, difficult times in my home State of Florida--the highest unemployment anyone can remember, nearing 12 percent. Florida, unfortunately, is No. 1 in mortgage foreclosures in the first half of the year; No. 1 in being behind in its mortgage payments. Our people are struggling. Our small businesses are struggling. People are struggling to make ends meet. As we face this very difficult time it is natural that the people of my State and the people around this country would look to their leaders in Washington for help. Certainly government cannot solve all problems. But we here in government do not want to make the problems any worse. Right now we are on the verge of raising taxes on the American people. Tax cuts that were imposed in the last 10 years are set to expire if this Congress fails to act by the end of the year. What is this going to mean to the average Floridian, to the average American, if their taxes go up? It depends upon where you find yourself, in terms of how you pay your taxes. We know the tax brackets are going to increase. For example, the 10-percent tax bracket would disappear and those taxpayers would move up to the 15-percent bracket, capturing all those with incomes below $34,550. It is not just going to affect the people at the upper end of the tax scheme but it is going to affect everyone. When people are having a difficult time making ends meet, to have to pay more in taxes is exactly the wrong thing to do. Some have said let's extend the tax cuts for those who are in the lower brackets and let's increase those who are at the higher brackets. The problem with that is you are again hurting this economy because we know that people who pay in the higher brackets are job creators. In fact, many of them are small businesses. In our country, small businesses often file as if they were individuals. Subchapter S corporations file as if they were individuals. By not continuing these tax cuts, by raising taxes in the middle of the recession, as many as three-quarters of a million small businesses in this country would have their taxes increase. I was talking to some folks in Pensacola last week. The gentleman I was speaking to told me the story of a businessperson who related that he is being laid off at his job. The reason he is being laid off is his employer told him when his taxes go up he is not going to be able to afford to keep that employee on. When you raise taxes on small businesses you hurt job creators, exactly the wrong thing we should be doing in this very difficult time. Instead of tackling issues that could help people get back to work, my friends on the other side of the aisle here are debating a campaign issue, a political issue about alleged campaign finance reform. Where is the initiative to try to put Americans back to work? Where are the offerings from my friends on the other side to get Americans back to work so we can get out of this very difficult economy? We on our side have proposed things such as cutting the payroll tax. If we cut the payroll tax 3 percent, every employee in America would get a 3-percent pay increase. Every employer would have 3 percent more they could use to buy a new piece of equipment or hire a new employee. That is the kind of policy this government could do to get people back to work. Instead, we passed a $1 trillion health care plan that we found out today is going to require 80 percent of small businesses to change their health care offerings--probably more expensive. So that promise, ``If you liked your health care plan, you can keep it'' is going to ring hollow. We passed the financial regulation reform bill that is causing people in Florida to wonder whether they should move their businesses overseas. We passed huge forms of regulation--more bureaucracy, more spending. What is it doing to job creation? It is freezing it. When I go home to Florida and talk to businesses, they say: I don't know what government is going to hand me next. I don't know if I hire that 25th or 50th employee if I am now going to be fined for not having the right kind of health care. I don't know what is in that 2,000-page financial regulation bill. I don't know what is in that 2,000-page health care bill. What does it mean for my small business? We have frozen American business, especially small business, which creates two out of every three jobs in this country, with too much bureaucracy, too much spending, too much borrowing, and too much debt. That goes to another important point about my friends on the other side of the aisle trying to raise taxes in the middle of a recession. This government does not have a revenue problem. This government has a spending problem. I came to the Senate a year ago, appointed to serve the people of Florida, 18.5 million Floridians. When I came to the Senate on September 10 of last year our national debt was just shy of $12 trillion--$11.7 trillion. The national debt today is $13.5 trillion. We have gone more than $1.5 trillion in additional debt in 1 year. It took 200 years for this country to go $1 trillion in debt. Why on Earth should the American people sacrifice more of their hard-earned money to give this body more money it is going to waste? The American people have no confidence that we have any ability in Congress to spend their money wisely. They are right about that. That is why they are so angry, and they have a right to be angry--another $1.5 trillion in debt. These numbers are so enormous it is hard to get your brain around them. A trillion dollars is $1,000 billion. I tell folks when I meet with them, if you took $1 bills and laid them out on the ground, $1 million would cover two football fields; $1 billion would cover Key West, FL--3.4 miles square of $1 bills blanketing the ground. A trillion dollars would cover Rhode Island--twice. This is an enormous amount of money. If you look at the 2009 budget, the 2010 budget, the 2011 budget-- each one of them is about $1.3 to $1.5 billion in debt. That is more than $4 trillion debt in 3 years. We cannot afford the government we have, let alone the government that some in this Chamber want. We need to do a much better job of spending the money we are spending now. But this body does not budget. We go through some procedure that is called budget but what we do is take last year's budget and add to it. No one goes into the agencies of government and says, Are these agencies spending their money efficiently and effectively? No one checks to see if every dollar spent is spent wisely. We are not jealous with the American people's dollars, we just spend them. Most don't know what we spend them on. Most don't know what those dollars are for. That is because we do not balance our budget. We do not do what American families do when they sit around the table in a difficult economy and say: You know, we are not going to be able to take that vacation this year; or, You know, maybe our daughter cannot have those piano lesson; or, Maybe we have to put the braces off until next year. The hard decisions Americans are making right now are not being made in this Chamber. We are spending more and more of your money, so why on Earth should we take more of your money and give it to government when it is not being spent wisely? The next generation's future is in jeopardy. If we continue to spend the way we are spending, the debt and deficit will be out of control. Right now we spend $200 billion a year on interest alone--paying for the obligations we should not have incurred in the past. That will turn to $900 billion by 2020 when the projected debt for this country will be $25 trillion. My friends, if we are $25 trillion in debt and we are spending $900 billion a year in interest payments, this government will not function. This is not just a problem for our kids; this is a problem for us. This problem is going to visit us in the next 2 to 5 years. Washington does not have a revenue problem. Washington has a spending problem. Let's get about the business of getting Americans back to work. If Americans are back to work, there will be more people paying taxes, there will be more revenues. Let's get about the business of balancing the budget and spending money on things that are efficient and effective. This body should not budget and spend money every year. We should do it every 2 years. My colleague Senator Thune has proposed that. Let's spend the other year on oversight making sure your money is spent wisely. If we are required to balance the budget, we will actually look in these agencies and see if they are spending your money wisely. If we do those two things, we can save America. So let's get about that business. Instead of talking about increasing taxes on small business and individuals, let's cut the payroll tax. Let's give employees a pay raise and employers a chance to hire new employees and buy equipment. Let's pass the free trade agreements with Colombia, with Panama, and South Korea. We know those agreements will create more jobs, especially in a State such as Florida. Why have they not been sent to the Congress for approval? My friends on the other side of the aisle like to talk about job creation, but none of the measures that is coming to the floor of this body, or very few, have anything to do with getting Americans back to work. Today we are missing another opportunity as this body debates alleged campaign finance reform instead of caring about what the American people care about and that is creating jobs. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LeMIEUX

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

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I have served in the Senate for 1 year. I have watched the process of different pieces of legislation come to the floor of the Senate. One of the most frustrating things, to the American people and certainly frustrating to me, is that we as Senators do not have the opportunity to offer amendments on these large pieces of legislation, legislation in this case that authorizes the actions of young men and women who are fighting to protect our safety and freedom around the world, that the Senator from Florida or Senator from Arizona or Senators from other States cannot stand up and say: I have an idea. I have a proposal. I have an amendment. Let it be aired in front of this body, let it be debated, and let's see whether it rises or falls on its merits. Instead, we get these rules that are closed where the majority leader comes down and says: I am going to fill the tree, which is Senate parlance meaning: I am going to close off all debate except for on the amendments I choose to put before the American people. That is not right. That is why the American people are, in part, so frustrated with Congress. We are not debating the issues that any individual Senator may bring forth on behalf of their constituents on what they think is the right way to move forward. Instead, we are going to amendments on issues that should not be attached to this bill, in my opinion. Don't ask, don't tell is a highly controversial amendment, one that has not been debated, one that is not going to have the opportunity to have the input of the military. We are supposed to be conducting a thorough examination and evaluation of the U.S. military before we make this substantial policy change--while we are fighting two wars at the same time. We are going to pass it and then see whether it is going to have an impact on military readiness? Does anybody doubt what the conclusion will be if it is passed, what the military will then say? If, for some reason, they had the courage and were able to have the freedom to actually express their opinion, do you think this body would undo it? Instead of allowing us to have the process we are supposed to, where we are supposed to get a sense from the military about how it will impact military readiness, we are going to pass, presumably, over the opinion of the four chiefs of the different branches of the military who oppose this measure, including General Amos, who will join now as the Commandant of the Marines, this controversial measure. Then we have the DREAM Act which, as my colleague from Alabama said, has not gone through the Judiciary Committee. Many in my State support the DREAM Act. It is a very difficult situation for kids who were brought to this country by their parents, through no fault of their own, have gone through public school, now go to a university and may not have the chance to stay and work in this country. I understand and I am sympathetic to that. But to attach that to this bill without trying to fix the broken immigration system, without first securing our borders, is disingenuous and irresponsible. So I, too, will not support moving forward on this Defense authorization bill. This is not the way this Congress should act. This is not the way the process is supposed to work. It is unfair to the American people. It is unfair to the members of the military. What should happen is we should have an ability to bring any amendments forward that are germane to the Defense authorization bill and let them rise and fall on their merits. What should not happen is that extraneous amendments that do not relate to this issue be stuck on and that all debate be closed. The American people are upset. They are frustrated with their government. Their government is broken, and this is just another example of how badly it needs to be fixed. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about job creation and what this Congress needs to do in order to make sure that our businesses have the best chance of succeeding in what is a very difficult business climate. I have the privilege of representing the great State of Florida-- 18\1/2\ million people. The economic difficulties we are having now are as difficult as anybody can remember. We are No. 1 in being behind on our mortgage payments; No. 1 on mortgage foreclosures for the first half of the year, and unemployment is at record highs--near 12 percent. No one can remember a recession as difficult as the one we are experiencing. I think it is our job, as Members of Congress, to do what we can where we can be helpful to try to get people back to work. In Florida, our small businesses are struggling. When I drive down the State roads of Florida, down Federal Highway in southeast Florida, or I am in Tallahassee on Monroe or I am over in Pensacola or in Jacksonville or wherever I am in the State--and I spent a lot of time in the State during our work period in August visiting with business owners--I see more and more doors that are shut, small businesses that have been closed. I talked to a woman today who owns a small strip shopping center. She said in the past 3 years they have gone from being 95 percent occupied to 55 percent occupied. Businesses are struggling. That is why I was proud to work with Senator Landrieu and others to fashion a small business bill, a bill I believe is going to help our small businesses get back to work. The small business bill does three things, principally, that I think are going to help small businesses. First, it is going to cut taxes on small businesses by $12 billion--a tax cut for small businesses. Among those tax cuts is a 100 percent exclusion of capital gains tax for those who invest in a small business. There is a provision to allow firms to immediately write off 50 percent of the cost of new equipment, and there is a doubling of the tax deduction for expenses for start-up businesses to $100,000. These will allow businesses to pay less taxes, to buy new equipment, hopefully hire new people, and get Floridians and Americans back to work. The bill also has a lending facility, a $30 billion lending facility that is going to bring money to small community banks to get loans to them--not Goldman Sachs, not Citibank, not Wall Street but the banker down the street, the banker who knows the small dry cleaners, the local paint shop, those small businesses that employ our friends and neighbors. If these banks do not loan the money, they will have to pay a higher interest rate back. They cannot just keep the money on their books to make their balance sheets look better. If they want to participate in this program--and it is voluntary, by the way--if they want to participate and get these dollars out to small businesses, they have to lend them out. All over Florida small businesses tell me they cannot get a loan, that their credit line has been frozen. If they are some of the few businesses that have a chance to expand, they cannot do so because they cannot get the needed capital. I visited one of those businesses this past week in Florida, a business by the name of UniQueso. They are a family business, two brothers, and they make dairy products, principally focused on the growing Hispanic community in Florida. They have had great success because this is a market that wants more of these wonderful products. They are moving their business from Cocoa to Orlando, FL. They are building a new plant. I had a chance to tour it. They are going to open in about a month, and they are growing their business. They are doubling the number of their employees. They are going to produce 10 times more product than they did at their previous location--just the kind of story we want to hear. But even though they have a good business plan, even though they are making money, 10 banks denied them loans. What did they do? This family-owned business had to sell off a majority share in their company to get an investor so they could expand. At least they were able to find a private investor, but they should not have had to give up control of their family business just to succeed in the marketplace when no bank would give them a loan. I believe this small business bill, while it will not cure every problem, is a good start. It is not going to cure all the troubles we have in this economy. That is why I am proud to support it. Frankly, there are not a lot of folks on my side of the aisle who support this bill. But I have to look at this bill for what it means for Florida and the country. It does not increase the debt, it does not increase the deficit, it does not increase taxes--it cuts taxes--and it is going to help small businesses with tax cuts and the credit they need to build their small business and, hopefully, put people back to work. That sounds good for Florida. It sounds good for America. But we need to do more. Where I do differ with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle is that we have taken steps in this Congress in the past year and a half that have been chilling to business and job creation. When I talk to business folks in Florida, they tell me this new health care law is keeping them from hiring new employees. They do not understand it, it is complicated, it is thousands of pages. They understand if maybe they hire that next employee, they will come within the confines of the bill and will be fined if they do not offer the type of health care the Federal Government has mandated. The financial regulation bill we passed in this Congress has caused confusion and anxiety among businesses in Florida, some of which have told me they are going to move a portion of their business to the Bahamas so they will not fall under these regulations. That is jobs that will leave Florida. Small business in Florida is frozen in its tracks because of an uncertain regulatory burden from Washington and now the specter of new taxes. At the end of this year, the tax cuts that were put in place nearly a decade ago are set to expire. If those tax cuts expire, we are going to raise taxes during a recession, and we are going to raise taxes on small businesses. As many as three-quarters of a million small businesses in America will be impacted by higher taxes at the end of the year if Congress does not act. Look, I walked across the aisle to work with my colleagues from the other side on something that made sense for job creation. I know now that there are four or five or six of my colleagues on the other side who are saying let's not raise taxes on anybody during recession. We need to work together. We need to work together to be problem solvers. It does not make any sense to raise taxes during a recession. It doesn't make any sense to raise capital gains taxes, which will stop investment. It doesn't make any sense to raise the taxes on dividends, which will hurt seniors, which will hurt people who invest in companies, which will chill business. It doesn't make any sense to raise taxes on small businesspeople who, we know, create two out of every three jobs in this country--more than that in my home State. I hope we will work together to extend the current policy for everyone and not raise taxes in the middle of a recession. Let me say there is one more thing this Congress can do right now to help job creation. We have three pending trade agreements--with Panama, with Colombia, and with South Korea. The President of the United States said in his last State of the Union Address that he wants to pass these free-trade agreements. He wants to promote trade and exports with foreign countries. Why haven't we taken them up? Why haven't we passed them? Colombia and Panama are huge trading partners of my home State of Florida. If we pass these free-trade agreements, we will create jobs in Florida almost immediately. Let's get out of the business of pulling huge levers on this economy, imposing new restrictions, and burdens and taxes on businesses. Let's promote trade. Where we act, let's act judiciously, with the surgeon's knife and not the bureaucrat's bludgeon. Business is hurting in this country, small business especially, hurting very much in my home State of Florida. I think there is a way for us to work together to do these things which will put Americans back to work. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 10 minutes.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Madam President, I rise today to give special recognition to the life and work of a great Floridian who was tragically killed in Florida unexpectedly just a few weeks ago. RADM LeRoy Collins, Jr., is the son of our former Governor, Governor LeRoy Collins. He was an admiral in the Navy. He was the head of the Veterans Affairs Division in the State of Florida where I had the opportunity to personally work with him when I served the Governor. A native of Tallahassee, FL, he received his commission from the Naval Academy in June 1956 and began a long career in the Navy. His first tour was aboard the amphibious transport USS Calvert, followed by the Submarine Officer's Basic Course in Groton, CT, and he later served abroad the U.S. submarine Chivo. Through hard work, dedication and sacrifice, LeRoy earned the rank of rear admiral. Admiral Collins served as an analyst for naval Intelligence in Washington, DC, and as a ballistic missile weapons officer aboard the nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine USS James Madison. After a brief tour working missile test operations at the Naval Ordnance Training Unit, in Cape Canaveral, he transferred to the Navy Reserve in 1966. While a naval reservist, Admiral Collins served as commanding officer of the coastal minesweeper USS Thrush and later as commander of various Navy Reserve submarine units. During his time, he was the Navy's liaison to the Florida National Guard and also commanding officer of the Navy liaison unit at U.S. Readiness Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, FL. The admiral served as Commander, Naval Reserve Readiness Command, Region 8 and later as Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Reserve) for Logistics, Pentagon, until his retirement from the Navy Reserve as a two-star rear admiral in October, 1990. Admiral Collins also had a career in business. He spent time with the Florida Power & Light Company and IBM. He was the founding president of Financial Transaction Systems, Inc., and president of Telecredit Service Center, Inc. In addition, he served as president of Dynamic Realty of Tampa, Inc., was chairman of Gateway Holdings, Inc., and served as president of the Armed Forces Financial Network. He was a great Floridian. The Collins family is perhaps Florida's first family. Governor Collins is perhaps our greatest Governor. Admiral Collins upheld the tradition of his family that traces it roots all the way back to the founding of Florida. The property upon which our Governor's Mansion sits was given by the Collins family. Their home, The Grove, sits right next door. Admiral Collins was in many ways everything you would expect of a great Floridian. He was genteel, he was kind, he was smart. Public service mattered to him. On behalf of the people of Florida, on behalf of the Senate, I extend our condolences to his wife Jane and their family on the passing of a truly great Floridian. He and they are in our thoughts and prayers. I yield the floor.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Madam President, I rise to speak this afternoon on the floor of the Senate about an issue that is very critically important to the people of this country, and that is our relationship with Latin America. This weekend, the new President of Colombia will be sworn in--Juan Manuel Santos--and he follows a great leader in Colombia, President Uribe, who, in my mind, is the Abraham Lincoln of that country. He kept that country unified at a very difficult time, while it was wracked with what was then a civil war. Eight years ago, President Uribe brought the country back together. He was able to fight the FARC, keep the country from falling into a narcoterrorist state, and has brought stability to Colombia. They are perhaps our best friend in Latin America. Colombia is a vibrant, beautiful country, full of good people, with a democracy that now works. This last election is a tribute to President Uribe. On behalf of my State of Florida and the Senate, I rise to congratulate President Uribe and the great work he did on behalf of Colombia, as well as to welcome in President Santos. Our relationship with Colombia is very important. They are a key trading partner to the United States and a key trading partner to my home State of Florida. When you are walking around and perhaps seeing some fresh flowers--there are some here in this Congress--but wherever you are in this country, there is a very good chance those flowers came from Colombia. Seventy percent of the flowers we have in this country that are purchased by local florists come from Colombia, and they come through Miami on their way to your local florists. We have a great trading relationship. That is why, in 2006, we entered into a free trade agreement with Colombia. Unfortunately, we have not ratified that agreement. Along with the free trade agreements for Panama and South Korea, they have languished without approval. The President spoke about this in his State of the Union Address--the importance of passing these free trade agreements--yet we still don't have those agreements before us here in the Congress. For one reason or another, they have yet to be ratified. There is a lot of talk in this Chamber about the creation of jobs, and that that should be our focus. Well, passing these free trade agreements would get Americans back to work. Right now those countries basically have free trade with us but we don't have free trade with them. Ninety percent of all Colombian products sold in the United States enter our country duty free. Yet American goods face tariffs of up to 35 percent when entering Colombia. According to the Latin America Trade Coalition, in 2008, more than 6,000 small- and medium-sized American businesses exported to Colombia. If we were to pass the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, more than 80 percent of U.S. consumer and manufacturing products and most U.S. farm goods would immediately enter Colombia duty free. Implementing this treaty could increase our gross domestic product by $2.5 billion. I say to my friends in the majority, if they want to create jobs in this country--and that certainly should be what we are focused most on in this most troubling economy--let's pass these free- trade agreements. Let's do it when we get back from the break; let's do it in September. We should have already done it. When I met with President Uribe in January of this year and talked to him about a variety of issues, he looked at me painfully and said: Why is our friend, the United States of America, not ratifying this agreement? Our greatest friend in the region, a bright spot of democracy, a President who has fought the narcoterrorists, stabilized this country as a bulwark against Venezuela and all the threats that posed to our region, and we can't ratify this agreement? It is a shame. It is something we need to do. We need to do it as well as ratify the agreement with Panama, as well as the one with South Korea.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, as in legislative session, I understand there is a joint resolution at the desk. I ask for its first reading.

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I ask for a second reading, and in order to place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I object to my own request.

