Daniel Moynihan

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today I rise to introduce a bill aimed at raising the fee Federal jurors are paid to that of $45.00 per day. According to the current statute, Federal jurors are paid $40.00 per day for the first thirty days of a trial and $50.00 for each day thereafter. They also receive $3.00 a day for transportation costs. The $40.00 per day a juror receives for his or her all day service is below the prevailing minimum wage, and the daily $3.00 transportation fee falls far below that required for parking or riding a bus or the subway. These inadequate sums place an undue hardship on those jurors who most need compensation: the self-employed, the commissioned, the temporary workers, and those who work for small employers often making it difficult for litigants to have representative jury panels. While undue hardship is often grounds for deferral or excusal from jury duty, it is important that we limit the financial hardship for those of our citizens engaged in this most important civic duty. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation intended to help students in those States that do not fare well in academic comparisons with students from other nations. It authorizes grants to States whose students continue to be outperformed by students in a majority of the nations which took the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS. TIMSS showed us that indisputably our students do not fare well in international competition. The most striking finding was that American students do worse, comparative speaking, the longer they are in our schools. Our fourth graders performed in the middle range of scores in math and were second to Japan in science. Our seniors are bringing up the rear. American high school seniors performed among the lowest of the 21 countries in the study. In mathematics our students were outperformed by those of 14 countries, were statistically similar to 4 countries, and outperformed only 2 countries. In science our students were outperformed by those of 11 countries, were similar to 7 countries, and again outperformed only 2 countries. Asian countries such as Korea, Japan, and Singapore did not participate in the twelfth grade study. Just as well, for morale purposes. Their students embarrassed our students at the fourth and eighth grade levels. The two questions that come to mind are what did we expect and what are we to do? Our expectations were high at the beginning of the decade. In September 1989, President Bush met with the Nation's governors in Charlottesville to set out goals for education. Four months later he devoted a sizable portion of his State of the Union Address to setting forth the agreed-upon goals. Some were lofty, harmless, and unmeasurable: ``By the year 2000 every child must start school ready to learn.'' Most children are. ``Every adult must be a skilled, literate worker and citizen.'' We know what it means to be a skilled mechanic, but a skilled citizen? Others were lofty, measurable, and the product of a leakage of reality that was stupefying then as now. First and foremost that ``By the year 2000, U.S. students would be first in the world in math and science achievement.'' President Bush was speaking to Congress in a vocabulary created in the 1960's by James S. Coleman, then professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. The ``Coleman Report'' introduced the language of educational outputs. Previously we spoke of inputs: student-teacher ration, money per student, and such. Coleman introduced the idea of outputs, and measuring our standing in the world is one such. With Coleman we had a new vocabulary for education, but sadly not a new understanding. The first finding of his remarkable report was ``that the schools are remarkably similar in the effect they have on the achievement of their pupils when the socioeconomic background of the students is taken into account.'' This was seismic. Family background is more important than schools. But 24 years later, in 1990, it had not been learned, or could still be ignored. Stating that our goal was to become the leader in math and science was folly. I wrote in the Winter 1991 Public Interest that ``on no account could the President's goals--the quantified, specific goals-- reasonably be deemed capable of achievement.'' I cited the general decline in high school graduation rates that began in 1970 and the lack of success we had in meeting very similar goals President Reagan set out in 1984. Most basically, we were ignoring Coleman's findings that we would have to start with the American family before we could expect improvements in American students. I concluded the Public Interest piece by saying, ``If, as forecast here, the year 2000 arrives and the United States is nowhere near meeting the educational goals set out in 1990, the potential will nonetheless exist for serous debate as to why what was basically a political plan went wrong. We might even consider how it might have turned out better.'' Our children will not meet the goals set for math and science leadership. How can we help them do better? The TIMSS report says that it is too early to draw specific conclusions about how to improve performance in twelfth grade, that it will take some time to analyze all the data therein. I should thing the higher education community would be at the forefront of this effort, for the colleges are the most immediately affected by undereducated high school graduates. One student in five takes remedial courses in at least one subject. Without giving short shrift to helping our elementary school students, we must focus on finding ways to keep them at the level they have achieved by fourth grade as they continue through school. This bill would make a small contribution to that effort by providing grants of $500,000 to $1,000,000 to states whose students collectively fall below the median score among the nations whose eighth graders retake the TIMSS tests this year or next. The money would be used to improve mathematics or science education. The grants would be awarded competitively; states whose students' scores qualify them must propose constructive ways of using the grants, such as for equipment, teacher training, or other purposes. The Department of Education last year released Linking the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Third International Mathematics and Science Study: Eight grade results. This study showed how the states' NAEP scores and other nations' TIMSS scores could be compared. The Department of Education would use the same process to determine where states rank in comparision with the upcoming results of the TIMSS exams by a new group of eight graders around the world. Those states whose students score below the median in either math or science would be eligible to apply for these grants. Mr. President, money is not the answer to our dismal showing among the nations of the world. Better families is the place to start. These grants, however, would help those states that need help the most. I ask my colleagues for their support and ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. Presidents, I rise today to introduce the Poverty Data Correction Act of 1999, a bill to require that any data relating to the incidence of poverty in subnational areas be corrected for the differences in the cost of living in those areas. This legislation would correct a longstanding inequity and would provide us with more accurate information on the number of Americans living in poverty. Residents of states such as New York and Connecticut earn more, on average,than do residents of Mississippi or Alabama. But they also must spend more. One need only try to rent an apartment in New York City to understand this. Yet, we have a national poverty threshold adjusted only by family size and composition, not by where the family lives. A family of four just above the poverty threshold in New York City or Anchorage is demonstrably worse off than a family of four just below the threshold in, say, rural Arkansas. And yet that family in New York might be ineligible for federal aid and will not count in the tallies of the poverty population used to allocate funds among the states, while the Arkansas family will be eligible and will be counted. Professor Herman B. ``Dutch'' Leonard and Senior Research Associate Monica Friar of the Taubman Center for State and local government at Harvard have devised an index of poverty statistics that reflects the differences in the cost of living between States. If we look at the ``Friar-Leonard State Cost-of-Living index,'' as it has come to be known, we find that, in Fiscal Year 1997, New York had a poverty rate of 20.5% third highest in the nation. yet the official poverty level for 1997 is 16.6%. These adjusted statistics still reflect poverty accurately: the poor states of Mississippi and New Mexico remain ranked higher than New York in this ranking of misfortune. Mr. President, our current poverty data are inaccurate. And these substandard data are used in allocation formulas used to distribute millions of Federal dollars each year. As a result, states with high costs of living--New York, Connecticut, Vermont, Hawaii, California, just to name a few--are not getting their fair share of Federal dollars because differences in the cost of living are ignored. And the poor of these high cost states are penalized because they happen to live there. It is time to correct this inequity. I ask unanimous consent that a summary of the legislation and its full text be included in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to introduce the Power Marketing Administration Reform Act of 1999, a bill to require that the Federal Power Marketing Administrations (PMAs) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) sell electricity at market rates and recover all costs. Mr. President, in 1935 only 15 percent of rural Americans had access to electricity. President Roosevelt's administration established the PMAs to sell power to rural Americans below market rates because so many rural areas could not afford to install the transmission and generation equipment required to provide electricity. Commencement of the massive public works projects such as TVA filled a desperate need for jobs during the Depression years and brought electricity to the many areas of our country which lacked access to this most basic amenity of modern life. The PMAs served an essential function in lifting our nation out of the Depression, Mr. President, but that time has passed. Sixty years after its inception, public power is less expensive and more accessible than ever before. The discounted rates provided by public power are a benefit which goes to a relatively few recipients at a tremendous expense to the American taxpayer. Nearly 60 percent of Federal sales go to just four states: Tennessee, Alabama, Washington, and Oregon. PMAs have failed to recover their operating costs for too long, and it is taxpayers who bear the cost of the discrepancy between cost of generation and consumer rates. This discrepancy has brought about a fiscal shortfall and significant environmental damage. Reports over past years from the General Accounting Office (GAO), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Energy confirm this view. In 1997, for instance, the GAO reported that the Bonneville Power Administration, the Rural Utilities Service, and three other PMAs cost American taxpayers $2.5 billion in fiscal year 1996. In March 1998 the GAO showed that the Federal government incurred a net cost of $1.5 billion from electricity-related activities in the Southeastern, Southwestern, and Western PMAs between 1992 and 1996. Up to $1.4 billion of the approximately $7 billion of Federal investment in assets derived from electricity-related activities in these PMAs is at risk of nonrecovery. The GAO has also reported on fairness in lending to the PMAs. The Federal Treasury incurs approximately 9 percent in debt when lending to the PMAs, but recovers only 3.5 percent from the PMAs on their outstanding debt. This is a loss to the U.S. Treasury of 5.5 percent on interest payments alone. It is taxpayers who are required to account for this interest shortfall. Mr. President, my bill would provide for full cost recovery rates for power sold by the PMAs and the TVA. Under the bill, PMA and TVA rates would be recalculated to conform to market rates and be resubmitted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for approval. The bill would also require that PMA and TVA transmission facilities are subject to open-access regulation by the FERC, and that FERC would be authorized to revise such rates when necessary to maintain a competitive environment. Cooperatives and public power entities will be given the right of first refusal of PMA and TVA power at market prices. Revenue accrued from the revisal of these rates will go first to the U.S. Treasury to recover all costs. The residual amount will then be disbursed by formula to the Treasury to mitigate damage to the environment attributed to the operation of PMAs and the TVA, and to support renewable electricity generating resources. Mr. President, the time has come for public power to be held accountable for the use of public dollars. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this legislation. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today I rise to introduce a bill that will amend several parts of our existing immigration laws, specifically those that fall under the umbrella of the Immigration and Nationality Act. These changes are aimed at making our immigration laws not only fairer but more efficient. The first change will amend Section 240(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. In 1996, the laws applying to criminal aliens were made overly restrictive. For example, all persons guilty of aggravated felonies--the number of crimes that fall into this category was greatly expanded and made retroactive in 1996--are now ineligible for virtually any form of leniency. This means that many people, who have led exemplary lives for many years, now find themselves deportable for offenses committed decades ago. They are also subject to mandatory detention and have no chance for an immigration judge to evaluate their individual circumstances. This is unfair. My second change amends Section 240A.