Barbara Mikulski

Ms. MIKULSKI

Ms. MIKULSKI. I now ask that amendment 3215, as amended by the Coburn amendment, be agreed to.

Ms. MIKULSKI. Parliamentary inquiry: Did we agree to amendment 3215, as amended by Coburn, or did we just agree to the Coburn second degree?

Ms. MIKULSKI. I ask that the second-degree amendment be agreed to.

Ms. MIKULSKI. I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Ms. MIKULSKI. I also call up a second-degree amendment offered by Senator Coburn of Oklahoma, amendment No. 3230.

Ms. MIKULSKI. We are making slow but steady progress. I, therefore, call up amendment No. 3215. It is a Mikulski- Shelby amendment.

Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be laid aside.

Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I thank my colleague for his support. It will not be our intention to adjourn for lunch. We are going to keep on working and keep on hearing our amendments, and then somewhere around 2 p.m. we will be offering an amendment to deal with NASA funding, which we think will take a considerable amount of time. With our colleagues' cooperation in bringing their amendments to the floor and the NASA amendment, we really do believe, with those who are working to clear these amendments, we can finish up late this afternoon. So we are not going to take a break for lunch; we are going to keep on working. To any colleagues who wish to speak on our bill or bring amendments to us, this is the time. With their cooperation, we can cooperate with all those who would like to be able to call it a day today and get back to their districts for the recess period.

Ms. MIKULSKI. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

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

Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I have an amendment which I wish to send to the desk.

Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending Inouye amendment be set aside.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, while we continue to clear our amendments, I say to our colleagues who might have amendments, bring them down. I note that we have hotlined our request. While we continue to clear amendments, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Ms. MIKULSKI. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Ms. MIKULSKI. The amendment provides additional funding for a drug court program. The amendment has appropriate offsets. I ask for the adoption of the amendment. It has been cleared on both sides of the aisle.

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

Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I continue to ask that the pending amendment be set aside, and I call up amendment No. 3227.

Ms. MIKULSKI. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 3227

Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, this amendment provides additional funding of $5 million for juvenile mentoring programs. The Senator from New Jersey has an appropriate offset. We have no objection to the amendment. It has been cleared on both sides. Therefore, I ask for the adoption of the amendment. As I said, it has been cleared on both sides.

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

Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I ask that the pending amendment be set aside, and I call up amendment No. 3220 on behalf of Senator Menendez of New Jersey.

Ms. MIKULSKI. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 3220

Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I concur. I thank the Senator from Alabama for bringing this to our attention. I urge adoption of the amendment.

Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, we are trying to clear amendments that have been cleared by Senator Shelby and myself. Others are looking at them, so we are proceeding. While those amendments are being cleared, one of the issues I wanted to bring to our colleagues' attention is how we are making America more competitive with this bill. Earlier in my presentation in which I gave an overview of the bill, I emphasized what we were doing in law enforcement, which I am so proud of, and of course the Presiding Officer himself as a former attorney general knows how important the Federal and local law enforcement agencies are. But this bill is called Commerce-Justice-Science. We focused, in our subcommittee--myself and my ranking member, Senator Shelby--on three issues this year: security, competitiveness, and accountability--the stewardship of the taxpayers' dollar. We focused on competitiveness because it is our subcommittee that funds the major science agencies that come up with the new ideas that help come up with the new jobs, the research that enables the private sector to take value and add to it to come up with the new products and very high-end technology. That provides jobs right in our own country and enables us to be competitive. We based a lot of our work on legislation called the America COMPETES Act. I know the Presiding Officer was part of that. This year, it was a bill that was passed by the House and the Senate to ensure our Nation's competitive position in the world through improvements to math and science, both a commitment to research and math and science education. It follows through on a commitment to ensure U.S. students, teachers, businesses, and workers are prepared to continue to lead the world in research and then taking that research to the private sector so it can come up with those products. In our bill, we don't do anything that picks winners and losers. We are not industrial policy people. What we are, though, is American policy people, to do this. This America COMPETES Act was based a lot on recommendations that came from the National Academy of Science report called ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm.'' That report was done at the request of three leaders: Senator Domenici, Senator Bingaman, and Senator Alexander. Then I, after it was published, became part of the group to implement it. Well, this is a great day for our colleague from New Mexico. I know last night our colleague from New Mexico, Senator Domenici, announced that he is going to retire from the Senate. He is in his home State of New Mexico today sharing his plans for his own future with his constituents. But while he is talking about his own future with his constituents, I want to acknowledge that he worked very hard on a bipartisan basis to ensure the future of the Nation. He and Senator Bingaman and Senator Alexander, again, working together, showed that we can do better so that we can compete in the world and that we compete in the world not only to win Nobel prizes--and we will continue to do so--but we will also win the markets, for which we must to have a stronger economy. So ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm,'' which was promoted by those three excellent and wonderful colleagues, led to, with the help of people such as Senator Lieberman and others, the America COMPETES Act. It keeps research programs at the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards, and DOE on a path for doubling the money for research in these key areas. But, in addition to research, we wanted to make sure we have the scientists, the engineers, and the technology experts to do so. We are falling behind in the number of people who choose science as a career or people with a science education to go into our classrooms. The America COMPETES Act puts an emphasis on that into action. They wanted to prepare thousands of new teachers and provide current teachers with teaching skills in the area of NSF's Noyce teacher scholarship program. They also wanted to enhance undergraduate education for the future science and engineering workforce. They also wanted to authorize new competitive grants at the Department of Education to increase the number of teachers, so grant programs also help do that. So we passed the America COMPETES Act. But, as my colleagues know-- what is authorizing legislation? It sets the policy, sets the direction, and puts national goals into the Federal lawbooks, which is a great first step. But now, the legislation we bring before the Senate, the Commerce-Justice-Science bill, the Mikulski-Shelby bipartisan bill, following on the tradition that sparked us, we are actually putting money in the Federal checkbook to do that. One of the areas, of course, where we do that is we increase funding for research. We are going to talk later on today about NASA, on the anniversary of sputnik, where that little round ball weighing 180 pounds shook up the cosmos and even the galaxies. But little known is something called the National Science Foundation. This was an agency which was created during the Eisenhower administration and has now withstood the test of time. President Eisenhower responded, a warrior-- and we all saw the great miniseries of Ken Burns on the war. We are so proud of Senator Inouye, who was featured in it. But Eisenhower, the man who led us in Europe, knew that when sputnik went up, we were in a race for America's future and we could either respond militarily or we could respond in a way that would have many uses. Eisenhower created two things: One, the National Science Foundation, and two, something called the National Defense Act. The National Defense Act was to get our young people involved in science and in technology so that they could come up with those new ideas to make sure that we not only beat the Russians in space but that we beat the Russians in everything--an idea with currency today, I might add. And then, the National Science Foundation. His brother was president of Johns Hopkins University, Milton Eisenhower. Later, what did the National Science Foundation do? We could have put a lot of money into the military so we could shoot those satellites down, but we said we were going to develop our own and be better at it. We became the premier country in satellites. Satellites defend the Nation. Satellites also give us information on weather. Satellites give us information and early warnings on things such as solar flares that can take out our power grid. Satellites were one of the greatest inventions ever created. America led the way. Eisenhower created this, where we would fund--we, the Federal Government, working in a unique partnership with universities, not Government doing the research but the Government putting money out in almost intellectual venture capital to come up with new research in physics, chemistry, biology, and the basic sciences; and then to give stipends so young, smart people, such as the people who wanted to do the ``October surprise,'' could come out of the hollows of West Virginia and the streets of Baltimore, our communities, to go on to do this. What did we fund? We funded programs that then we're able to do. In our legislation, we have now increased our research to $6.5 billion. In this, we have focused on education, K through 12. We have also funded other important programs in research, our science programs. We help with minority education. By the way, this is one of the most important agencies that helps historically black colleges, to make sure they have the financial resources they need. An example would be the increased funding for the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation. We provide $75 million for math and science partnerships in education. We estimate that our program will have an impact upon over 140 math and science teachers. We also have a talent expansion program to begin to recruit them. We are bringing teachers into internships. Over at Morgan University and down at the Eastern Shore, we have something called the Chesapeake Consortium, where our young people are getting paid internships to work on rocket ships that go off--small rockets that go off from down on Wallops Island. If you came with me to the Eastern Shore, to Somerset County, where primarily the lifestyle is that of watermen and agriculture--these people work hard and have dirt under their fingernails and big dreams. One of the largest employers is our prison. This is an area the Senators from Virginia share, where the facility is called Wallops Island. Our young people at the Chesapeake Consortium are working at Wallops to develop these small rockets and also work with UAV research. If you went down there with me to that county that has one of the highest poverty rates, in terms of cash income, in my State, and you saw these young men and women with the Chesapeake Consortium shirts on, where they had worked at historically black colleges with our talented science team instead of flipping hamburgers, they had a paid internship, they are flipping ideas. Each and every one of them is a graduate and they have jobs in major technology agencies in our country. This is what we are doing. I want my colleagues to know we are increasing funding in research. We are investing in education. We are investing in and implementing the America COMPETES Act, and we are making sure we are truly rising above the gathering storm. I hope Senator Domenici will be here today. I will personally pay my respects to him for being the leader he is. When he returns, he will find we passed this bill. It is a tribute to what bipartisanship means, finding that sensible Senator, and we are going to build a stronger country because of this. I wished to bring this to our colleagues' attention as we clear these amendments. I suggest the absence of a quorum.