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I rise to speak on the President's nomination of Elena Kagan to serve as an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. First, I congratulate my colleague from Iowa for his tremendous remarks this evening, as he went through the reasons he will not be supporting Elena Kagan. I congratulate him on such a reasoned and persuasive oration this evening. Ms. Kagan has been nominated to fill the seat of Justice Stevens. I had the opportunity, in 2004, to appear before the Court in the position as deputy attorney general of Florida. During that time, because Chief Justice Rehnquist was ill, Justice Stevens presided. I think before I go into an evaluation of Solicitor General Kagan, it is important to note what a historic figure Justice Stevens is to the American bench and the bar. Even before he began his 35 years of service on the Supreme Court, he built a stellar reputation as a member of the bar as a lawyer and a careful jurist. He graduated from Northwestern School of Law. He served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge. Then he spent nearly 20 years, from 1949 to 1969, as a practitioner of law and one of the country's foremost experts on antitrust law. He taught courses at the University of Chicago, he served on a Department of Justice commission, and he authored various papers on antitrust issues. It was in 1970 that President Nixon appointed Justice Stevens to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. After 5 years of service there, he was elevated to the Supreme Court. His service to this country should be remembered, and he gets our thanks. On behalf of a grateful nation, I send my gratitude to him for his unique and important service to this country. In evaluating a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, we in the Senate exercise a solemn obligation. It is a rare time in our constitutional democracy when the three branches come together in one proceeding. One of those is the unfortunate proceeding of impeachment. Thankfully, that is not why we are here. But the other is this proceeding--a proceeding when the President submits for consideration a judicial nominee who is then evaluated by this body under the advice and consent clause of article II, section 2, clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution. That clause reads, in part: [The President] shall have Power, by and with Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States. . . . While we do have that advice-and-consent role on a normal occasion for those other officers, for judges of the lower courts, for ministers and the like, it is a rare occurrence when this body has the honor and opportunity to evaluate a Supreme Court nominee. Because it is a rare occurrence and because this is a lifetime appointment to the head of one of the branches of our coequal government, we have a solemn responsibility to do our job and understand what our job is. In preparing for this responsibility of providing advice and consent and in being a lawyer who wanted to do a good job and be lawyerly about this work, I took the opportunity to try to study up on what our opportunity and responsibility is in this confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice. What do these terms ``advice and consent'' mean and what is our responsibility and how do we undergo that responsibility to fulfill our constitutional obligation? Certainly, in order to fulfill it, we must understand it. What does advice and consent mean? Advice certainly means to provide information, counseling, and to give some feedback to the President of the United States as to a nominee. It seems to be more of the role of a counselor than anything else. But of the two words, it is not the most weighty. The most weighty of the two is consent. In fact, the advice-and- consent function is not found within the enumerated legislative powers. Article I of the Constitution holds those responsibilities. Advice and consent is found in article II, which enumerates the powers of the executive branch, of the President. Advice and consent is shown as a limitation on the President's power. The President cannot just put whomever he or she wishes on a court. He can only do so with the advice and consent of this body. In fact, our Founders did not place this responsibility in both the House and the Senate. They solely put that responsibility among the Members of this body. ``Consent'' being the operative and, in my mind, meaningful term because without our consent, the nominee is not confirmed. Our responsibility is not trivial, and we are certainly not here to be a mere rubberstamp on the President's nomination. It is our obligation to thoroughly evaluate and provide that consent because, but for our consent, the nominee will not be seated. How do we execute that responsibility? What does it mean to provide consent and how should we do it? Certainly, we have to look at the nominee and the applicant. We have to see that the person will be a person of integrity, that they are thoughtful, that they have experience, and that they will uphold the obligations of a Supreme Court Justice. Last May, when I started my work of trying to evaluate how I would fulfill my constitutional obligation and started to do some reading of prior confirmation proceedings, the writings of Senators who have come before me, I came upon what I believe is a four-part criteria to evaluate a nominee to the Nation's highest Court. It should be stressed how important a position this is. There are only nine Justices who sit atop the judicial branch, and they are appointed for life. There is no other portion of government where this is true, to be head of a coequal branch for life--Justice Stevens serving 35 years on the U.S. Supreme Court. What criteria should we use? I propose the following: One, a nominee should present a robust body of work. Why? Because there needs to be something for us to evaluate. We need to have the ability, in providing our consent function, to look at a body of work so we can properly execute our responsibility. This does not mean, nor do I believe, that it is required for a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court that they have been a judge. In fact, our Constitution provides no requirements for a judge to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. This is unlike what we see in the Congress. There are specific requirements of how old you have to be to be in the House, to be in the Senate, how many years you must be a resident of this country. The same requirements apply to the President. There are no requirements for a judge as it is stated in the Constitution, for a Justice of the Supreme Court. In evaluating that there are no requirements, we certainly need to know what the Justice stands for and how the Justice will fulfill his or her obligations on the Court. Without a body of work, that is very difficult to evaluate. While there is no requirement that one be even, in fact, a lawyer, although every person who has been confirmed has been a lawyer, and there is no requirement that you be a judge, if you are not a judge, you do not have a robust body of work for us to evaluate. That makes it more difficult on our part to make a decision of whether we should give our consent and, I suggest, it provides an additional burden to the nominee to be forthcoming when answering questions. Since we do not have a body of work to evaluate, since we cannot look at prior decisions that a judge has handed down, to know how a judge ruled in the past and, therefore, glean how the judge will rule in the future, that nominee must be forthcoming so we can hear how he or she will do his or her job as a Justice. Second, the nominee must demonstrate an unfailing fidelity to the text of the Constitution and proper restraint against the temptation to expand judicial power. Why do we find this important? I will talk about this more in a minute. It is because we have a separation of powers and checks and balances that were imbued in our Constitution by our Founders. They intended for our government to be counterbalanced by each branch--the legislative, the judicial, and the executive. It is the beauty of the Constitution that no branch will exert too much authority because it will be checked by the other, each branch having checks on the other. Furthermore, sometimes forgotten, is that the Federal Government is part of a federalist society. We are a Republic, and the Federal Government is only one piece of the governmental structure. The rest are the governments of the States and the powers and rights which are left to the people under our Constitution. Our Founders sought checks and balances between the Federal Government and the State governments and the people as well. A nominee must understand that the judiciary cannot expand its role beyond the confines our Founders intended. In fact, we know our Founders intended for the judiciary not to serve as a legislative branch because in article II, the legislative power is vested solely in the Congress. For a judge or Justice to take on a legislative role, to not have a firm adherence to the law as written, violates the separation of powers, violates the rights and responsibilities of the Congress. Third, the nominee must make determinations about the meaning of Federal law and the Constitution and apply the law as written, again, because of that separation of powers. Fourth, the nominee must understand the Court's role in stopping unconstitutional intrusions by the elected branches. Our Founders knew each branch of government would seek to expand the scope of its power. That is the beauty of the checks and balances system--to keep each body in check. They did not want a strong executive. They worried about the tyranny of the executive. But they also worried about the tyranny of the legislative. Nor did they hope the judiciary would become too strong. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78 that ``it is the courts that will serve as the bulwarks of limiting Constitution against legislative encroachment.'' Our Founders designed this intricate system of checks and balances to keep all the governmental bodies and institutions in check, to not expand to the detriment of another body, to not expand to the detriments of our rights and the rights of the States. In evaluating Solicitor General Kagan--and I note also in comparing her to Justice Stevens--I find she does not have the experience that gives us the opportunity to evaluate her work, to determine what kind of judge or Justice she would be. In preparing for this decision, I went back and I read a book that was written by one of our predecessors, Senator Paul Simon. It was a book he published in 1992. The book is called ``Advice and Consent.'' The book concerns the confirmation hearings of Justice Bork and Justice Thomas. Interestingly, in this book--and it is a very fine book and I commend anyone who is interested in this topic to read it--there is a foreward in the book by Laurence Tribe, the famous constitutional scholar, at the time the Tyler Scholar of Constitutional Law at Harvard University, with whom I believe Solicitor General Kagan served when she was the dean of Harvard Law School. In this foreward, I think that Professor Tribe provides a very cogent and focused analysis of the problem we experience in the modern confirmation setting where nominees fail to provide sufficient answers to questions. Why this is so troubling with Solicitor General Kagan is because we do not have the body of work to evaluate. It has been the course, in the past 20 years, that it seems all the nominees to the Supreme Court give these sort of vapid answers. That is not my phrase. That is, in fact, her phrase. We will talk about that in a moment--vapid answers that come from questions from the Senators on the Judiciary Committee, failing to articulate what your position is on a particular point of law, all the more concerned when we have no record to evaluate. Here is what Professor Tribe said: The Court and the Nation cannot afford any more ``stealth'' nominees who steadfastly decline to answer substantive questions the Senate might pose on the oft-invoked ground that the matter might come before the Court during their possible tenure. This easy refrain does not provide a valid excuse for stonewalling, no matter how frequently it is repeated . . . On the contrary, the adversary system works best when all concerned, and not just those who nominated the judge, know what there is to be known about the judge's starting predispositions on a pending issue. And let's stop pretending that such predispositions do not exist. It hardly fosters fairness to claim that a mind is completely neutral when in fact a lifetime of experiences has unavoidably inclined it one way or another and to other, and to equate an open mind with a blank one insults the intelligence of all concerned. He goes on to say: A nominee whose record is too pale to read with the naked eye or whose views are shrouded in fog too dense for anything but the klieg lights of national television to pierce is probably ill-suited for a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court in any event. Let me repeat: A nominee whose record is too pale to read with the naked eye or whose views are shrouded in fog too dense . . . is probably ill-suited for a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court. Mr. President, unfortunately, that describes Solicitor General Kagan. She is an extremely bright and articulate woman. She has a tremendous academic background. I commend her for her public service--of serving in a Presidential administration. I commend her for serving as dean of a law school. That too is public service. But our job is to evaluate these nominees, and we cannot evaluate them if they have no record of how they would rule or how they have ruled, and they provide no sufficient information when they come before the Judiciary Committee of this body. Without that information, how can we faithfully provide our consent? There is a notion in the law of consent needing to be informed. In fact, it can't really be consent in the law if it is not informed. Yet Solicitor General Kagan, without a judicial record and a failure to directly and clearly answer questions, as Professor Tribe writes, fails to give us the information to allow us to give consent in an informed way. We need to look no further than her own words when she wrote, in a spring 1995 Law Review article. It was a comment on a book that was talking about the confirmation mess, and then-Professor Kagan, also bemoaning the state of confirmation hearings, said: When the Senate ceases to engage nominees in meaningful discussion of legal issues, the confirmation process takes on an air of vacuity and farce, and the Senate becomes incapable of either properly evaluating nominees or appropriately educating the public. She described the process before the Judiciary Committee as becoming vapid, and, unfortunately, even though she should know more than anyone else--because those were her words, the charade that she condemned in her article in the 1990s--she engaged in the same charade when she appeared before the Judiciary Committee. ``A nominee whose record is too pale to read with the naked eye or whose views are too shrouded in fog . . . is probably ill-suited for a lifetime appointment,'' said Professor Tribe. Ms. Kagan also has very little practical experience. Unlike Justice Stevens, who practiced law for 20 years, Ms. Kagan practiced law for 2. Never having served before as a judge, we don't know her record. She said that the confirmation proceedings in the past had an ``air of vacuity and farce,'' a ``vapid and hollow charade.'' Instead of following her own admonishment, she participated in that charade. She engaged in the same vapid exercise that she