(1)(a) of the same act. At present, the Attorney General has the authority to stop the deportation of a lawful resident who has been in this country for seven years. The 1996 changes to the Immigration and Nationality Act now bar this relief for anyone convicted of an aggravated felony. This provision has led to many injustices because of the sheer number of offenses that are now aggravated felonies. I propose that we deny relief only to those who have been convicted of aggravated felonies that carry a penalty of five years or more in prison. In conjunction with this, I propose that we amend Section 240A(d)(1). This provision says that the time for determining the above seven years residency period stops when an aggravated crime is or was committed. This has barred relief for people with ancient convictions but many good years of citizenship since then. This should be changed so that the countable residence period stops only when formal immigration charges are filed because of the crime and not when the crime is or was committed. Another of my amendments made the transitional rules permanent governing Section 236(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This section now requires that all criminal aliens be detained from the time of their release on criminal charges until their deportation hearing. This requirement was so harsh and expensive that Congress provided a two-year transition period, ending on October 1998, that allowed immigration judges to use their discretion in evaluating whether or not an individual was a risk of flight or a danger to the community. This discretion should be continued because it is fair and because it will empty our jails of those who will return for their hearings and who pose no threat to our communities. I also propose that we restore judicial review in deportation cases. The 1996 reforms ostensibly banned criminal aliens from seeking a judicial review of their cases. The courts have reached many different outcomes over this ban and the situation, frankly, is a mess. I believe that criminal aliens should have the right to have their convictions reviewed by a United States circuit court of appeals. Similiarly, I believe that aliens should have the right to legal counsel when they are faced with removal. The law now provides that an alien is entitled to counsel if he can afford to retain one. In reality, this has created great expense and delay for the Federal government because cases are often continued for lengthy periods while aliens try to find pro bono counsel or counsel they can afford. My bill creates a pilot program in selected Immigration and Nationalization districts where free, expert counsel would be provided to aliens. A study of the impact on overall Department of Justice costs would be required to decide if this program should be extended nationwide. My last amendments are concerned with who should be admitted to this country. The most objectionable element of our current admission system is the delay--estimated to be five years--for a vitally important family reunion category, part A of the second family-based preference (FS-2A). This category, for admission of spouses and minor children of lawful, permanent residents, is now limited to 114,000 per year. Nuclear families should live together. To obtain more spaces for the FS-2A preference, the diversity lottery visas should be eliminated, freeing 55,000 spaces annually. Lastly, I believe that the EB-5 preference for investors should be repealed. The rich should not be able to buy their way into this country. This category was added in 1990 to encourage investment. Instead, this provision has led to the creation of some highly questionable investment schemes that have cost the Immigration and Naturalization Service untold hours and resources in attempting to reign them in. Moreover, the evidence of new jobs being created is very thin and not worth the administrative costs. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, On January 3, 1999, Jerry Quarry, a perennial heavyweight boxing champion contender in the 1960's and 1970's, died of pneumonia brought on by an advanced state of dementia pugilistica. He was 53. The list goes on: Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore and Muhammad Ali are but a few examples. The Professional Boxing Safety Act of 1996 was an excellent step toward making professional boxing safer for its participants. Nevertheless, it contains several gaps. The two amendments I propose here today are aimed at protecting professional fighters by requiring more rigorous prefight physical examinations and by requiring a brain catscan before a boxer can renew his or her professional license. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the ``Y2K State and Local Government Assistance Programs (GAP) Act of 1999.'' I am pleased to have Senators Robert F. Bennett (R-UT) and Christopher J. Dodd (D-CT), the Chairman and Vice Chairman, respectively, of the Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem, as original cosponsors of this legislation. This bill provides a matching grant for states to work on the millennium computer problem. While the Federal government and large corporations are expected to have their computers intact on January 1, 2000, state governments lag behind in fixing the problem. Failure of state computers could have a devastating effect on those individuals who rely on essential state-administered poverty programs, such as Medicaid, food stamps, and child welfare and support. These individuals cannot go a day, a week, or a month without these programs working properly. I am hopeful that the bill Senators Bennett, Dodd, and I are introducing today will help states fix their computers, particularly those computers used to administer Federal welfare programs. It has been almost three years since I asked the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to study and produce a report on the implications of the Y2K problem. CRS issued the report to me with the following comments: ``The Year 2000 problem is indeed serious, and fixing it will be costly and time-consuming. The problem deserves the careful and coordinated attention of the Federal government, as well as the private sector, in order to avert major disruptions on January 1, 2000.'' I wrote the President on July 31, 1996 to relay the findings of CRS and make him aware of this grave problem. In the letter, I warned the president of the ``extreme negative economic consequences of the Y2K Time Bomb,'' and suggested that ``a presidential aide be appointed to take responsibility for assuring that all Federal agencies, including the military, be Y2K compliant by January 1, 1999 [leaving a year for `testing'] and that all commercial and industrial firms doing business with the Federal government must also be compliant by that date.'' Since that time, the government has taken some of the necessary steps to combat the millennium bug. The President created the Year 2000 Conversion Council and appointed John Koskinen to head it. The Senate, under the leadership of Chairman Bennett and Vice Chairman Dodd, established the Special Committee on the Y2K problem. And Representative Stephen Horn (R-CA) continues to due an excellent job in keeping the government focused on the issue. Thanks in part to the work of these individuals, we have made tremendous progress on the millennium bug. Y2K experts have become optimistic enough to dismiss doomsday predictions of widespread power outages, telephone failures, and grounded jetliners in the U.S. Businesses and Federal agencies that were lagging in their repair work last year have redoubled their efforts in recent months; telephone and electric networks, which are crucial to the operation of almost all large computer systems, are in better-than-expected shape; and technicians have found remarkably few date-related problems with the electronic circuitry in a host of other ``day-to-day'' devices, from subway cars to elevators. Mr. Koskinen predicts that the bug's impact will be similar to a powerful winter storm--minor inconveniences for many people and severe, but short-term, disruptions for some communities. I agree with Mr. Koskinen and other Y2K experts. I do not expect the four horsemen, armed with flood and catastrophe, to be riding in on January 1, 2000. But experts agree that state governments are not making sufficient progress in fixing the problem. It is for this reason that Senators Bennett, Dodd, and I are introducing this bill today. The ``Y2K State and Local GAP Act of 1999'' provides funding for states to address the Y2K problem. The bill stipulates that certain Federal poverty programs--Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), food stamps, child support enforcement, child care, and child welfare programs--be listed as priority programs. The people dependent on these programs will be the most adversely affected by the problem if state computers crash. To be eligible for Federal support money, states must submit a plan describing their Y2K development and implementation program. A state that is awarded a grant under this legislation is required to expend $1 for every $2 provided by the Federal government. The matching requirement will give states and local governments incentive to work on their computers. And the numbers indicate that states need a great amount of incentive and help on this issue. According to a National Association of State Information Resource Executives survey, some states have not yet completed work on any of their critical systems, and those systems responsible for administering poverty programs are a real concern. A November 1998 General Accounting Office (GAO) report found that most of the systems used to administer poverty programs are not ready for the new millennium--84 percent of Medicaid systems, 76 percent of food stamps, and 75 percent of TANF systems were not compliant. Since these programs are administered at the state and local level, it is these computers which ensure that benefit payments are on time and accurate. Given the lack of means of those assisted by the programs, the possible disruption of benefit payments should be a cause for concern--a billion dollars in benefits payments might not be delivered because of the millennial malady. Historically the fin de siecle has caused quite a stir. Prophets, prelates, monks, mathematicians, and soothsayers warn Anno Domini 2000 will draw the world to its catastrophic conclusion. I am confident that the Y2K problem will not play a part in this. But we must continue to work on this problem with purpose and dedication. Disraeli wrote: ``Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.'' We created the Y2K problem and we must fix it. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Y2K State and Local Government Assistance Programs Act of 1999 be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I introduce this bill to repeal an unprecedented provision--unprecedented until the 104th Congress--to tamper with the constitutional protection of habeas corpus. The provision reads: (d) An application for writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a person in custody pursuant to the judgment of State court shall not be granted with respect to any claim that was adjudicated on the merits in State court proceedings unless the adjudication of the claim-- (1) resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States; or (2) resulted in a decision that was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding. In 1996 we enacted a statute which holds that constitutional protections do not exist unless they have been unreasonably violated, an idea that would have confounded the framers. Thus, we introduced a virus that will surely spread throughout our system of laws. Article I, section 9, clause 2 of the Constitution stipulates, ``The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.'' We are mightily and properly concerned about the public safety, which is why we enacted the counter-terrorism bill. But we have not been invaded, Mr. President, and the only rebellion at hand appears to be against the Constitution itself. We are dealing here, sir, with a fundamental provision of law, one of those essential civil liberties which precede and are the basis of political liberties. The writ of habeas corpus is often referred to as the ``Great Writ of Liberty.'' William Blackstone (1723-80) called it ``the most celebrated writ in English law, and the great and efficacious writ in all manner of illegal imprisonment.'' I repeat what I have said previously here on the Senate floor: If I had to choose between living in a country with habeas corpus but without free elections, or a country with free elections but without habeas corpus, I would choose habeas corpus every time. To say again, this is one of the fundamental civil liberties on which every democratic society of the world has built political liberties that have come subsequently. I make the point that the abuse of habeas corpus--appeals of capital sentences--is hugely overstated. A 1995 study by the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics determined that habeas corpus appeals by death row inmates constitute 1 percent of all Federal habeas filings. Total habeas filings make up 4 percent of the caseload of Federal district courts. And most Federal habeas petitions are disposed of in less than 1 year. The serious delays occur in State courts, which take an average of 5 years to dispose of habeas petitions. If there is delay, the delay is with the State courts. It is troubling that Congress has undertaken to tamper with the Great Writ in a bill designed to respond to the tragic circumstances of the Oklahoma City bombing 1995. Habeas corpus has little to do with terrorism. The Oklahoma City bombing was a Federal crime and has been tried in Federal courts. Nothing in our present circumstance requires the suspension of habeas corpus, which was the practical effect of the provision in that bill. To require a Federal court to defer to a State court's judgment unless the State court's decision is ``unreasonably wrong'' effectively precludes Federal review. I find this disorienting. Anthony Lewis has written of the habeas provision in that bill: ``It is a new and remarkable concept in law: that mere wrongness in a constitutional decision is not to be noticed.'' We have agreed to this; to what will we be agreeing next? I restate Mr. Lewis' observation, a person of great experience, long a student of the courts, ``It is a new and remarkable concept in law: that mere wrongness in a constitutional decision is not to be noticed.'' Backward reels the mind. On December 8, 1995, four former U.S. Attorneys General, two Republicans and two Democrats, all persons with whom I have the honor to be acquainted, Benjamin R. Civiletti, Jr., Edward H. Levi, Nicholas Katzenbach, and Elliot Richardson--I served in administrations with Mr. Levi, Mr. Katzenbach, Mr. Richardson; I have the deepest regard for them--wrote President Clinton. I ask unanimous consent that the full text be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I join my distinguished colleague, Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, in introducing legislation to establish a Federal Commission on Statistical Policy. Congressman Stephen Horn of California and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney of New York plan to introduce similar legislation in the House of Representatives. This legislation is similar to S. 1404, The Federal Statistical System Act of 1997, a bill which was favorably reported out of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs October 6 of last year by a 9 to 0 vote. This Senator first introduced legislation to study the Federal statistical system on September 25, 1996, for the 104th Congress, and again on January 21, 1997, for the 105th Congress. Over the past few years, I have testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management and the House Subcommittee on Government Management, Information and Technology to explain this legislation. This bill represents more than 2 years of work and much bipartisan cooperation. The Federal Commission on Statistical Policy would consist of 16 Presidential and congressional appointees with expertise in fields such as actuarial science, finance, and economics. Its members would conduct a thorough review of the U.S. statistical system, and issue a report that would include recommendations on whether statistical agencies should be consolidated into a centralized Federal Statistical Service. Of course, we have an example of a consolidated statistical agency just across our northern border. Statistics Canada, the most centralized statistical agency among OECD countries, was established in November 1918 as a reaction to a familiar problem. At that time, the Canadian Minister of Industry was trying to obtain an estimate of the manpower resources that Canada could commit to the war effort. And he got widely different estimates from statistical agencies scattered throughout the government. Consolidation seemed the way to solve this problem, and so it happened--as it can in a parliamentary government-- rather quickly, just as World War I ended. In April of 1997, a member of my staff met in Ottawa with the Assistant Chief Statistician of Statistics Canada. He reported that Statistics Canada is doing quite well. Decisions about the allocation of resources among statistical functions are made at the highest levels of government because the Chief Statistician of Statistics Canada holds a position equivalent to Deputy Cabinet Minister. He communicates directly with Deputy Ministers in other Cabinet Departments. In contrast, in the United States, statistical agencies are buried several levels below the Cabinet Secretaries, so it is difficult for the heads of these statistical agencies to bring issues to the attention of high-ranking administration officials and Congress. Statistics are part of our constitutional arrangement, which provides for a decennial census that, among other purposes, is the basis for apportionment of membership in the House of Representatives. I quote from article I, section I: . . . enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall be Law direct. But, while the Constitution directed that there be a census, there was, initially, no Census Bureau. The earliest censuses were conducted by U.S. marshals. Later on, statistical bureaus in state governments collected the data, with a Superintendent of the Census overseeing from Washington. It was not until 1902 that a permanent Bureau of the Census was created by the Congress, housed initially in the Interior Department. In 1903 the Bureau was transferred to the newly established Department of Commerce and Labor. The Statistics of Income Division of the Internal Revenue Service, which was originally an independent body, began collecting data in 1866. It too was transferred to the new Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903, but then was put in the Treasury Department in 1913 following ratification of the 16th amendment, which gave Congress the power to impose an income tax. A Bureau of Labor, created in 1884, was also initially in the Interior Department. The first Commissioner, appointed in 1885, was Colonel Carroll D. Wright, a distinguished Civil War veteran of the New Hampshire Volunteers. A self-trained social scientist, Colonel Wright pioneered techniques for collecting and analyzing survey data on income, prices and wages. He had previously served as Chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics, a post he held for 15 years, and in that capacity had supervised the 1880 Federal census in Massachusetts. In 1888, the Bureau of Labor became an independent agency. In 1903, it was once again made a Bureau, joining other statistical agencies in the Department of Commerce and Labor. When a new Department of Labor was formed in 1913, given labor an independent voice--as labor was ``removed'' from the Department of Commerce and Labor--what we now know as the Bureau of Labor Statistics was transferred to the newly created Department of Labor. And so it went. Statistical agencies sprung up as needed. And they moved back and forth as new executive departments were formed. Today, some 89 different organizations in the Federal government comprise parts of our national statistical infrastructure. Eleven of these organizations have as their primary function the generation of data. These 11 organizations are: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date Agency Department established ------------------------------------------------------------------------ National Agricultural Statistical Agriculture........... 1863 Service. Statistics of Income Division, IRS. Treasury.............. 1866 Economic Research Service.......... Agriculture........... 1867 National Center for Education Education............. 1867 Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics......... Labor................. 1884 Bureau of the Census............... Commerce.............. 1902 Bureau of Economic Analysis........ Commerce.............. 1912 National Center for Health Health and Human 1912 Statistics. Services. Bureau of Justice Statistics....... Justice............... 1968 Energy Information Administration.. Energy................ 1974 Bureau of Transportation Statistics Transportation........ 1991 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ need for legislation President Kennedy once said: Democracy is a difficult kind of government. It requires the highest qualities of self-discipline, restraints, a willingness to make commitments and sacrifices for the general interest, and also it requires knowledge. That knowledge often comes from accurate statistics. You cannot begin to solve a problem until you can measure it. This legislation would require the Commission to conduct a comprehensive examination of the current statistical system and focus particularly on whether to create a centralized Federal Statistical Service. In September 1996, prior to introduction of my first bill to establish a Commission to study the U.S. statistical system, I received a letter from nine former Chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) endorsing this legislation. Excluding two recent chairs, who at that time were still serving in the Clinton Administration, the signatories include virtually every living former chair of the CEA. While acknowledging that the United States ``possesses a first-class statistical system,'' these former Chairmen remind us that ``problems periodically arise under the current system of widely scattered responsibilities.'' They conclude as follows: Without at all prejudging the appropriate measures to deal with these difficult problems, we believe that a thoroughgoing review by a highly qualified and bipartisan Commission as provided in your Bill has great promise of showing the way to major improvements. The letter is signed by: Michael J. Boskin, Martin Feldstein, Alan Greenspan, Paul W. McCracken, Raymond J. Saulnier, Charles L. Schultze, Beryl W. Sprinkel, Herbert Stein, and Murray Weidenbaum. It happens that this Senator's association with the statistical system in the Executive Branch began over three decades ago. I was Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy and Planning in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. This was a new position in which I was nominally responsible for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I say nominally out of respect for the independence of that venerable institution, which as I noted earlier long predated the Department of Labor itself. The then-Commissioner of the BLS, Ewan Clague, could not have been more friendly and supportive. And so were the statisticians, who undertook to teach me to the extent I was teachable. They even shared professional confidences. And so it was that I came to have some familiarity with the field. For example, we had just received a report on price indexes from a committee led by a Nobel laureate, George Stigler. The Committee stressed the importance of accurate and timely statistics noting that: The periodic revision of price indexes, and the almost continuous alterations in details of their calculation, are essential if the indexes are to serve their primary function of measuring the average movements of prices. While the Final Report of the Advisory Commission To Study The Consumer Price Index (The Boskin Commission) focused primarily on the extent to which changes in the CPI overstate inflation, the Commission also addressed issues related to the effectiveness of Federal statistical programs and recommended that: Congress should enact the legislation necessary for the Departments of Commerce and Labor to share information in the interest of improving accuracy and timeliness of economic statistics and to reduce the resources consumed in their development and production. There is, of course, a long history of attempts to reform our nation's statistical infrastructure. In her invaluable book Organizing to Count, Janet L. Norwood, former Commissioner of the BLS, has described efforts to bring some order to the national statistical system, going back to a Commission appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury in 1903 and following through to a 1990 Working Group of the Cabinet Council for Economic Policy, chaired by Michael Boskin. One such effort occurred in July of 1933 when, by Executive Order, President Roosevelt set up a Central Statistical Board--organized by the Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, and the sometime Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Isador Lubin. I say sometime because although Lubin headed the Bureau from 1933-1946, much of his time was spent ``on leave'' serving in various White House statistical assignments, including as a special statistical assistant to the President. In their fine history of the agency, The First Hundred Years of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Joseph P. Goldberg and William T. Moye write that the Board was then established by Congress ``in 1935 for a 5-year period to ensure consistency, avoid duplication, and promote economy in the work of government statistics.'' But in most cases little or no action has been taken on their recommendations. The result of this inaction has been an ever expanding statistical system. It continues to grow in order to meet new data needs, but with little or no regard for the overall objectives of the system. As Norwood notes in her book: The U.S. system has neither the advantages that come from centralization nor the efficiency that comes from strong coordination in decentralization. As presently organized, therefore, the country's statistical system will be hard pressed to meet the demands of a technologically advanced, increasingly internationalized world in which the demand for objective data of high quality is steadily rising. In this era of government downsizing and budget cutting, it is unlikely that Congress will appropriate more funds for statistical agencies. It is clear that to preserve and improve the statistical system we must consider reforming it, yet we must not attempt to reform the system until we have heard from experts in the field. The legislation establishes a Federal Commission on Statistical Policy for a three-year term. The Commission would consist of 16 members: eight of whom to be chosen by the President; four of whom by the Speaker of the House of Representatives in consultation with the Majority and Majority Leader; and four of whom by the President pro tempore of the Senate in consultation with the Majority and Minority Leader. In an initial 18-month period, the Commission would determine whether to consolidate the Federal statistical system, and would also make recommendations with respect to ways to achieve greater efficiency in carrying out Federal statistical programs. If the Commission recommends creation of a newly established independent Federal statistical agency, designated as the Federal Statistical Service, the Commission's report would contain draft legislation incorporating such recommendations. Over the full term of the Commission, it would also conduct comprehensive studies and submit reports to Congress that: Evaluate the mission of various statistical agencies and the relevance of such missions to current and future needs; Evaluate key statistics and measures and make recommendations on ways to improve such statistics better serve the intended major purposes; Review information technology and make recommendations of appropriate methods for disseminating statistical data; and Compare our statistical system with the systems of other nations. This legislation is only a first step, but an essential one. The Commission will provide Congress with the blueprint for reform. It will be up to us to finally take action after nearly a century of inattention to this very important issue. I ask unanimous consent the full text of the letter from nine former Chairmen of the Council of Economic Adviser, a summary of the bill, and the full text of the bill be included in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today I am introducing with my colleague Senator Chafee the CHIP Data and Evaluation Improvement Act of 1999. This legislation would ensure comparable data and an adequate evaluation of children's health coverage under the new Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and Medicaid. In 1997, CHIP was established to provide health coverage for low- income uninsured children. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 provided $48 billion over ten years, mostly in the form of a block grant, for states to develop children's health insurance programs. New York and other states pioneered expanded children's health programs well before the enactment of CHIP. With new federal CHIP funding, more states are beginning to develop their own programs. To date, 48 states have CHIP plans that have been approved by the Health Care Financing Administration, with most just beginning to implement their programs. We await reports on the effectiveness of their efforts to cover the nation's uninsured children.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today on behalf of myself and my distinguished colleague from New York, Mr. Schumer, to introduce three tax measures designed to strengthen our commitment to enhancing the prospects for long-term economic growth in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and a fourth piece of legislation to ensure fair funding for its Children's Health Insurance Program. Twice this decade, Congress has imposed significant tax increases on companies doing business in Puerto Rico. Those tax increases in 1993 and 1996, agreed to in the context of broader deficit reduction and minimum wage legislation, substantially altered the economic relationship between the United States and the possessions. The legislation I introduce today will address several of the economic concerns caused by those tax increases and restore incentives for employment, investment, and business opportunities. Federal tax incentives for economic activity in Puerto Rico are nearly as old as the income tax itself. Under the Revenue Act of 1921, U.S. corporations that met two gross income tests were deemed ``possessions corporations'' exempt from tax on all income derived from sources outside the United States. The possessions corporation exemption remained unchanged until 1976. Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, added by the Tax Reform Act of 1976, maintained the exemption for income derived by U.S. corporations from operations in a possession. It also exempted from tax the dividends remitted by a possessions corporation to its U.S. parent. However, to prevent the avoidance of tax on investments in foreign countries by possessions corporations, the 1976 Tax Reform Act eliminated the exemption for income derived outside the possessions. In 1993, Congress imposed significant limitations on Section 936. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 subjected Section 936 to two alternative limitations (the taxpayer may choose which limitation applies). One limitation is based on factors that reflect the corporation's economic activity in the possessions. The other limitation is based on a percentage of the credit that would be allowable under prior-law rules. The staff of the Joint Tax Committee estimated that the 1993 Act changes would raise $3.75 billion over five years. While Congress substantially limited tax incentives for companies doing business in Puerto Rico in 1993, the Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996 effectively repealed remaining federal tax incentives, subject to a 10-year transition rule for taxpayers with existing investments in Puerto Rico. The Joint Tax Committee staff estimated the 1996 changes would raise $10.5 billion over ten years. In committee report language accompanying the 1976 Act, Congress recognized that the Federal government imposes upon the possessions various requirements, such as minimum wage requirements and requirements to use U.S. flag ships in transporting goods between the United States and various possessions, that substantially increase the labor, transportation and other costs of establishing business operations in Puerto Rico. In the 1990s, in light of trade agreements such as NAFTA and increased economic competition from low-wage Caribbean countries, these concerns are particularly acute. Traditionally, Puerto Rico has been excluded from or underfinanced in many federal programs because, it has been argued, the island does not pay income taxes to the Federal government. For example, Puerto Rico has only minimal Federal participation in the Medicaid program. In 1998, Puerto Rico's Medicaid program received approximately $170 million in federal funds, whereas it could have received approximately $500 million if it were treated as a state. Clearly, Congress should not adopt a double standard of taxing Puerto Rico's economic activity while denying funding for federal programs. Mr. President, the first of the bills I introduce today, while not designed to reinstate prior law, seeks to build on the temporary wage credit that is currently provided in the Internal Revenue Code. The bill removes provisions that limit, in taxable years beginning after 2001, the aggregate taxable income taken into account in determining the amount of the credit. Employers would generally be eligible for a tax credit equal to 60 percent of wages and fringe benefit expenses for employees located in Puerto Rico. New as well as existing employers would be rewarded for providing local jobs. Instead of expiring at the end of 2005, the credit would terminate three years later for tax years starting after 2008. Thus, businesses would have a 10 year period in which to take advantage of these incentives. A second proposal addresses the inequitable treatment of Puerto Rico under the tax credit for increasing research activities (the R&D tax credit). The R&D credit has never applied to qualified research conducted in Puerto Rico and the other U.S. possessions. Until recently, U.S. companies paid no taxes on Puerto Rico source income. As a result, there were no tax consequences to Puerto Rico's exclusion from the R&D credit. With the phasing out of section 936, applying the R&D credit to research expenditures in Puerto Rico has become a matter of fairness, and this legislation would ensure eligibility for companies operating in the possessions. The Government of Puerto Rico has made research and development a centerpiece of its new economic model, and Puerto Rico's 1998 Tax Incentives Act created a deduction for research and development expenses incurred for new or improved products or industrial processes. While the immediate cost of extending the R&D credit to Puerto Rico is minimal (in 1998, the Joint Tax Committee estimated the total five year revenue loss at $4 million), the long term benefits for Puerto Rico's diversifying economy could be significant. The third bill addresses a provision of the tax law a portion of which expired on September 30, 1998. The Puerto Rican Federal Relations Act and the Revised Organic Act of the Virgin Islands mandate that all federal collections on insular products be transferred (``covered- over'') to those unincorporated jurisdictions of our Nation. Further, the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act provides that collections on all imported rum be transferred to the treasuries of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. In 1984, because of a dispute concerning the use of the tax cover-over mechanism in Puerto Rico, the cover-over was limited to an amount of $10.50 per gallon tax on rum, rather than the full $13.50 per gallon tax. The disputed practice was discontinued many years ago. In 1993, Congress enacted a temporary increase in the rum cover-over, to $11.30, effective for five years. That provision expired on September 30, 1998, and the rum cover-over dropped back to $10.50. The legislation would restore the cover-over to the full amount of the excise tax collected on rum ($13.50 per proof gallon), as mandated in the basic laws regarding those jurisdictions and in the Caribbean Basin Initiative. Last September, the Congressional Budget Office estimated such a proposal would cost $350 million over 5 years and $700 million over 10 years. Additionally, the proposal provides that, for a five-year period, 50 cents per gallon of the cover-over to Puerto Rico would be further transferred to the Puerto Rico Conservation Trust. The Conservation Trust, created for the protection of the natural resources and environmental beauty of Puerto Rico, was established by the Department of the Interior and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1968. The Trust was initially funded through an oil import fee. More recently, it was primarily financed through Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code. The Trust lost more than 80 percent of its funding as a consequence of the decision to phase-out section 936 and eliminate the Qualified Possession Source Investment Income provision in the tax code. The proposal to transfer a portion of the restored cover-over for five years to capitalize the Trust is projected to result in a permanent endowment. Lastly, I introduce a bill to provide sufficient funding for Puerto Rico and the Territories' Children's Health Insurance Programs (CHIP). The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 established CHIP as a grant to states to cover uninsured low-income children. We provided approximately $20 billion in the first five years. The original allocation formula would have provided only 0.25 percent of the funding to Puerto Rico and the Territories. Recognizing that this allocation provided insufficient funding for CHIP programs in Puerto Rico and the Territories, Congress increased their allotments by $32 million in the Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for FY 1999. However, this increase was provided for Fiscal Year 1999 only. This bill would increase the allotments for Puerto Rico and the Territories for future years such that funding would equal about one percent of the total grant funding. Puerto Rico and the Territories account for about 1.52 percent of the nation's population. This would increase funding in Fiscal Year 2000 to $34.2 million. I urge my colleagues' support for this modest but significant legislation. In an era of open borders, expanding trade, and increasingly interlinked economic ties, the United States should not punish Puerto Rico by selectively applying some laws while denying the benefits of others. Economic conditions in Puerto Rico warrant special consideration. While the United States is enjoying the benefits of an historically unprecedented period of economic expansion, unemployment among Puerto Rico's 3.5 million inhabitants remains high at 12.5 percent. The needs of Puerto Rico, and the importance of this provision, were magnified by the devastation recently caused by Hurricane Georges. Mr. President, now is the time to reinforce our close economic relationship with Puerto Rico. I hope my colleagues in the Senate will join me in working toward swift passage of these measures. Finally, Mr. President I ask unanimous consent that the text of the four measures be printed in full in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation to prohibit states from imposing the so called ``family cap'' as part of their Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) programs. The ``family cap'' is a policy under which a child born to a poor family on assistance is simply ignored when calculating the family's benefit--as if the child, this new infant, did not exist and had no needs. More than 20 states have imposed some version of this cap as part of their TANF programs. As I have said in previous debate on this subject, these children have not asked to be conceived, and they have not asked to come into the world. We have an elemental responsibility to them. And so states ought not deny benefits to these children because of the actions of their parents. We recently received the results of an evaluation of welfare reform in New Jersey, the first state to impose such a ``family cap.'' As it is only one study, one should be cautious about generalizing from the results. Still, it was striking to note according to the study, that over the four-year observation period ``[m]embers of the experimental group [i.e. those under a family cap] also experienced an abortion rate that was 14 percent higher than the control group [i.e. those not under a cap].'' Is that really the outcome that authors of the 1996 welfare law intended? Further, the evaluation notes of the New Jersey welfare reform effort, of which the cap as a component, that ``[w]e found no evidence that [the program] had any systemic positive impact on employment, employment stability, or earnings among AFDC recipients.'' That is, it did little to move welfare recipients to work, the ostensible objective of the 1996 welfare law. And so, with this bit of evidence to reinforce my original position, I propose today to end the family cap, and I ask unanimous consent that a summary of the legislation and its full text be included in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce two bills which will make significant reductions in the pollutants which most degrade our national air quality. The Acid Deposition and Ozone Control Act of 1999 and the Clean Gasoline Act of 1999 would reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions through national ``cap and trade'' programs, and reduce the sulfur content in gasoline, respectively. We have come a long way since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. Since that last reauthorization effort, we have successfully reduced emissions of the pollutants we set out to regulate and tremendously expanded our