condemned. The burden was on Ms. Kagan to demonstrate how she would rule as a judge. With no record for us to evaluate, she could not engage in the same charade that she had previously condemned and leave us with nothing to know as to how she would act in a lifetime appointment--an appointment, if Justice Stevens' record is any sort of indication of how long a ``Justice Kagan'' might serve, for 35 years. I have an obligation, Mr. President, under article 2, section 2 to provide advice and consent, and I cannot do so where the nominee cannot or does not provide a record that my colleagues and I can evaluate. We are left without a solid basis upon which to judge how she would judge. During the Judiciary Committee proceedings, she said she would give binding precedent all the respect of binding precedent. That is meaningless. It gives us no indication of how she might make her decisions, how she might rule. So I am left with these serious concerns. I am left with the serious concerns about her commitment to uphold the constitutional principle of a limited government, the fundamental protections of the second amendment, and placing law ahead of her personal and political views. I spoke before about one of these criteria being the fidelity to the Constitution and the principle of a limited Federal Government. ``Thomas Jefferson warned us that our written constitution can help secure liberty only if it is not made a blank paper by construction.'' Ms. Kagan testified that her whole life provided indications of what kind of judge or Justice she would be. And in that statement I agree. As mentioned earlier, before law school, when she was writing a thesis at Oxford, she stated that ``new times and circumstances demand a different interpretation of the Constitution,'' and that judges may ``mold and steer the law in order to promote certain ethical values and achieve certain social ends.'' That is not what the Founders intended for a Justice of the Supreme Court. In that same thesis, she wrote: The judge's own experience and values become the most important element in the decision. If that is too results oriented, so be it. Mr. President, that is a violation of the constitutional requirement that all power legislative be vested in this Congress. I was concerned about the colloquy that she had with Senator Coburn. In fact, it was something I discussed with her in person prior to her testimony before the Judiciary Committee. This colloquy was about the commerce clause and whether or not it was limited. Remember that our Founders intended for the Federal Government to be limited in its powers. That is why there are enumerated powers in article 1. They are not plenary; they are limited by their number. Senator Coburn asked her about sponsoring a bill, about requiring Americans to eat their fruits and vegetables, and it got a response from Solicitor General Kagan that it ``sounds like a dumb law.'' But Senator Coburn asked whether or not it would be constitutional and she failed to provide an answer. Senator Coburn then put the meat on the bones and asked: What if I said that eating three fruits and three vegetables would cut health care costs by 20 percent? Now we're into commerce. And since the government says that 65 percent of all the health care costs [are because of health care], why isn't that constitutional? No real meaningful answer to give clarity of how Solicitor General Kagan as Justice Kagan would rule. Mr. President, the Federal Government has expanded its powers beyond what our Framers intended--far beyond what our Framers intended. James Madison, in Federalist 45, said: The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. But that is not how our constitution is modernly interpreted. We are away from what our Founders intended. We are away from the clear meaning of the words of the Constitution. And Solicitor General Kagan doesn't tell us that the commerce clause has a limit, in her view. And it is through the commerce clause that this Congress and Congresses in the past have sought to enter and to invade every portion of life in this country--things in which our Founders never intended the Federal Government to be involved. It appears Ms. Kagan has this same view of an expansive Federal Government--a Federal Government that makes States its dependents and apparatuses thereto, a Federal Government that has no limits, a Federal Government that can invade every portion of our lives, a Federal Government that is too vast, too expensive and beyond what our Founders intended. I am also concerned about Solicitor General Kagan's views on the right to bear arms enumerated in the second amendment. I think she has too little regard for some of our Constitution's most fundamental protections. As a law clerk, she was dismissive of the second amendment, saying she was not sympathetic to the amendment. During the Clinton administration, she developed numerous anti-second amendment initiatives. In her confirmation process for Solicitor General, she declined to comment on second amendment rights. There was a discussion earlier of my friend and colleague from Iowa talking about natural rights. I think it is important for us to remember the setting upon which our Framers brought this constitution to bear. There were the Articles of Confederation--a loose arrangement between the States where there was no central government. The Founders took it upon themselves to seek to enact a stronger Federal system but a system that, as the 9th amendment, the 10th amendment and other provisions of the Constitution show, leaves rights to the States and to people; that enumerates specific powers of the Federal Government. Remember, initially, there were not even the first 10 amendments. Remember, there was a confirmation battle as to whether the States individually would ratify the Constitution. There were anti-Federalists who thought the constitution had gone too far and given too much authority to the Federal Government, and our Founders Hamilton, Madison and Jay, in writing the Federalist Papers, had to make the case of some form of central government. But they gave the assurances that most of the obligations to govern would be left to the people and the States. Ms. Kagan doesn't have that view, it appears. Finally, I am concerned about the way that then-Dean Kagan treated the military as the dean of Harvard Law School. I think it is outrageous that the U.S. military was not allowed to recruit on campus while she was the dean of the law school. And this idea that the military could go through another part of the school--the Veterans Association but not the Career Services Office--is outrageous. The Veterans Association had no funding, no office. It was not set up to allow law students to interview with the military. Some have called this the same as ``separate but equal.'' It was not even equal. It is outrageous. It is outrageous beyond the fact that Harvard received Federal dollars. It is outrageous that a premier institution such as Harvard University, one of our first institutions of higher learning, known throughout the world as being an exceptional school, would not allow the military the benefit of its students to serve by being interviewed on campus, in a regular on-campus process in which every law firm or other agency of government is allowed to participate. And that is a decision that she presided over. That is an error of judgment. But I also believe that it was an error of law. In 1996, Congress passed the Solomon Amendment allowing the Secretary of Defense to deny Federal grants to institutions of higher education if they prohibited ROTC or military recruitment on campus. Under the Harvard Law School antidiscrimination policy, the military was banned from utilizing its services, and it was concluded that, therefore, those Federal funds would be suspended. Ms. Kagan refused to abide by that Solomon Amendment when she was the dean. In 2002, Harvard was informed by the Department of Defense its practice of letting military recruiters contact students through the Harvard Law School Veterans Association, but not the Office of Career Services, violated the Federal law. In response, Dean Kagan filed a brief challenging the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment, which is her right--not a good decision but her right. The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit enjoined the law. And Ms. Kagan reinstated Harvard's, in my view, discriminatory policy. Now, you might say: Well, the court ruled; therefore, it was appropriate for her, if she so chose, to go back to the previous policy because that had been enjoined. However, Massachusetts is not in the Third Circuit, it is in the First. An appellate decision in the Third Circuit is not binding on the First Circuit. If Dean Kagan wanted to go to court again and seek to have it applied, that would have been one thing. What she did instead is unilaterally follow a decision that had no effect upon her and, in my view, violates the law. Again, I think Solicitor General Kagan is an extremely intelligent person, an articulate person. I think that she has a commendable career of public service. But she has failed to meet the burden that is required of someone with no judicial record. She has failed to inform us of how she would judge as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. With no record to read, there is heightened scrutiny on the nominee, and we did not have the opportunity to have full and forthcoming answers from Ms. Kagan. Instead, what we had was the same vapid and vacuous answers that she condemned in her law review article in the mid-1990s, the same type of charade Lawrence Tribe said makes somebody ill-suited for a lifetime appointment, with such a thin record. If perhaps she would have been more forthcoming, I would have been able to come to a different conclusion. But when you take the lack of her record, her inability to provide clear responses to questions to give us indication of how she would rule, and the concerns about the second amendment, about how she treated the military at Harvard, and her views about the activism of the Court--in light of all those reasons, I will be voting no on Ms. Kagan's confirmation. I yield the floor.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Madam President, it has been my privilege to work on the measure that is before the Senate, the small business bill that has been championed by my friend from Louisiana, Senator Landrieu, that Ms. Cantwell, the Senator from Washington, has been so instrumental working on, as well as my friend, Senator Klobuchar, with whom I worked on the export portion of this bill. To the American people at home watching this, this must be a rather confusing process. Why is it that there is a piece of legislation, a Small Business Promotion Act, that has bipartisan support--why is it not being voted on today? Frankly, there are a lot of things around here we cannot agree on--the majority of things, it seems. But this is something we can agree on. It is going to be good for America. I was pleased to sponsor the amendment along with my friend from Louisiana, the LeMieux-Landrieu amendment, which is the lending facility. It is a provision that will bring money to local community banks to loan money to the people on Main Street--not Wall Street bankers but the bankers you see at Rotary or Kiwanis or at church or synagogue who loan to the auto mechanic, to the dentist, to the hair stylist, to the people working in your local communities. In my home State of Florida, that is the vast majority of our businesses--nearly 2 million small businesses in Florida, small businesses that are struggling in the worst economy anyone can remember, the worst economy in Florida since the Great Depression. Today I saw a report out of Florida Trend, one of our leading business magazines, saying that for the first half of the year, Florida now leads the country in home foreclosures. We are No. 1 behind on payments on our mortgages. Our unemployment rate is 11.4 percent, but that does not truly capture how bad the situation is because that unemployment rate is a moving average over time, and after a certain period of time when you have been out of work, you are no longer counted as unemployed because those who make these statistics believe you are not actively in the job market anymore. The truth of it is, if you walk down the street in my home State of Florida, you have a 1-in-5 chance, if you see an able-bodied adult, that they are unemployed or underemployed. Twenty percent is the real number of people who don't have a job or don't have enough of a job. The people in my State are hurting. This is a bipartisan bill and it should pass. I am hopeful our leaders, Leader Reid and Leader McConnell, who are meeting right now, are going to come to an agreement on amendments. Let me break this down for the American people so they can understand what is going on. Our friends on the other side of the aisle, the Democrats, are in the majority. They have 59 votes. They can control the agenda. We, here on the Republican side, want to offer amendments to bills, but we can only offer amendments by agreement. The majority that is in charge only lets us offer amendments if they agree to it, so we have little bargaining power. But we believe we should have the opportunity to make bills better. So we are going to have some amendments to this bill, and we should have some amendments to this bill. You know what. If they are good ideas, the power of our ideas will prevail and the other side will agree to them and if they are not, they will not. If the American people, later on, think we have better ideas, maybe they will send more of us here and if they don't, maybe they will send more of them. But we should have the opportunity to offer our amendments. On the other side, they are going to have some amendments, too, and that is fine, but they should be relevant to this bill. They should not be leftover appropriations on issues that have nothing to do with small business just because this is the train leaving the station and some Members of this body want to see their stuff put on it. I understand why they want to get things done, but this small business bill should pass, it should pass with relevant amendments from both sides, and we should do it today. We should do it today and pass it and send it over to the House so the House can pass it and send it to the President and he could sign it. I say that as a Republican because, before I am a Republican, I am a Floridian and I am an American, and this bill is good for our country and it is especially good for my State. I was pleased that the leader, Leader Reid, came down and made some changes in his proposal. I am heartened he is meeting with Leader McConnell right now. I hope they can work this out, because if they cannot work this out, shame on us. Shame on us if we cannot get this done when there is bipartisan support for this bill, a bill that will cut taxes for small businesses providing much needed credit and lending for local community banks to lend to small businesses without increasing taxes and without increasing the debt or deficit. When do we get to do that around here? Not too often--we do not. I have tried to work in good faith with my friends on the other side to facilitate the negotiations today to get us to a place where we can have reasonable amendments, where the rights of the minority will be protected and in the same vein we can still get this bill passed and I hope we can do so because we have good people on the other side of the aisle who I know want to get this done. I remain hopeful. I thank Senator Landrieu and Senator Cantwell. I see my friend from Rhode Island, whom I also thank for his good work on this bill, and I hope today we will get this done with a reasonable accommodation so we can help the American people.