understanding of the causes and effects of major environmental problems such as acid deposition, ozone pollution, decreased visibility, and eutrophication of coastal waters. We can be proud of these accomplishments, but we have along way to go yet. Since 1990 we have learned, for instance, that the sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions reductions required under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 are insufficient to prevent continued damage to human health and sensitive ecosystems. We have also learned that nitrogen oxides (NOX), which we largely ignored nine years ago, are significant contributors to our nation's many air quality deficiencies. And finally, we have demonstrated that legislation containing regulatory flexibility and market incentives is preferable to the traditional ``command and control'' approach. My bills seek to build upon this new body of knowledge by combining the best and most current scientific evaluation of our environmental needs with the most effective and efficient regulatory framework. The scientific data indicate that the 1990 Amendments did not go far enough to prevent continued human health and ecosystem damage from SO2 and NOX. We now know that ozone pollution, caused in large part by NOX emissions, can have a terrible effect on human respiratory functions. The Harvard University School of Public Health's 1996 study of ozone pollution established a strong link between ground level ozone pollution and 30,000-50,000 emergency room visits during the 1993 and 1994 ozone seasons. Ecosystems continue to suffer, too. The 1998 report of the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP) indicates that sulfate concentrations of surface waters in the Southern Appalachian Mountains have been increasing steadily for more than a decade, making for an increasingly inhospitable environment for trout and other fish species. There are other types of problems, too. Visitors to our nation's national parks and wilderness areas find that it is more difficult than ever before to enjoy these scenic vistas. It is becoming increasingly difficult to see through the haze which clogs the air in our national parks. Scientists have produced volumes of scientific literature on ozone, acid deposition, regional haze, and other air quality problems over the past decade. We now know much more about the causes of these problems than we did in 1990. We know that NOX emissions, which we underestimated as a cause of air pollution, in fact play an important role in the formation of ground level ozone, acide deposition, and nitrogen deposition. We know that sulfur dioxide not only contributes significantly to acid deposition, but also to reduced visibility in our great scenic vistas. The most recent NAPAP report reflects this changing body of knowledge. The NAPAP report notes that NOX make a highly significant contribution to the occurrence of acid deposition and nitrogen saturation on both land and water. According to NAPAP, a majority of Adirondack lakes have not shown recovery from high acidity levels first detected decades ago. Forests, streams, and rivers outside of New York, in the Front Range of Colorado, the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, and the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains of California are also now showing the effects of acidification and nitrogen saturation. And mountains are not the only ecosystems affected. The Ecological Society of America, the nation's leading professional society of ecologists, issued a report in late 1997 which notes that airborne deposition of nitrogen accounts for a significant percentage of the nitrogen content of coastal water bodies stretching from the Gulf Coast up and around the entire length of the eastern seaboard. The Chesapeake Bay is believed to receive 27 percent of its nitrogen load directly from the atmosphere. For Tampa Bay, the figure is 28 percent. For the coastal waters of the Newport River in North Carolina, more than 35 percent. Clearly, any serious effort to address these problems must address NOX emissions and further reduce SO2 emissions. My bills address the major sources of NOX and SO2. The Acide Deposition and Ozone Control Act of 1998 would affect ``stationary sources'' of NOX and SO2, mainly electric utilities, and the Clean Gasoline Act of 1999 would affect ``mobile sources'', mainly cars and trucks, of NOx and other tailpipe emissions. Acid Deposition and Ozone Control Act: Controlling Stationary Sources When we designed the SO2 Allowance Program in 1990, our task was simplified by the fact that over 85 percent of SO2 emissions originated in fossil fuel-fired electric utilities. Utility emissions account for just under 30 percent of total NOX emissions, a smaller share, but large enough to merit attention. My bill establishes a year-round cap-and-trade program for NOX emissions from the utility sector and mandates a further 50 percent cut in emissions of SO2 through the existing cap and trade program. Because of the human health risks of urban ozone pollution during the summer months, the Acid Deposition and Ozone Control Act requires utilities to surrender two allowances for each ton of NOX emitted between May and September. During the remainder of the year, only one allowance is required to produce one ton of NOX emissions. In this way, utilities are encouraged to make the greatest reductions during the summer, when the collective risk to human health from these emissions is higher. In light of the impressive success and cost effectiveness of the cap and trade program which regulates SO2, the Acid Deposition and Ozone Control Act is designed to build onto it as seamlessly as possible by establishing a ``Phase III'' under the existing program. Under the proposed Phase III, total utility emissions of SO2 would be reduced to just under 4.5 million tons per year, significantly reducing acid deposition and improving visibility in our Nation's scenic vistas. The Clean Gasoline Act of 1999: Addressing Mobile Sources This bill establishes a national, year-round cap on the sulfur content of gasoline sold in the United States. The bill would extend the so-called California gasoline sulfur standard nationwide. The benefits of reducing gasoline sulfur would be dramatic and virtually immediate. The presence of sulfur in gasoline increases vehicle emissions because sulfur poisons the catalytic converter used in the vehicle's emissions control system. Sulfur is a pollutant only: its presence (or absence) does not effect engine performance. In the 1970's, we fought to remove lead from gasoline to make possible the introduction of catalytic converters. Until recently, we did not appreciate that sulfur is a catalyst poison, too. All vehicles in the national fleet with catalytic converters--virtually all vehicles--produce higher levels of NOX because of the high levels of sulfur in the gasoline they burn. The cost of gasoline would rise under this bill--by a nickel a gallon at the retail level, at most. For a car driven 15,000 miles per year that achieves 15 miles per gallon, the cost of the Clean Gasoline Act would be $50 annually. Keep in mind, however, that gasoline prices, adjusted for inflation, are cheaper now than they have been at any time since 1950, the beginning point of our analysis. And the benefits to human health and the environment of reducing gasoline sulfur far outweigh this modest cost. A recent study by the State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators and the Association of Local Air Pollution Control Officials (STAPPA-ALAPCO) found that reducing gasoline sulfur levels to 40 parts per million, the California standard, would bring an air quality benefit equivalent to removing nearly 54 million vehicles from our national fleet. New York City alone would have a benefit equal to removing 3 million vehicles from its streets. We must not pass up the opportunity to make such large gains in emissions reductions for such a minor cost. As I mentioned earlier, I am proud of what we accomplished in enacting the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. The SO2 Allowance Program established by that legislation has achieved extraordinary benefits at program compliance costs less than half of initial projections. The efficacy of the approach is proven. The current science indicates, however, that we did not go far enough in 1990 in setting our emissions reduction targets. The bills I have introduced endeavor to build upon our accomplishments thus far, and to begin the work which remains to be done. I encourage my colleagues to join myself and Mr. Schumer in sponsoring the Acid Deposition and Ozone Control Act of 1999, and to join myself and Mr. Levin, Mr. Leahy, Mr. Schumer, Mrs. Boxer, Mr. Cleland, and Mr. Jeffords in sponsoring the Clean Gasoline Act of 1999. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bills be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce a bill which restricts those who can have access to black powder, the primary ingredient in pipe bombs. At present, there are no restrictions on those who wish to buy commercially manufactured black powder in quantities not to exceed 50 pounds solely for sporting or recreational purposes. Anyone, including a convicted felon, a fugitive from justice, and a person adjudicated to be mentally defective, can buy commercially manufactured black powder in the above amounts with no questions asked. This is both wrong and dangerous. The same restrictions that apply to who can buy explosives should also apply to those who can lawfully buy commercially manufactured black powder. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today I join my colleague, Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire, in introducing a bill to allow certain members of the clergy who are currently exempt from Social Security an open season to ``opt in.'' Under section 1402 of the Internal Revenue Code, a member of the clergy who is conscientiously, or because of religious principles, opposed to participation in a public insurance program generally, may elect to be exempt from Social Security coverage and payroll taxes by filing an application of exemption with the Internal Revenue Service within two years of beginning the ministry. To be eligible for the exemption, the member of the clergy must be an ``individual who is a fully ordained, commissioned, or licensed minister of a church, or a member of a religious order who has not taken a vow of poverty.'' Once elected this exemption is irrevocable. This legislation would allow members of the clergy who are not eligible for Social Security a two-year open season in which they could revoke their exemption. At the time of exemption, many clergy did not fully understand the ramifications of their actions, and it is not until later in life, when they are blocked from coverage, that they realize their need for Social Security and Medicare. This decision to ``opt in'' would be irrevocable and all post-election earnings would be subject to the payroll tax and credited for the purposes of Social Security and Medicare. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this legislation would affect approximately 3,500 members of the clergy and would increase revenues by about $45 million over the next five years. Similar legislation was passed both in the 1977 Social Security Amendments (Section 316) and in the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (Section 1704). This bill has been endorsed by the United States Catholic Conference and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. It is a simple but much-needed measure, and I urge every member of the Senate to support it.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to introduce a bill which would place the home and studio of Thomas Cole under the care of the Greene County Historical Society as a National Historic Site. I am pleased Senator Schumer has agreed to cosponsor this bill. Thomas Cole founded the American artistic tradition known as the Hudson River School. He painted landscapes of the American wilderness as it never had been depicted, untamed and majestic, the way Americans saw it in the 1830s and 1840s as they moved west. His students and followers included Frederick Church, Alfred Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and John Frederick Kennesett. No description of Cole's works would do them justice, but let me say that their moody, dramatic style and subject matter were in sharp contrast to the pastoral European landscapes that Americans previously had admired. The new country was just settled enough that some people had time and resources to devote to collecting art. Cole's new style coincided with this growing interest, to the benefit of both. Cole had begun his painting career in Manhattan, but one day took a steamboat up the Hudson for inspiration. It worked. The landscapes he saw set him on the artistic course that became his life's work. He eventually moved to a house up the river in Catskill. First he boarded; then he bought the house. He married and raised his family there. That house, known as Cedar Grove, remained in the Cole family until 1979, when it was put up for sale. The Cole house would be only the second site under the umbrella of the Park Service dedicated to interpreting the life and work of an American painter. Olana, Church's home, sits immediately across the Hudson, so we have the opportunity to provide visitors with two nearby destinations that show the inspiration for two of America's foremost nineteenth century painters. Visitors could walk, hike, or drive to the actual spots where masterpieces were painted and see the landscape much as it was then. I regret that none of Thomas Cole's work hang in the Capitol, although two works by Bierstadt can be found in the stairwell outside the Speaker's Lobby. Perhaps Cole's greatest work is the four-part Voyage of Life, an allegorical series that depicts man in the four stages of life. It can be found in the National Gallery, along with two other Cole paintings. Another work of Cole's that we would be advised to remember is The Course of Empire, which depicts the rise of a great civilization from the wilderness, and its return. Several years ago the first major Cole exhibition in decades was held at the National Museum of American Art. The exhibition was all the evidence needed of Cole's importance and the merit of adding his home to the list of National Historic Sites. I should add that this must happen soon. The house needs work, and will not endure many more winters in its present state. This legislation would authorize cooperative agreements under which the management of the Cole House would go to the Greene County Historical Society, which is entirely qualified for the job. The Society could enter into cooperative agreements with the National Park Service for the preservation and interpretation of the site. I ask that my colleagues support this legislation, and that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce a bill that would require vendors of explosives to notify the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (B.A.T.F.) when they sell such items. Now, there is no requirement that a seller notify the B.A.T.F. when a customer buys explosives. All that is required is that the buyer complete a federally generated form--5400.4--and that the seller keep it. There is nothing that requires the seller to send a copy of this form to the B.A.T.F. In all likelihood, any terrorist attach aimed at this country's infrastructure will use explosives to achieve its purpose. One key way to prevent an attack such as this is to have information about the individuals who are buying these items. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today I introduce legislation that would establish a Medical Education Trust Fund to support America's 144 accredited medical schools and 1,250 graduate medical education teaching institutions. These institutions are national treasures; they are the very best in the world. Yet today they find themselves in a precarious financial situation as market forces reshape the health care delivery system in the United States. Explicit and dedicated funding for these institutions, which this legislation will provide, will ensure that the United States continues to lead the world in the quality of its health care system. This legislation requires that the public sector, through the Medicare and Medicaid programs, and the private sector, through an assessment on health insurance premiums, contribute broad-based and fair financial support. My particular interest in this subject began in 1994, when the Finance Committee took up the President's Health Security Act. I was Chairman of the Committee at the time. In January of that year, I asked Dr. Paul Marks, M.D., President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, if he would arrange a ``seminar'' for me on health care issues. He agreed, and gathered a number of medical school deans together one morning in New York. Early on in the meeting, one of the seminarians remarked that the University of Minnesota might have to close its medical school. In an instant I realized I had heard something new. Minnesota is a place where they open medical schools, not close them. How, then, could this be? The answer was that Minnesota, being Minnesota, was a leading state in the growth of competitive health care markets, in which managed care organizations try to deliver services at lower costs. In this environment, HMOs and the like do not send patients to teaching hospitals, absent which you cannot have a medical school. We are in the midst of a great era of discovery in medical science. It is certainly not a time to close medical schools. This great era of medical discovery is occurring right here in the United States, not in Europe like past ages of scientific discovery. And it is centered in New York City. This heroic age of medical science started in the late 1930s. Before then, the average patient was probably as well off, perhaps better, out of a hospital as in one. Progress from that point sixty years ago has been remarkable. The last few decades have brought us images of the inside of the human body based on the magnetic resonance of bodily tissues; laser surgery; micro surgery for reattaching limbs; and organ transplantation, among other wonders. Physicians are now working on a gene therapy that might eventually replace bypass surgery. I can hardly imagine what might be next. After months of hearings and debate on the President's Health Security Act, I became convinced that special provisions would have to be made for medical schools, teaching hospitals, and medical research if we were not to see this great moment in medical science suddenly constrained. To that end, when the Committee on Finance voted 12 to 8 on July 2, 1994 to report the Health Security Act, it included a Graduate Medical Education and Academic Health Centers Trust Fund. The Trust Fund provided an 80 percent increase in federal funding for academic medicine; as importantly, it represented stable, long-term funding. While nothing came of the effort to enact universal health care coverage, the medical education trust fund enjoyed widespread support. An amendment by Senator Malcolm Wallop to kill the trust fund by striking the source of its revenue--a 1.75 percent assessment on health insurance premiums--failed on a 7-13 vote in the Finance Committee. I continued to press the issue in the first session of the 104th Congress. On September 29, 1995, during Finance Committee consideration of budget reconciliation legislation, I offered an amendment to establish a similar trust fund. My amendment failed on a tie vote, 10 to 10. Notably, however, the House version of the reconciliation bill did include a graduate medical education trust fund. That provision ultimately passed both houses as part of the conference agreement, which was subsequently vetoed by President Clinton. The budget resolution for fiscal year 1997 as passed by Congress also appeared to assume that a similar trust fund was to be included in the Medicare reconciliation bill--a bill which never materialized. The Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Representative Bill Archer, was largely responsible for the inclusion of trust fund provisions in the Balanced Budget Act of 1995 and the budget resolution for fiscal year 1997. He and I share a strong commitment to ensuring the continued success of our system of medical education. Indeed, Chairman Archer and I were both honored in 1996 to receive the American Association of Medical Colleges' Public Service Excellence Award. That is the history of this effort, briefly stated. Medical education is one of America's most precious public resources. Within our increasingly competitive health care system, it is rapidly becoming a public good--that is, a good from which everyone benefits, but for which no one is willing to pay. Therefore, it should be explicitly financed with contributions from all sectors of the health care system, not just the Medicare program as is the case today. The fiscal pressures of a competitive health market are increasingly closing off traditional implicit revenue sources (such as additional payments from private payers) that have supported medical schools, graduate medical education, and research until now. In its June, 1995 Report to Congress, the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission (ProPAC), created to advise Congress on Medicare Hospital Insurance (Part A) payment, summarized the situation of teaching hospitals as follows: As competition in the health care system intensifies, the additional costs borne by teaching hospitals will place them at a disadvantage relative to other facilities. The role, scale, function, and number of these institutions increasingly will be challenged. . . . Accelerating price competition in the private sector . . . is reducing the ability of teaching hospitals to obtain the higher patient care rates from other payers that traditionally have contributed to financing the costs associated with graduate medical education. ProPAC's June, 1996 Report to Congress confirmed that ``major teaching hospitals have the dual problems of higher overall losses from uncompensated care and less above-cost revenue from private insurers.'' The State of New York provides a good example of what is happening as health care markets become more competitive. Effective at the end of the 1996 calendar year, New York repealed a state law that set hospital rates. Hospitals must now negotiate their fees with each and every health plan in the state. Where teaching hospitals were once guaranteed a payment that recognized, to some degree, its higher costs of providing services, the private sector is free to squeeze down payments to hospitals with no such recognition. While the State of New York operates funding pools that provide partial support for graduate medical education and uncompensated care, it is largely up to the teaching hospitals to try to win higher rates than other hospitals when negotiating contracts with health plans. Some may succeed in doing so, but most will probably not. New York's state law was unique, but the same process of negotiation between hospitals and private health plant takes place across the country. Who, in this context, will pay for the higher costs of operating teaching hospitals? It is worth mentioning that the NY state funding pools for GME were established as a temporary, yet important source of support for GME until Federal law--like the bill I am introducing today--can be passed by Congress. While New York has historically recognized the value of supporting GME through the state funding pools, this source of funding is currently in jeopardy of not being reauthorized by the state legislature. It is obvious that teaching hospitals can no longer rely on higher payments from private payers to do so. Nor should they. The establishment of this trust fund, which explicitly reimburses teaching hospitals for the costs of graduate medical education, will ensure that teaching hospitals can pursue their vitally important patient care, training, and research missions in the face of an increasingly competitive health system. Medical schools also face an uncertain future. There are many policy issues that need to be examined regarding the role of medical schools in our health system, but two threats faced by medical schools require immediate attention. This legislation addresses both. First, many medical schools are immediately threatened by the dire financial condition of their affiliated teaching hospitals. Medical schools rely on teaching hospitals to provide a place for their faculty to practice and perform research, a place to send third and fourth-year medical school students for training, and for some direct revenues. By improving the financial condition of teaching hospitals, this legislation significantly improves the outlook for medical schools. The second immediate threat faced by medical schools stems from their reliance on a portion of the clinical practice revenue generated by their faculties to support their operations. As competition within the health system intensifies and managed care proliferates, these revenues are shrinking. This legislation provides payments to medical schools from the Trust Fund that are designed to partially offset this loss of revenue. As we begin the 106th Congress, the Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare as established in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 is debating its recommendations to assure the long-term solvency and viability of the Medicare program. One of the most important policy discussions the Commission has undertaken centers on Medicare's role in the funding of Graduate Medical Education. In order to remain the world leader in graduate medical education, we must continue to maintain Medicare's commitment to GME and to the nation's teaching hospitals. I urge the Commission to maintain GME support through the Medicare program in order to assure a stable, federal source of funding. Several Commission members have raised the alarming idea of subjecting GME to an annual appropriations process. I urge my colleagues to reject this dangerous notion. It would be a tragedy for our medical schools and teaching institutions. Pitting GME against other important federal priorities would likely result in a substantial reduction in the federal commitment to GME. None of the foregoing is meant to suggest that the new competitive forces reshaping health care have brought only negative results. To the contrary, the onset of competition has had many beneficial effects, the restraint of growth on average in health insurance premiums being the most obvious. But as Monsignor Charles J. Fahey of Fordham warned in testimony before the Finance Committee in 1994, we must be wary of the ``commodification of health care,'' by which he meant that health care is not just another commodity. We can rely on competition to hold down costs in much of the health system, but we must not allow it to bring a premature end to this great age of medical discovery, an age made possible by this country's exceptionally well-trained health professionals and superior medical schools and teaching hospitals. This legislation complements a competitive health market by providing tax- supported funding for the public services provided by teaching hospitals and medical schools. Accordingly, the Medical Education Trust Fund established in the legislation I have just reintroduced would receive funding from three sources broadly representing the entire health care system: a 1.5 percent tax on health insurance premiums (the private sector's contribution), Medicare and Medicaid (the latter two sources comprising the public sector's contribution). The relative contribution from each of these sources will be in rough proportion to the medical education costs attributable to their respective covered populations. Over the five years following enactment, the Medical Education Trust Fund provides average annual payments of about $17 billion. The tax on health insurance premiums (including self-insured health plans) raises approximately $5 billion per year for the Trust Fund. Federal health programs contribute about $12 billion per year to the Trust Fund: $8 billion of current Medicare graduate medical education payments and $4 billion in federal Medicaid spending. This legislation is only a first step. It establishes the principle that, as a public good, medical education should be supported by dedicated, long-term Federal funding. To ensure that the United States continues to