Mr. LeMIEUX. I am pleased to.

Mr. LeMIEUX. That reminds me, my friend, if I may, reminds me of the saying that half the truth is no truth at all. Yes, that part is true. But the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say, is if this bill were not loaded with all these appropriations bills that have nothing to do with small business, we would be on this bill right now and it would be passed. The keys to the kingdom lie with the majority. This deal could be done right now and we could get to this bill.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, today I wish to give special recognition to the life and work of a friend and fellow Floridian, former U.S. Navy RADM LeRoy Collins, Jr . I had the pleasure of working closely with Admiral Collins during my time with the Governor's office and more recently on federal issues improving health care for veterans. He was a fifth-generation Floridian who came from a long line of public servants and will always be remembered for his commitment to the military community and our State. A native of Tallahassee, FL, LeRoy Collins received his commission from the U.S. Naval Academy in June 1956 and began a long career with the Navy. His first tour was aboard the amphibious transport USS Calvert, followed by a Submarine Officer's Basic Course in Groton, CT. Later, he served aboard the submarine USS Chivo. Through hard work, dedication and sacrifice, LeRoy earned the rank of rear admiral. Admiral Collins served as an analyst for Naval Intelligence in Washington, DC and as a ballistic missile weapons officer aboard the nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine USS James Madison. After a brief tour working missile test operations at Naval Ordnance Training Unit in Cape Canaveral, he transferred to the Navy Reserve in 1966. While a naval reservist, Admiral Collins served as commanding officer of the coastal minesweeper USS Thrush and later as commander of various Navy Reserve submarine units. During his time, he was the Navy's liaison to the Florida National Guard and also commanding officer of the Navy liaison unit at U.S. Readiness Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, FL. The admiral served as Commander, Naval Reserve Readiness Command, Region 8 and later as Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Reserve) for Logistics, Pentagon, until his retirement from the Navy Reserve as a two-star rear admiral in October, 1990. Throughout his service in the Navy Reserve, Admiral Collins was also a businessman. He spent time with the Florida Power & Light Company and IBM. He was the founding president of Financial Transaction Systems, Inc., and president of Telecredit Service Center, Inc. In addition, he served as president of Dynamic Realty of Tampa, Inc., was chairman of Gateway Holdings, Inc., and served as president of the Armed Forces Financial Network. I wish to take this opportunity to pay tribute to Admiral Collins, a pillar of our great State, for his service to our Nation and his commitment to helping Florida's veterans. His work for Florida's veterans, their families and survivors in improving their health and well-being will be greatly missed. Admiral Collins served his country diligently, with pride, and with honor. On behalf of all Floridians, and specifically the nearly 1.8 million veterans who call Florida home, I thank him for his service and know he will be greatly missed.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, today I honor a true American hero, Mr. Pius Bannis. Mr. Bannis is the field office director for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services stationed in the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. During the darkest moments of the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010, that destroyed Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Mr. Bannis bravely performed his duties. As we know, children are the most vulnerable victims of any disaster--let alone the tragic January 12, 2010, earthquake causing devastation of monumental proportions in Haiti. In the immediate aftermath of this tragedy, Mr. Bannis selflessly worked around the clock to ensure hundreds of orphaned Haitian children were removed from harm's way and placed in a safe environment with loving American families. It was during these very emotional moments Mr. Bannis heroically united families but never wavered from his sworn duty of upholding the law as a field office director for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. His heroic actions will afford countless orphaned children an opportunity to build a better life in the wake of this tragedy. Today I wish to recognize Mr. Bannis' extraordinary leadership. I commend him and his colleagues of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for their selfless sacrifices and service to protect the most vulnerable victims of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute and recognition to the Boy Scouts of America as they gather in our Nation's Capital to celebrate their 100th anniversary. The Boy Scouts of America was incorporated on February 8, 1910, by William Dickson Boyce. Over the last century, the Boy Scouts of America has reached more than 114 million young people by combining lifelong values and educational activities with the fun and wonder of the outdoors. Scouting plays an important role in preparing generations of young men for the responsibilities of adulthood. Boys learn the importance of respect and community service. Through scouting activities, Boy Scouts discover the satisfaction of achievement and self-confidence. Today's Scouts embrace a lifelong commitment to service, and embody the values of personal responsibility and self-discipline. They share a love of our environment, an appreciation of diversity, and an idealism and optimism in the future of our country. These are values that must continue to be cultivated and strengthened in communities all across our great Nation. The Boy Scouts of America embody the moral values important to any society, and Scouts and Scout leaders are to be commended for their good work in promoting these values. As found in the Scout's Handbook, ``A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.'' Let us welcome the Boy Scouts of America to Washington, DC, for their 2010 Boy Scout National Jamboree and recognize their enormous contributions to our country. I commend the Boy Scouts of America organization for a century's worth of service and commitment to instilling the finest values in America's future leaders.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. I again thank my colleague from Louisiana and all my other colleagues. I see the Senators from Washington and Minnesota, who have worked on this bill are here. I think this is a very important piece of legislation, and that is why I have worked in a bipartisan way with my friend from Louisiana, who has been a leader on this bill and has put this bill together. I know this is not without controversy. Some of my colleagues were here earlier, and they do not support this bill. I have enormous respect for my friends from South Dakota and Tennessee, and I appreciate their perspective, but I respectfully disagree with it. I think it was Ronald Reagan who said that if we agree on something 90 percent of the time, that means we are friends, and we are friends. I have tremendous respect for their views. But this bill does not bring with it, I believe, the problems my friends pointed out. This legislation helps small businesses, and in my State of Florida, that really matters because while we are the fourth largest State in the country, we are a small business State, not a big business State. We do have our share of big businesses, and we will grow more in the future. But because of Florida's meteoric rise in population over the past 20 or 30 years, we don't have those Fortune 100 companies headquartered in our State as other States do. Instead, we are a collection of small businesses, for the most part--nearly 2 million small businesses in Florida. But during this recession--the worst recession Florida has seen in anyone's recent memory--those small businesses have been hurting. When I drive down the interstates and the State roads of Florida and I go past the small strip shopping centers and small buildings that house those small businesses that employ so many Floridians, unfortunately I now see a lot of dark and vacant buildings because these businesses have not been able to make it through this recession. Our unemployment in Florida is nearly 12 percent, and it may be worse than that because many no longer seek employment. If you figure the underemployed along with the unemployed, one in five adult Floridians who are able to work either doesn't have a job or doesn't have enough of a job. We are No. 2 in mortgage foreclosures, and we are No. 1 in the country in being behind on our mortgage payments. So Florida is hurting. There are signs that things are getting better, but we are struggling. And more than perhaps any other State, our small businesses need help. This bill does that in a commonsense way, and let me explain why. The bill provides $30 billion for local community banks. This isn't Goldman Sachs, this isn't AIG, this is the banker down the street--the one you see at church or synagogue, the one in your Kiwanis or Rotary, the one who shops in the same stores you do. This is not some Wall Street banker but your local banker. So the bill provides $30 billion for local banks to make loans to small businesses. The first reason it is not like the other program that was passed to bail out Wall Street is it is optional. The Treasury Secretary and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve are not going to get a bunch of local banks in a boardroom one night and pressure them into taking this money, as was done with TARP. It is voluntary. If they do not want it, they do not have to take it. Second of all, this isn't going to increase the deficit. In fact, unlike most programs here in Washington--and my friends on the other side know I come to the floor all the time worried about the way we spend money in this Congress, worried about our debt and deficit, worried about what it will mean for our kids and our future--this piece of legislation is actually going to return more than $1 billion to the Treasury over time--so not a deficit, a surplus. Again, the program is voluntary, it doesn't create a debt or deficit, and it doesn't create big government. It puts the money in the hands of community bankers to lend to small businesses, the folks who create jobs. My friend from Louisiana had a chart up earlier reflecting that 65 percent of all jobs are created by small businesses. I believe that number is far greater in my home State of Florida. So who supports this amendment on which we have been working? Well, in Florida, the Florida Bankers Association does. Alex Sanchez, the president and CEO, wrote me and said: This bill will help create jobs for Floridians by increasing the loans to Florida's economic engine: Small businesses. Who else supports it? Camden Fine, the president and CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America. He said: This legislation is a positive for our community banking sector and to our small business customers who are vital to job creation and the economic recovery. Robert Hughes, National Association for the Self-Employed, says: The National Association for the Self-Employed, on behalf of our 200,000 member businesses, strongly supports creating the Small Business Lending Fund, which we hope will alleviate the funding and credit freeze faced by small businesses by expanding loan resources. Barney Bishop, president of Associated Industries of Florida, which represents businesses throughout Florida, says that this act moving through the Senate right now will help small businesses and ``lead to jobs, jobs, and more jobs.'' David Hart, executive vice president of the Florida Chamber of Commerce, says: Their ability to access capital is critical for economic recovery and job growth. The Florida Chamber of Commerce Small Business Council believes the Small Business Lending Fund will enhance the ability of small business owners to create jobs and transition Florida to a new and sustainable economy. Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, writes in support of this bill: The United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which represents more than 200 local Hispanic chambers and serves as the national advocate for nearly three million Hispanic- owned businesses in our country, supports passage of the Small Business Lending Fund Act. These are Main Street groups. These are business groups that support this bill. So with all due respect to my colleagues who spoke before, this is good for business, and it is done in a measured and focused way that empowers the private sector. This is not big government. This doesn't run a deficit and it doesn't increase taxes. In fact, to my friends who are supporting the base piece of legislation but may not want to support the amendment, they should know that our amendment cuts $2 billion in taxes out of the base bill. So we are going to cut taxes. The base bill has a lot of other cuts in taxes for small businesses, and I talked about that when I spoke earlier today. This is going to be good for Floridians and Americans by getting needed capital to these small businesses that are struggling. That is why I support it. And I hope my friends on this side of the aisle will look at this bill seriously. I hope they think enough of me to look at it and give it a thorough evaluation because I know it is sort of a strange position I am in here. There may not be a lot of support for this on this side of the aisle, but my job representing Florida is to do what is right by the people I represent and to do what is right for the people of this country, and I believe this bill will do just that. It is not a perfect bill. No piece of legislation is. It will not solve the entire problem. No piece of legislation can. But I believe it will help. It will help in Florida, and it will help across the States of this great country, and that is why I support it. In conclusion, Mr. President, I hope we can vote on this bill. I know the leadership is going back and forth trying to figure out a way to have some more amendments on this bill, and I believe that is the only obstacle to voting on this bill. I believe amendments should be allowed on this bill--a reasonable number--so we can get to it and we can pass it. Let's pass this thing before the weekend. Let's not wait until next week. Let's consider it, let's get it done, and let's help these small businesses. Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my time to the Senator from Louisiana.

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I wish to thank my colleague from Louisiana, Senator Landrieu, the chair of the Small Business Committee, who has been a great leader on this topic. It has been my pleasure to work with her on this measure to try to help our struggling small businesses. I think Florida, maybe more than any other State, relies and depends upon its small businesses. We are the fourth largest State in the country, but we are a State that grew so fast, so quickly, that even though we have 18.5 million people, we do not have a lot of big businesses. The businesses in Florida--nearly 2 million of them--are small. Not one Fortune 100 company is headquartered in Florida. Now we are trying to get there--we have a couple that are on the cusp--and we will. But Florida had this meteoric rise in population over the past 20 or 30 years. It was built on construction and growth and tourism and all the reasons why people want to come to our beautiful State. But the jobs that have been created over the years are from small firms. They are the restaurant, the local diner, the beach shop, the tailor, the laundromat, the auto mechanic. These are the businesses that are creating the jobs in Florida. Many of them are centered around the service economy. We are doing a lot to diversify our economy. But the truth of it is, they are the mainstream of Florida's economy, and they are struggling. This is the worst recession in anyone's memory in Florida, even worse than the recession we had in the 1970s. Our unemployment rate peaked over 12 percent. It is still at 11.5 percent. While this sounds strange, 11.5 percent may not be better than 12 percent in this circumstance because what happens on unemployment rolls is that after a certain amount of time, people drop off and are no longer even looking for work. The truth of it is, if you are walking down the street in Florida and you see another adult walking down the street who is not retired, there is a one in five chance that person is unemployed or underemployed. Times are tough. There are some signs of life. Some things are getting better. But for Floridians, this is the most difficult economy we have ever experienced. We have the second highest mortgage foreclosure rate. I read recently that our folks are No. 1 in the country in being behind in their mortgage payments. So our small businesses, the creators of jobs, the folks who, as Senator Landrieu said, create 65 percent of the jobs nationwide--I bet you that number is much higher in Florida--need help. This bill is going to help those small businesses. It is not going to cure the problem overnight. Let's be realistic. But it is going to help. The base bill does a lot of good things for small businesses. There are a lot of tax cuts in this bill. It is going to exclude small business capital gains by 100 percent. The bill will temporarily increase further the amount of the exclusion from the sale of qualifying small business stock. It is going to help something on carryback interest. It means a lot to small businesses. It will extend the 1-year carryback for general business credits to 5 years for certain small businesses. This alternative minimum tax hurts our small businesses. This bill will allow certain small businesses to use all types of general business credits to pay less taxes. When they purchase equipment, it is going to allow them to accelerate that depreciation. When small businesses get to keep more of their money, they get to keep more of their employees, and they get to hire new ones. That is just in the base bill. This amendment Senator Landrieu and I and others are working on is going to put money into our local community banks that will be lent to small businesses. There has been a lot of confusion about the bill, and some of my friends and colleagues on my side of the aisle do not like it. I hope they are going to come around. There is a concern that this is going to be similar to what happened in the TARP bill. But these two bills are very different, and this amendment is very different. Let me explain why. TARP went to the big banks that were failing at the end of 2008, a lot of which were selling mortgage-backed securities and other exotic investments they should not have been selling, and they put their assets at risk and, therefore, put the American economy at risk. This has nothing to do with that. These are small banks. This is the banker you know down the street, the banker who is at your rotary or at your Kiwanis, whom you see at church or synagogue. This is not some Goldman Sachs banker. This is your local community banker who loans to the laundromat, the tailor, the construction business--the folks who employ people in your hometown. This program is optional. No bank has to take it. If they are a small bank, though, if they have assets under $10 billion, they will get an ability to get some more money they can lend out to small businesses that create jobs. That is not a partisan issue. We all should support that. The money that comes back in is going to be repaid, and not only are we not going to increase the deficit or the debt, as my colleague from Louisiana just said, the Federal Government will actually make money. That is not something we hear a lot about in Washington. So it is not going to increase the deficit. It is not going to increase the debt. It is not going to increase taxes. It is going to lend money to local banks, to loan that money to small businesses, to help them in this difficult time. When I drive down the streets of Florida--whether it is in Orlando, Tampa, Pensacola, Jacksonville, Fort Lauderdale, Naples, all across the State--we have a lot of strip shopping centers. It is the way Florida was built. It is nice. You get to park in front, go in, buy your goods or services, and go home. But you can see them from the roads. When I drive down these main thoroughfares and I look over, what I see are empty buildings--empty buildings--because our small businesses have gone under because they no longer can pay their rent, because they no longer have the customers they used to have, and because they no longer can get lending from their bank. What is particularly of interest to Floridians about this bill--I am sure this is true in other States, such as California and Arizona and Nevada, other States that had this big real estate-based economy that boomed in the past years--what happens to your local businesses is that a lot of times the loans they are getting now are tied to real estate they own. They may own a small parcel in a small building where they operate their business. They have a mortgage against that property. They are paying their payments, but the asset, the real estate, has fallen in value tremendously. So now, when the regulators come in and look at the bank's books to make sure the banks are operating OK, they say: Wait a minute. The mortgage that Joe's business has is technically in default because the asset their loan is against has fallen in value by 50 percent. I have business owners coming to me all the time telling me their banks are putting them in technical default because of the depreciation of the asset which is being held against the loan, which is their real estate. So this is an extreme and an enormous problem in Florida. This bill will put more money in the small banks to help lend to businesses to help them bridge the gap until this economy recovers. I also wish to speak a little bit about another amendment to this bill I have been working on with Senator Klobuchar that talks about export promotion--another issue that is not partisan. We all want more exports. Exports in Florida are a big deal. They are a huge part of our economy, being the gateway to Latin America. We sell our goods overseas. But small businesses, and even medium-sized businesses, whether they are in Illinois or Louisiana or any other place in this country, often don't know the services the Federal Government--the Department of Commerce--can give them to open the doors of trade and allow them to sell their products overseas. So what Senator Klobuchar and I are doing with this amendment, with export promotion--and she has done a tremendous job on this issue--is putting more resources into the Department of Commerce to go back to 2004 levels--because we have had to make a lot of cuts there--in order to provide more folks who can then go out and show businesses how they can sell their wares, to create more sales, so they can grow their business and hire more people. That is good for everybody's economy. I am not a big believer in government spending, but when we are spending to help businesses pursue their economic and entrepreneurial opportunities, that is good for America. In fact, when the Department of Commerce spends $1 million on export promotion, their estimated return is $57 million--a 57-to-1 economic return. So that is just another very good part of this bill. I hope we have an opportunity to vote on this bill. We may even have an opportunity to vote on this bill and this amendment today. Our leadership is working on some other amendments. I hope those opportunities will be provided. This is a bill we all should agree upon. It is a bill that should have 70, 80, or more votes in this Chamber, and we should get it done because it would be good for the small businesses, the job creators of our country, in their time of need. I wish to thank my colleague from Louisiana who has been a great leader on this issue. I wish to thank her for working with me in order to lend my efforts to this bill to help to improve it in ways that I thought would be important for this country and for my home State of Florida. I also wish to recognize my colleague, Senator Klobuchar, who is here. She has done such great work on the export portion of this bill. With that, I will turn back my time to my colleague from Louisiana.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, it is always good to follow my distinguished colleague from Pennsylvania and to hear his comments.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I am here today to talk about the bill the Senate just voted on and passed, the financial regulation overhaul bill. It is, in my mind, a missed opportunity. We had the opportunity to truly address the causes of the financial meltdown and put into place measures that would stop the meltdown from happening the next time. But, unfortunately--as I have seen in about the year's time I have had the privilege to serve in the Senate--it seems it is the predilection of this Congress to take a crisis and then come forward not with a narrowly focused and tailored solution but, instead, a large-ranging, comprehensive bill that creates more government, that creates more bureaucracy, that puts more debt on our system of government, and still fails to address the very problem we should be trying to focus upon. We were supposed to rein in the wild and risky speculative tools and empower our regulators to prevent another crisis. But we did not. I heard Senator Dodd, who I have enormous respect for--and I think he put a tremendous amount of time into this bill, but I heard him on the floor the other day, in giving his sort of summation as to why this bill should be passed, saying this will not stop any future recessions. He is right. He is right because we did not do what we needed to do in order to truly fix the problems that happened back in the 2007-2008 era when we had this tremendous financial meltdown--this meltdown which has depleted trillions of dollars of the net worth of Americans; this meltdown that has led to one of the greatest, if not the greatest, recession since the Great Depression. In my home State of Florida, people are suffering mightily. We have nearly 12 percent unemployment. We are either No. 1 or No. 2--depending upon the month--in mortgage foreclosures, and our people are behind on their mortgage payments more than any other State in the Union. We are a State that has been based, perhaps too much, on growth. So when folks are not coming to build a new home, the contractor does not have a job. When folks are not coming to visit our beaches or our tourist attractions, the restaurateur, the hotelier--they lose their work. So things are very difficult in Florida. This financial crisis stemmed in part from some of the problems we saw in lending, in real estate, and there was no place that was any worse than what happened in Florida. What this bill fails to address: the underwriting standards that should have been in place to stop these so-called ninja loans--``no income, no job.'' They called them ninja loans. Anybody could get one, and people were put into homes they could not afford. Why was that able to happen? It was because there were no underwriting standards. There was no skin in the game for those getting the mortgage. There was no skin in the game for the mortgage broker, who was able to sell off this mortgage to Wall Street, where there was this vast and great demand to bundle these products into mortgage- backed securities, and, for the first time ever, tie our real estate market, our homes--our most important investments--with the financial markets. As soon as that was done, the speculation and the speculators ran wild. This bill does not do enough to prevent that in the future, to provide the real skin in the game that should be needed to trade those mortgage-backed securities. We failed to address those two factors. Perhaps even worse, we failed to address Fannie and Freddie, the government-sponsored entities that stood as silent guarantors to all these mortgages, that let the market have faith and confidence that the government was the backstop to these mortgages that should have never been let. This bill fails to address that. Two of the leading causes of the financial debacle we failed to addressed. Finally, a point we needed to address, and we did: My colleague and friend, who presides over the Senate this afternoon, was the person who was the leading proponent on trying to do something about the rating agencies, and we did do something. I was pleased to work with Senator Cantwell, and I was appreciative of the efforts of Senator Franken, to try to do something about these rating agencies. And we did. That is one good thing about this bill. They are written out of law. These rating agencies compounded the problem because when these mortgages, packed together--mortgages that were not any good, that were not going to get paid, that then got turned into a trading vehicle-- when they went up to Wall Street, these rating agencies that are paid for by the investment banks stamped them with AAA ratings, gave them the ``good housing seal of approval'' and let the world believe they were sound investments. They failed. And lo and behold, we find that the government has given a sanction in law to these rating agencies to be the determiners of creditworthiness--a monopoly, if you will. Well, one good thing this bill does is to strip that out. No longer will they be given that state-sponsored monopoly. Now the marketplace will have to work. Now we will not be so relying upon people who are paid by the investment banks that did not do their homework and in part caused this crisis. If we would have tackled the GSEs, Fannie and Freddie, and if we would have tackled underwriting standards, I would be here giving a speech today talking about why I voted for the bill. But we only did one of the four things and, unfortunately, now, we have a bill that Wall Street loves. Citigroup loves it. Goldman Sachs loves it. But Main Street is very concerned about it. We are going to make sure that orthodontists are regulated because they, every once in a while, extend credit to their patients. But the folks on Wall Street, who caused these problems, and the underlying cause of the debacle, the mortgage problem, the underwriting problem, and the Fannie and Freddie problem do not get addressed. According to the study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, this bill will create a huge new governmental bureaucracy: 70 new Federal regulations through the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, 54 new Federal regulations through the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, 11 new Federal regulations through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, 30 through the Federal Reserve, 205 through the SEC. You may say: Well, that sounds good. We need more regulations, right? There was a problem. But if the regulation does not go after the problem that caused the debacle, what do the regulations do? We are in a situation right now where business in this country is frozen. It is frozen solid because of the actions of the Congress and this administration who are doing so much to this economy that big business and small business alike do not believe they can hire new workers. There is so much uncertainty in the marketplace. I hear this from small businesspeople in Florida where we have 1.9 million small businesses, to workforce centers which are trying to get people back to work, to incubators which are trying to grow new jobs, to presidents of chambers of commerce, and other folks I talk to regularly. They tell me business is frozen. Washington is doing so much to the economy they do not know where to turn next. Because they do not know what the future looks like, and