lead the world in the quality of its medical education and its health system as a whole, the legislation would also create a Medical Education Advisory Commission to conduct a thorough study and make recommendations, including the potential use of demonstration projects, regarding the following: Alternative and additional sources of medical education financing; Alternative methodologies for financing medical education; Policies designed to maintain superior research and educational capacities in an increasingly competitive health system; The appropriate role of medical schools in graduate medical education; and Policies designed to expand eligibility for graduate medical education payments to institutions other than teaching hospitals, including children's hospitals. Mr. President, the services provided by this Nation's teaching hospitals and medical schools--groundbreaking research, highly skilled medical care, and the training of tomorrow's physicians--are vitally important and must be protected in this time of intense economic competition in the health system. I ask unanimous consent that a summary of the bill and the text of the bill, respectively, be included in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, it is with great pride that I rise today with my distinguished colleague Senator Schumer to introduce the ``Kate Mullany National Historic Site Designation Act,'' a bill to designate the Troy, New York, home of pioneer labor organizer Kate Mullany as a National Historic Site. A similar measure introduced in the House of Representatives last year by Congressman Michael R. McNulty engendered a great deal of support and was cosponsored by over 100 members. Like many Irish immigrants settling in Troy, Kate Mullany found her opportunities limited to the most difficult and low-paying of jobs, the collar laundry industry. Troy was then known as ``The Collar City''-- the birthplace of the detachable shirt collar. At the age of 19, Kate stood up against the often dangerous conditions and meager pay that characterized the industry and lead a movement of 200 female laundresses demanding just compensation and safe working conditions. These protests marked the beginning of the Collar Laundry Union, which some have called ``the only bona fide female labor union in the country.'' Kate Mullany's courage and organizing skills did not go unnoticed. She later traveled down the Hudson River to lead women workers in the sweatshops of New York City and was ultimately appointed Assistant Secretary of the then National Labor Union, becoming the first women ever appointed to a national labor office. On April 1, 1998, Kate Mullany's home was designated as a National Historic Landmark by Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and on July 15 First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton presented citizens of Troy with the National Historic Landmark plaque in a celebration. By conferring National Historic Site status on this important landmark, we can ensure that Kate Mullany's contributions to the labor movement and the cause of women's equality in the workplace are not soon forgotten. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce a bill to authorize funding for Cuban nationals for the Fulbright Educational Exchange Program so that they may come to the United States for graduate study. The world is a changed place. The Soviet Union dissolved almost a decade ago, and since then democracy has replaced totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. Since the demise of its sponsor, the Soviet Union, and the disappearance of Soviet subsidies, Cuba has had to change to survive. In time, the winds of democracy sweeping the globe will reach the shores of Cuba. We learned from the cold war that one of the most subversive acts in that ideological conflict was exposing communists to the West. In his lucid chronicle of the demise of the Soviet Union, Michael Dobbs writes in Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, A turning point in [Boris] Yeltsin's intellectual development occurred during his first visit to the United States in September 1989, more specifically his first visit to an American supermarket, in Houston, Texas. The sight of aisle after aisle of shelves neatly stacked with every conceivable type of foodstuff and household item, each in a dozen varieties, both amazed and depressed him. For Yeltsin, like many other first-time Russian visitors to America, this was infinitely more impressive than tourist attractions like the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial. It was impressive precisely because of its ordinariness. A cornucopia of consumer goods beyond the imagination of most Soviets was within the reach of ordinary citizens without standing in line for hours. And it was all so attractively displayed. For someone brought up in the drab conditions of communism, even a member of the relatively privileged elite, a visit to a Western supermarket involved a full-scale assault on the senses. What we saw in that supermarket was no less amazing than America itself,'' recalled Lev Sukhanov, who accompanied Yeltsin on his trip to the United States and shared his sense of shock and dismay at the gap in living standards between the two superpowers. ``I think it is quite likely that the last prop of Yeltsin's Bolshevik consciousness finally collapsed after Houston. His decision to leave the party and join the struggle for supreme power in Russia may have ripened irrevocably at that moment of mental confusion. The young people of Cuba are that country's future. As such what they learn now will help shape a post-Castro Cuba. Since its inception in 1947, at the suggestion of Senator J. William Fulbright, the Fulbright Educational Exchange Program has sent nearly 82,000 Americans abroad and provided 138,000 foreign students and professors with the opportunity to come to the United States for study--to live here, to understand our great country, and return to their own nations so enriched. Nearly 50 years ago they sent me off to the London School of Economics. I left the United States untouched by war to live in Europe as it climbed out of its ruins. In London, I learned from experience Seymour Martin Lipset's dictum, ``He who knows only one country knows no country.'' Use the simple analogy of eyesight: it takes two eyes to provide perspective. It was a seminal time for the world and for me. This bill will offer that opportunity to Cubans to study in the United States, as I studied in London. Fidel Castro will not live forever--it is time to get ready for an end game. Now is the time to start showing the people of Cuba, especially the young people, how the United States works and how their country might change. So let us bring them here and not act like it's the middle of the Cold War. Let us bring them to the United States and offer them education and a chance to see the world's oldest democracy in action. We need to begin now to expose future leaders of Cuba to the United States. For, as Senator Fulbright observed, The vital mortar to seal the bricks of world order is education across international boundaries, not with the expectation that knowledge would make us love each other, but in the hope that it would encourage empathy between nations, and foster the emergence of leaders whose sense of other nations and cultures would enable them to shape specific policies based on tolerance and rational restraint. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to introduce the Government Secrecy Reform Act. I would like to begin by thanking my cosponsors, Senators Helms, Lott, Daschle, Thompson, Collins, and Schumer. The legislation that we introduce today is intended to implement the core recommendation of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy: a statute establishing the principles to govern the classification and declassification of information. The Federal government has a legitimate interest in maintaining secrets in order to fulfill its Constitutional charge to ``provide for the common defense.'' At the same time, this interest must be balanced by the public's right to be informed of government activities. The Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, which I chaired, found a secrecy system out of balance: one which has lost the confidence of many inside and outside the Government. Consequently, information needing protection does not always receive it, while innocuous information is classified and remains classified. The Commission found in its 1997 report that ``[t]he best way to ensure that secrecy is respected, and that the most important secrets remain secret, is for secrecy to be returned to its limited but necessary role. Secrets can be protected more effectively if secrecy is reduced overall.'' Begin with the concept that secrecy should be understood as a form of government regulation. This was an insight of the Commission, building on the work of the great German sociologist Max Weber. The instinct of the bureaucracy, Weber wrote, was to ``increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret.'' The concept of the `official secret' ``is the specific invention of bureaucracy, and nothing is so fanatically defended by the bureaucracy as this attitude.'' We traditionally think of regulation as a means to govern how citizens are to behave. Whereas public regulation involves what citizens may do, secrecy concerns what citizens may know. And the citizen does not know what may not be known. As our Commission stated: ``Americans are familiar with the tendency to overregulate in other areas. What is different with secrecy is that the public cannot know the extent or the content of the regulation.'' Thus, secrecy is the ultimate mode of regulation; the citizen does not even know that he or she is being regulated! It is a parallel regulatory regime with a far greater potential for damage if it malfunctions. In our democracy, where the free exchange of ideas is so essential, it can be suffocating. To reform this system, the Commission recommended legislation be adopted. Senator Jesse Helms and I, and Representatives Larry Combest and Lee Hamilton (all Commissioners), introduced the Government Secrecy Act on May 7, 1997. Our core objective is to ensure that secrecy proceed according to law. Since the Truman Administration, classification and declassification have been governed by a series of executive orders but not one has created a stable and reliable system to ensure we protect what truly needs protecting and nothing more. The system lacks the discipline of a legal framework to define and enforce the proper uses of secrecy. The proposed statute can help ensure that the present regulatory regime will not simply continue to flourish without any restraint and without meaningful oversight and accountability. The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Chaired by Senator Thompson of Tennessee, considered the bill is the 105th Congress and reported it unanimously. In its report to accompany the bill, the Committee had this important insight: Our liberties depend on the balanced structure created by James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution. The national security information system has not had a clear legislative foundation, but . . . has been developed through a series of executive orders. It is time to bring this executive monopoly over the issue to an end, and to begin to engage in the same sort of dialogue between Congress and the executive that characterizes the development of government policy in all other means. As the Cold War gathered, this ``executive monopoly'' as the Governmental Affairs Committee has termed it, was spawned. The United States had to organize itself to deal with aggression from the Soviet Union. American society in peacetime began to experience wartime regulation. The awful dilemma was that in order to preserve an open society, the U.S. government took measures that in significant ways closed it down. The culture of secrecy that evolved was intended as a defense against two antagonists: the enemy abroad and the enemy within. Edward Shils chronicled the perils of this growing secrecy system in his 1956 work, The Torment of Secrecy. He said of this era: The American visage began to cloud over. Secrets were to become our chief reliance just when it was becoming more and more evident that the Soviet Union had long maintained an active apparatus for espionage in the United States. For a country which had never previously thought of itself as an object of systematic espionage by foreign powers, it was unsettling. The larger society, Shils continued, was ``facing an unprecedented threat to its continuance.'' In such circumstances, ``the phantasies of apocalyptic visionaries now claimed the respectability of being a reasonable interpretation of the real situation.'' Shils was writing, as he explained in his Foreword, ``after nearly a decade of degrading agitation and numerous unnecessary and unworthy actions . . .'' Today, by contrast, the public and its representatives have few of the concerns of ideological ``infiltration'' that dominated our attention and our domestic politics during the decade preceding Shils' book. Indeed, if there is such a thing as a ``typical'' case of espionage, it involves an employee well into mid-career who sells national security secrets out of greed, not because of any ideologically-based motivation. Moreover, today it is the United States government that increasingly finds itself the object of what Shils four decades ago termed the ``phantasies of apocalyptic visionaries.'' Conspiracy theories have been with us since the birth of the Republic. The best-known and most notorious is, of course, the unwillingness on the part of the vast majority of the American public to accept that President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. A poll taken in 1966, two years after release of the Warren Commission report concluding that Oswald had acted alone, found that 36 percent of respondents accepted this finding, while 50 percent believed others had been involved in a conspiracy to kill the President. By 1978 only 18 percent responded that they believed the assassination had been the act of one man; fully 75 percent believed there had been a broader plot. The numbers have remained relatively steady since; a 1993 poll also