because this government is pulling these huge levers on the economy, they believe they cannot make any moves. Because of the health care bill, businesses in Florida, small businesses are telling me they are not going to hire new people because they cannot afford the new regulation. In fact, some of these businesses are not only going to not hire new people, they are going to let people go. This financial regulatory reform bill--a business in Florida has told me its trading desk is going to the Bahamas. Those folks are now going to move and no longer add to our tax base and the wealth and diversity of our community because this regulation is going to put them in a situation where business says it is more beneficial to move them out of the State, out of the country. There are always unintended consequences. When we pull these huge levers on the economy, we create tremendous uncertainty, and business does what business needs to do to keep its people working and to make profits. That is what business is focused on. Those are the jobs that allow all of us to work, to provide for our families. Right now, those jobs are under siege. In a State such as mine where we have nearly 12 percent unemployment, where times are especially difficult, the last thing in the world we need is for the Federal Government to be monkeying with the economy to the extent that businesses can't feel as though they can hire new workers. This financial regulatory reform bill does more of what the health care bill did, and it seems to be the penchant of this Congress. We should be focused on jobs. We should be here day and night trying to find ways to make sure business has the incentives it needs to create new jobs and retain jobs, because we need to get people back to work. This financial regulatory reform bill was a bill we should have had 80 or 90 votes on. It should have been narrowly focused and tailored on the problems that caused the financial debacle of 2008 that we still suffer through. This Chamber needs to get in the business of focusing on what should be done to address the problem and not using every crisis as an excuse to grow government. This new consumer agency we created will cost billions of dollars and will empower a new Federal Government executive, who reports to no board, to be able to make broad and wide-ranging policy decisions across this country and in the boardrooms of the businesses of America's companies. That is how Washington solves a problem these days. We don't fix the SEC which is the agency that is supposed to be doing the job. We don't go in and fire all the people at the Securities and Exchange Commission who should have been on top of this. We create a whole new governmental level of bureaucracy. We layer governmental agency on top of governmental agency, create more power, create bigger government, spend more of your money, and run this country into further debt. We need a change. We need to do things differently. I wish I could have voted for this. I wish it would have focused on the issues it needed to, but, unfortunately, I can't because it does more harm than good. I am appreciative of my colleagues for supporting the amendment I did with Senator Cantwell on the rating agencies, but only in that regard and in a few other regards did we do something that actually helped. Most of what we did didn't fix the problem and it caused more harm than good. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I have come to the floor today to talk about the tragedy affecting my State as well as other States that border the gulf. We are into this crisis now 72 days. On the worst days, there is as much as 60,000 barrels of oil spewing into the gulf. That is more than 4 million barrels of oil. That comes out to about 180 million gallons of oil that has gone into the Gulf of Mexico. We know British Petroleum is at fault. We know they are responsible for paying for the cleanup. But that is just half of the story. The other half is that the Federal Government has a responsibility in times of crises to step up, to manage the crisis, to do everything possible to bring all available resources to address the crisis, to keep the oil from washing up on our beaches in Florida, from getting into our coastal waterways and estuaries. This is not a Republican issue. This is not a Democratic issue. This is an issue of doing the job those who wanted to be elected to these positions in the executive branch now own. When you are the President, you don't get to pick which crisis comes. You don't get to say: I don't choose to address this problem or not address that one. When you are the President, your administration is responsible for trying to solve the problems that happen on your watch. This oilspill has happened on this administration's watch. I want the President to succeed. All Americans do. But the truth is, this administration is failing in keeping this oil off our shores. Why do I say that? I don't say that without some reservation because it is a serious charge. The facts speak for themselves. We have 2,000 skimmers in the United States. These are ships equipped to suck up oil off of the top of the water, bring it into the ship so it can be removed from the area that has been polluted. We got this document last week from the Coast Guard. Admiral Allen, with whom I met with the President weeks ago, said there were 2,000 skimmers. I said to the President: Mr. President, if there are 2,000 skimmers, why aren't those skimmers in the gulf? At that time there were 24 skimmers off the coast of Florida. Today we believe there are about 84. Florida says 84. The Feds say 130. Since this started, we couldn't get a straight answer or one that reconciled between the State and the Feds. The good news is, it has gone up to 84 from 24. But it is still a mere fraction of what it could be. We are told there are 400-some skimmers in the gulf. Around the country, there are 2,000; 1,600 or so in the continental United States. Why are all those skimmers not in the gulf? This is something I have been calling for for weeks. Between Texas and South Carolina there are 850. Why aren't they skimming up the oil? When I raised this issue with the President, he and Admiral Allen said: Those skimmers need to be in other places in case there is an oilspill. That is like me saying that we can't send a fire truck to your house that is on fire because we may need it for another fire. That is not a lot of solace to you if your house is burning down, not a lot of solace to the people of the gulf when this oil is washing up onshore, ruining their lives, keeping them from working, hurting the ecosystem and the environment they love. Something has happened that is good news. The day after I met with the President, along with our Governor and other State and local officials, on day 57 of the crisis, on day 58 Rear Admiral Watson issued a memo, June 16, 2010. I ask unanimous consent that this be printed in the Record.

Mr. LeMIEUX. This is a four-bullet point paragraph document. It reads in part: Pursuant to my authority, I have determined that an adequate number of oil spill response vessels (OSRVs), as defined by 46 U.S.C. Sec. 2101(20a), documented under the laws of the United States and capable of skimming oil cannot be employed in a timely manner to recover the oil released from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. Oil currently discharges into the Gulf of Mexico at unprecedented levels. There are simply not enough U.S. OSRVs capable of skimming oil available to keep up with the pace at which oil flows from the well. Until the flow is stopped, therefore, it is my opinion that domestic and foreign OSRVs capable of skimming oil are needed to provide adequate and timely protection to the Gulf Coast. That is the day after we raised this issue with the President. It comes on day 58. It should not have taken 58 days to figure out they didn't have enough equipment, but better late than never. Monday of this week, the EPA and Coast Guard, on day 70, issued an order releasing these skimmers to come to the gulf from whatever legal requirements keep them where they are, including releasing Navy skimmers. That is good too. Now it is day 70, but it is still progress. I am hoping, and what I am seeing is that these skimmers will come to the gulf soon. We are tracking the skimmers. We got a list of these 2,000. We are calling folks in different places where the skimmers are, different ports around the Southeast and the Mid-Atlantic. We are going to check with them and say: Are your skimmers on the way? We need the help. I was in Pensacola Monday. I have been down there four or five times since the incident began. The oil on the beach is profound. It breaks one's heart to see it. It is a splattering of oil and muck and scum on the beaches. In some places I found what I would call tar rocks about the size of grapefruit that have washed ashore. Who knows what is happening down below the water, how far these plumes of oil go, what it is doing to marine life, to the turtles, to the porpoises, to the fish, what that is going to mean for the people of the gulf coast who rely upon fishing and the seafood industry, what it will mean for our health. When you stand on the beach, you can smell the oil. The people of my State are heartbroken. I can see it in their faces and hear it in their voices. I talked to one woman who works at the pier. I asked her: Are people coming to the beach. She said: People are coming who don't often come. People are coming who want to say goodbye, want to see the beach one last time. That is like having a loved one who is in the hospital on their deathbed, going to see the beach one last time. We have these skimmers, these 2,000. Hopefully they are on the way. That is progress. That is the domestic side of this issue. The other side is foreign skimmers. We have been hearing from the beginning that foreign countries have been offering assistance, reaching out to us the way we help the world because of the goodness of our hearts as Americans when the world has problems. When there is a typhoon in Southeast Asia or an earthquake in Haiti or Chile, the first country there to respond because of the goodness of our people is the United States. We provide help and relief, military sometimes. Other countries have also offered to help us in this, our time of need, sometimes for free. Sometimes those companies want to get paid. Nonetheless, they have offered to help. In fact, there have been 64 offers, according to the U.S. State Department's document of June 29, 2010. We have accepted 7 out of 64. Let me read some of these to you. On June 23, Canada offered skimmers. That is under consideration. On May 13, the European Maritime Safety Agency, still under consideration; on June 22, Japan, under consideration. On April 30, Norway; some have been accepted, other offers are under consideration. On May 2, the Republic of Korea offered skimmers--May 2--under consideration; on June 23, Turkey; on June 22, Qatar; on May 10, the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, under consideration. Mr. President, 64 offers, 57 under consideration. Now, the State Department said yesterday they will accept 22 offers of assistance from 12 countries. Good. Good. It is day 72. Why wasn't it done sooner? I have come to the floor before and shown a picture of a ship called the Swan that was offered on May 6 from a Dutch company. The Swan had the capacity of soaking in thousands of pounds of oil and water, and we never got back to them. We now have the opportunity to bring another ship into our effort. The Swan was a huge ship. As shown in this picture I have in the Chamber, this is A Whale--appropriately named. It is reported to be the largest skimmer in the world. I met with the folks who own the ship yesterday, Taiwanese folks. They have no approval yet to use this ship, but they still steamed this ship from Taiwan to the gulf--it is just getting there now--on their own dime. Imagine what it costs to sail this ship, 300 yards long, bigger than an aircraft carrier. It is the largest oil skimmer ever devised. It is at least 250 times that of these modified fishing boats we are using for skimming. It has a capability to draw as much as 500,000 barrels of oily water per 8- to 10-hour cycle, and it does not have to stop. It puts the ship next to it, which it offloads the oily water to, and it can keep going 24 hours a day. By the way, storms are not a problem either because it is so big. It does not rock in the waves of a storm. So you hear these concerns now with our Tropical Storm Alex in the gulf that certain ships are going to have to stop their efforts. If this ship is allowed to work, it does not have to stop, according to what the owners told me. It is being tested by the Coast Guard either today or tomorrow. Let's hope we use this incredible resource and ones like it because when this oil washes up onshore, when we have failed to respond to the offers of assistance from foreign countries, it is not just oil that is washing up onshore, it is failure. We need every resource, domestic and foreign alike, in the gulf, and we needed them yesterday. In fact, we needed them 50 days ago. It should not have taken this long to marshal this response. I just watched the President of the United States on television. He is in Racine, WI. He gave a speech, a very political speech. He likes to blame the Republicans for everything that has gone wrong in the country. It is all our fault. Well, let me take issue with him on this one point. This is his job. He may not want to be in charge of the United States of America and be the President when we have the worst oilspill we have ever had, but that is part of the job. It is not Thad Allen's job to run this. It is not Janet Napolitano's job. It is not Ken Salazar's job. It is not Jane Lubchenco's job or any other folks who work in the administration. It is the job of the President of the United States. When he ran for President, he said President Bush's response to Katrina was halfhearted and it was half measures. I am not sure he would want this same standard applied to him right now. I know it is fun to give a political speech, but the people in the Gulf of Mexico are suffering, and they need help and they need a President who is on the job managing through problems. Mr. President, being from Florida, we have had a lot of crises in the past several years with hurricanes. In 2004, in 2005, we had 9 or 10 hurricanes come through Florida that devastated us. I got to watch a chief executive officer of our State, our Governor at the time, Jeb Bush, when I was in the Attorney General's Office, manage through problems, overcome obstacles, work 12, 14, 16 hours a day to make things happen, to get results. That is what it takes, and there is no one like the chief executive officer to overcome those obstacles. That is what we need from the President of the United States in this situation. I do not want to see him in Wisconsin giving a political speech. I want to see him in Florida getting these skimmers there, overcoming obstacles, solving problems, managing through this crisis, so we can protect our beaches, protect our estuaries, and protect the way of life for the people of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. This crisis is not over. It may not be on your television as much as it was, but the oil is still spewing out of this well. We hope these relief wells work. We hope they can stop the oil from leaking in the Gulf of Mexico at an unprecedented rate. We still do not know how much is leaking. We hope BP is capturing at least half of that oil now, maybe a little bit more, but we do not know. But every day that goes by that oil leaks in the Gulf of Mexico and washes up on the shore of my State--when I stand on the beach in Pensacola and I cannot see a single skimmer, I wonder where our Federal Government is. We need help. We need some urgency. We need some purpose. I am glad they signed the order this week to let those skimmers come. I am glad we are finally starting to accept foreign skimmers--72 days into the crisis. But I will continue to come to the floor every day until that oil wellhead stops leaking to talk about this issue and bring light and attention to it, to make sure this government is doing everything it can, marshaling every resource possible to keep that oil from coming on our beaches and into our coastal waterways. I will close with this: In Florida, people love the water. It is the reason most people come to Florida. It is not just because of the great way of life. It is not just because of the great climate. It is because of the water. Ninety percent of the people of our State live within 10 miles of the ocean. We have more recreational boaters than any other State in the country. We have more coastline than any other State in the country save Alaska. The water is a way of life to people in Florida. I have had grown men, men I have known and respected my whole life-- not men you would consider emotional or soft--talk about the situation of this oil crisis with me and start to break down and cry. It is that much of an issue for the people of Florida. I want to see our Federal Government rise to the task and do everything possible to solve this problem. With that, Mr. President, I see my colleague is here and I yield the floor to him.

Mr. LeMIEUX

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, yesterday I had the opportunity to be in Pensacola, FL, to look at the impact the oilspill is having on my home State of Florida. I went out in the morning and walked on the beach and saw, unfortunately, the oil that has spewed across our beautiful beach in Pensacola, one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Not only did I see the scattering of droplets of oil across the beach first thing in the morning, I also saw what I will call not just tar balls but tar rocks--rocks the size of grapefruit that had emulsified, almost petrified, and found their way to the shore. Later in the day, I also took another trip to the beach to the place where we get naturally occurring tidal pools just a few feet from where the ocean meets the coastline. In those pools, I could see oil that had seeped into the sand. Now we are to the point where the oil is seeping into the sand faster than it can be cleaned up. The fear is, as the sand washes over that oil, it will be buried and we will continue to discover it for months and perhaps years on end. What effect it will have on the beaches and our ecosystem is unknown. This spill has been going on for 71 days. Throughout this time, I have been calling upon greater Federal response to this tragedy in the gulf--most importantly, the need to have more skimmers off of our shoreline. Amazingly, we have not deployed the full panoply of assets we have in this country to protect our beaches, to protect our coastal waterways, to protect our estuaries. One would think every skimmer in the United States would be in the Gulf of Mexico. One would think every foreign skimmer that has offered assistance would be deployed off our shores. But one would be incorrect in thinking that because it is not the case. When I met with the President 2 weeks ago today in Pensacola, I urged him to bring more skimmers to the gulf coast. At that time, we had about 32 skimmers off the coast of Florida. That number fell to 24 shortly thereafter. It is now, according to the State of Florida, up to 89, according to the incident report today. That is an improvement. The Feds say there are 130. The State number and the Fed number have never matched, so somewhere between 89 and 130 skimmers are off the coast of Florida. We believe there are about 400 skimmers in the Gulf of Mexico alone. That number may sound like a lot, but when one thinks of an area going all the way from Louisiana to Panama City, FL, we look out on the beach, and we don't see a single one. How many skimmers are available to be deployed? We found out last week there are skimmers remaining. As of June 21, in the United States, there were 2,000 skimmers remaining. It sounds as if that is in addition to the 400 in the gulf right now. From Texas, district 8, through the Florida, Georgia, South Carolina district, which is district 7, there are 850 skimmers in whole or in part not being deployed. That makes absolutely no sense. I have been calling for weeks now for this government, this administration to sign an Executive order releasing all skimmers in the United States to come to the Gulf of Mexico to clean up the oilspill. When I talked about this issue with the President, I said to him: We need to get all these skimmers now. If there are 2,000, they need to be in the gulf. They need to be steaming toward the gulf now. There should be an armada of skimmers off the beaches of Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. The response I got was: Some of these skimmers have to stay in place in case there is an oilspill. That is like saying: We can't send a firetruck to your house because there may be a fire burning someplace else. That is not much solace to you if your house is burning down. There is some good news. We have found out that as of yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard, along with the Environmental Protection Agency, have issued an emergency order. The order is signed by Admiral Papp from the Coast Guard and Lisa Jackson, Administrator of EPA. It is a temporary suspension of certain oilspill response time requirements to support the Deepwater Horizon oilspill, the urgently needed immediate relocation of nationwide oilspill response resources to the Gulf of Mexico. It also calls upon the Navy, with which I met earlier last week, to release assets it has. There are legal restrictions that require these skimmers to be in certain places around the country if there is a certain amount of traffic--for example, commercial traffic, the ports, or whatever. We need to keep skimmers in place. This order, which we have been calling on for weeks, releases those skimmers. It says it is done because there is an urgent need. It is not so urgent when we do it on day 70. It is welcomed, but it wasn't done urgently. It says, on page 9 of this order, that this was done in response to a memorandum Admiral Watson of the Coast Guard did on June 16 saying there was an urgent need to reallocate skimmers. I am glad to see that because that is the day after I met with the President in Pensacola. I am glad the President got the word out to the Coast Guard and got them to start working on this order. We got it done. So we hope we will now see skimmers from around the country making their way to the gulf. I have a list today of these 2,000 skimmers and where they are located. I am going to come to the floor every day we are here and track these skimmers to make sure they are getting where they need to go. It is only through efforts by myself and others in the Senate who have called this out, who have said: Where are these skimmers, that we have gotten the sense of urgency to get them there, albeit not so urgently when it has taken 70 days. That is the issue of the domestic skimmers. Help is on the way. The rule has been signed. We are appreciative of that. We will see if those skimmers make it there anytime soon. We need them there because the oil is washing up on the shores. It is not only oil washing up, it is failure. It is failure because these skimmers were not in place earlier. I wish to talk about a second topic, which is international assistance. I came to the floor last week with a picture of this vessel, the Swan. It was offered on May 6 to the United States from a Dutch company, Dockwise. It had the capacity of soaking up 20,000 tons of oil a day, nearly 6 million gallons of oil a day. The Federal Government never got back to this Dutch company. Instead, an American ship was used. We are glad to see that. We want American ships used. But that ship only had one-twentieth the capability of this ship. My response is, use all of them. Use every one we can. Our country in our goodness is the first to respond when there is a disaster someplace else. Whether it is a typhoon, an earthquake, America, through the goodness of the hearts of our people, goes forward and gives help. When other countries are offering us assistance, even when we have to pay for it, we should be taking it. This ship never got used. How much oil would have been sucked up by the Swan if it was in the gulf doing its job? How much oil would have been off the beaches of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana if this ship was doing its job? This is an emblem of an opportunity missed. Now this ship is no longer available. There were something like 56 offers of assistance from foreign countries and associations, and only 6 were accepted by the government. They tell us the Jones Act--a law that prohibits foreign flag ships--is not the reason we are not getting these ships in. They tell us the Jones Act only applies to 3 miles in, coastal waterways. Therefore, it is no prohibition to bringing these ships in. One, that is not what these folks think because they didn't get their ship in, and two, I don't care what the reason is, whether it is the Jones Act or some other law, these ships should be here. This is not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue; this is an issue of competence. These ships should be there. Let me show you the next ship we have a chance at, and hopefully we won't mess this up. The Swan was a very big ship. This ship is aptly named ``A Whale.'' It is the world's largest skimmer, if reports are correct. It is making its way from Virginia to the Gulf of Mexico. The skimming capacity of this ship is at least 250 times that of the modified fishing boats currently attempting to skim the gulf. This one ship can skim as much as 250 of the skimmers that are in the gulf now in a single day. The vessel's capacity is sufficient to draw in as much as 500,000 barrels of oil. The Swan could do 20,000 barrels. This is 500,000 barrels of oil per 8- to 10-hour cycle. This is the mother of all skimmers. It is like the size of an aircraft carrier. We do not know yet whether this ship is going to be allowed in the gulf to skim up oil. It is beyond belief, it is beyond comprehension that we would not use this ship and ships like it to get the job done. I will be doing everything I can to make sure A Whale or any other ship of this size can be in the Gulf of Mexico to help us. We want the domestic assets. We want the small skimmers we have now. The ones coming from the Navy can fit on the back of a truck or fit in a plane or on a railcar. They are small. We are happy to have them, but they pale in comparison to the size of A Whale, reportedly the world's largest skimmer. I ask the President, why aren't we letting this ship in the gulf to skim up the oil? It is beyond belief. It is beyond comprehension. I will continue to come to the Chamber every day we are here to talk about this issue, about foreign ships that can help, about domestic ships being deployed, until we stop the oil from spilling on the bottom of the gulf, until we clean up all the oil that is in the gulf right now. It is impacting the lives of Floridians. When I was in Pensacola yesterday and talked to everyday Floridians, I could see the anguish in their eyes. I could see the stress and hear it in their voices. People move to Florida because they love the water. Ninety percent of Floridians live within 10 miles of the water. They have more recreational boaters than any State in the Union, more coastline than any State in the continental United States. It is part of our way of life. Every resource available should be used to keep this oil from coming ashore. I yield the floor.