found that three-quarters of those surveyed believed (consistent with the film JFK, released that year) that there had been a conspiracy. It so happens that I was in the White House at the hour of the President's death (I was an assistant labor secretary at the time). I feared what would become of Oswald if he were not protected and I pleaded that we must get custody of him. But no one seemed to be able to hear. Presently Oswald was killed, significantly complicating matters. I did not think there had been a conspiracy to kill the president, but I was convinced that the American people would sooner or later come to believe that there had been one unless we investigated the event with exactly that presumption in mind. The Warren Commission report and the other subsequent investigations, with their nearly universal reliance on secrecy, did not dispel any such fantasies. The Assassination Records Review Board has now completed its Congressionally mandated review and release of documents related to President Kennedy's assassination. It has assembled at the National Archives a thorough collection of documents and evidence that was previously secret and scattered about the government. The Review Board found that while the public has continued to search for answers over the past thirty-five years: [T]he official record on the assassination of President Kennedy remained shrouded in secrecy and mystery. The suspicions created by government secrecy eroded confidence in the truthfulness of federal agencies in general and damaged their credibility. Credibility eroded needlessly, as most of the documents which the Board reviewed were declassified. In conducting this document-by-document review of classified information, the Board reports that ``the federal government needlessly and wastefully classified and then withheld from public access countless important records that did not require such treatment.'' With the Government Secrecy Reform Act, we are not proposing putting an end to government secrecy. Far from it. It is at times terribly necessary and used for the most legitimate reasons--ranging from military operations to diplomatic endeavors. Indeed, much of our Commission's report is devoted to explaining the varied circumstances in which secrecy is most essential. Yet, the bureaucratic attachment to secrecy has become so warped that, in the words of Kermit Hall, a member of the Assassination Records Review Board, it has transformed into ``a deeply ingrained commitment to secrecy as a form of partriotism.'' From this perspective, it is easy to see how secrecy became the norm. Secrecy need not remain the only norm--particularly when one considers that the current badly overextended system frequently fails to protect its most important secrets adequately. We must develop what might be termed a competing ``culture of openness''--fully consistent with our interests in protecting national security. A culture in which power and authority are no longer derived primarily from one's ability to withhold information from others in government and the public at large. This is our purpose in introducing the Government Secrecy Reform Act. I thank those who have agreed to cosponsor the bill and ask my colleagues to lend it the attention it deserves. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I join my distinguished colleague, Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, in reintroducing legislation that would preserve Social Security and make it solvent permanently, while providing a payroll tax cut of about $800 billion over the next ten years. Last March, Senator Kerrey and I introduced a nearly identical bill-- S. 1792, The Social Security Solvency Act of 1998. And in July of 1998 Senators Gregg and Breaux introduced S. 2313, The 21st Century Retirement Security Plan, with a companion bill introduced in the House by Congressmen Koble and Stenholm. All of these bills attempt to steer a mid-course between those who seek to maintain the current system (albeit with some traditional modifications of payroll tax rates and benefits) and those who seek to replace Social Security with private accounts. The Moynihan/Kerrey and Gregg/Breaux/Koble/Stenholm bills are quite similar. In September of last year I, along with Senators Gregg, Breaux, Kerrey, Coats, Robb, Thomas, and Thompson formed a Bipartisan Social Security Coalition. In a ``Dear Colleague'' we argued that a number of principles have guided us in our efforts to build a consensus on the future of Social Security including: A payroll tax cut for all working Americans, with an opportunity for all workers to invest in personal savings account; Payroll tax rates set so that annual revenues closely match annual outlays throughout the actuarial valuation period; A progressive benefit formula; Accurate cost-of-living adjustments; Repeal of the earnings test so that beneficiaries are free to work while collecting benefits; and Permanent solvency for the Social Security program with a reduction in the Federal Government's unfunded liabilities. For those who care, as we do, about preserving this vital program, I would simply suggest that without these changes, Social Security as we know it will not survive. For some 20 years now, opinion polls have shown that a majority of non-retired adults do not believe they will get their Social Security when they retire. Ask anyone on the street; ask anyone in their thirties or forties. They are convinced that Social Security will not be there for them. In one sense, they have good reason to think so: the Social Security Trustees so state in their most recent annual report released in April, 1998, which pointedly notes that: * * * in 2034, tax income of OASI (Social Security) is estimated to be sufficient to pay about \3/4\ of program costs; that ratio is projected to decline to about \2/3\ by the end of the projection period. Lack of confidence is partially the result of neglect by a Social Security Administration that has made little effort to stay in touch with Americans before retirement. But there is also a more powerful influence at work: a serious ideological movement opposed to government social insurance as a threat to individual initiative and, indeed, liberty. There is now abroad a powerful set of distinguished political leaders and academics who would turn the 60-year-old system of Social Security retirement, disability, and survivors benefits over to a system that depends solely on personal savings invested in the market. This is a legitimate idea, with respectable intellectual support. (One thinks of the energetic work of Martin Feldstein, who 20 years ago argued that ``Social Security significantly depresses private wealth accumulation.'') It is an idea that has gained world-wide recognition. Since 1988, workers in the United Kingdom had been permitted to opt out of a part of the Social Security system, if they sign up for some personal retirement savings plans similar to our IRAs or 401(k) arrangements. In Sweden, the model welfare state, a pension reform plan that includes a mandatory private pension component equal to 2.5 percent of earnings went into effect this year, after being enacted by a coalition government composed of Social Democrats and other left of center parties. As the 1990s arrived, and with it the long stock market boom, the call for privatization of Social Security has all but drowned out the more traditional views. For the first time, something akin to abolishing Social Security becamer a possibility. Don't think it couldn't happen. In 1996, we enacted legislation which abolished Title IV-A of the Social Security Act, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The mothers' pension of the progressive era, incorporated in the 1935 legislation, vanished with scarcely a word of protest. Will the Old Age pensions and survivors benefits disappear as well? What might once have seemed inconceivable is now somewhere between possible and probable. I, for one, hope that this will not happen. A minimum retirement guarantee, along with disability and survivors benefits, is surely something we ought to keep, even as we augment the basic guarantee--as both the U.K and Sweden have done--with some form of private accounts. Here is what Senator Bob Kerrey and I proposed, in the legislation that we are reintroducing today. Our bill makes changes that will preserve Social Security and make it solvent indefinitely. Under our plan, private accounts would complement Social Security, not replace it. Markets go up, but they also, as we made painfully clear last summer, frequently go down. But even with fluctuations in markets there are ways to safeguard private accounts. Working with the Securities and Exchange Commission and those in the securities industry we believe that it is possible to provide private savings instruments that meet the needs of workers planning for their retirement, and that are reasonably secure, with diminimus administrative costs. We believe that the best approach to retirement savings in the 21st century is a three-tier system founded on the basic Social Security annuity. To which is added one's private pension--which about half of Americans now enjoy--and one's private savings. Our plan would return Social Security to a pay-as-you-go system. This makes possible an immediate payroll tax cut of approximately $800 billion over the next 10 years, as payroll tax rates would be cut from 12.4 to 10.4 percent. The bill would permit voluntary personal savings accounts, which workers could finance with the proceeds of the two percentage point cut in the payroll tax. Under this provision in our legislation--together with a total of $3,500 deposited in an individual's account at birth and at ages 1-5 under the Kidsave provision of the bill--all workers will be able to accumulate an estate which they can pass on to their children and grandchildren. Our plan includes a one percentage point correction in cost of living adjustments for all indexed programs except Supplemental Security Income. Benefits are also adjusted to reflect projected increases in life expectancy, similar to what has just been adopted in Sweden. It is worth digressing here to note that under current law the so- called normal retirement age (NRA) is scheduled to gradually increase from 65 to 67. In practice, the NRA, is important as a benchmark for determining the monthly benefit amount, but it does not reflect the actual age at which workers receive retirement benefits. More than 70 percent of workers begin collecting Social Security retirement benefits before they reach age 65, and more than 50 percent do so at age 62. Under the bill, workers can continue to receive benefits at age 62 and the provision in the 1983 Social Security amendments that increased the NRA to age 67 is repealed. Instead, under this legislation, if life expectancy increases the level of benefits payable at age 65 (or at the age at which the worker actually retires) decreases. (Sweden has adopted a similar provision allowing workers to continue to retire at age 61, even as monthly benefits are reduced to mirror the projected gradual increase in life expectancy.) We also propose to eliminate the so-called earnings test, which reduces Social Security benefits for retirees who have wages significantly above $10,000 per year, and is a burden and annoyance to persons who wish to work after age 62. Finally, Social Security benefits would be taxed to the same extent private pensions are taxed, with the provision phased-in over the 5 year period 2000-2004. And Social Security coverage would be extended to newly hired employees in currently excluded State and local positions. This package of changes ensures the long-run solvency of Social Security while reducing payroll taxes by almost $800 billion over the next decade, and with little or no change in the Federal budget surplus. Beginning in the year 2030, payroll tax rates would increase gradually to cover growing outlays, and would rise only slightly above the current level in the year 2035. Can this be done? From an actuarial perspective, it's easy. We know-- or at least the actuaries can tell us--within a couple of million persons how many workers will be supporting how many retirees in 2050. Contrast this with Medicare, where you do not know where gene therapy will lead in three years, let alone 30 years. The 17 members of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, ably chaired by Senator Breaux, can, I am sure, attest to the analytic complexity of the issues they are discussing as part of that important Commission's work. Politically, however, it won't be easy to fix Social Security. In a manner that the late economist Mancur Olson would recognize, over time Social Security has acquired a goodly number of veto groups which prevent changes, howsoever necessary. In so doing they also undermine confidence in Social Security by supporting a promised level of benefits which the Trustees, as noted above, readily admit cannot be delivered. The veto groups assert that the Moynihan-Kerrey bill will reduce benefits by 30 percent. Not true when compared to what actually can be delivered. With pay-as-you-go, and adjustments in benefits related to an accurate cost of living index and the increase in life expectancy, the Moynihan-Kerrey bill delivers higher benefits than Social Security can actually provide with projected tax revenues under current law. For example, in 2040 the Social Security actuaries estimate that the current program can only deliver 73 percent of promised benefits. We do slightly better than that. Add in the annuity--financed with voluntary contributions of 2 percent of earnings--and benefits are 20 percent or more higher than the current program can deliver--even assuming real rates of interest no higher than a modest 3 percent. For 2070, the actuaries estimate that current financing will only support benefits equal to 68 percent of what is promised--a reduction of more than 30 percent. Again we do slightly better even without the private accounts--and more than 25 percent better with the private accounts. As I say, this won't be easy. Which is why this is a time for courage as well as policy analysis. Social Security, one of the great achievements of our government in this century, is ours to maintain. Our bill does just that. I ask unanimous consent the summary of the bill and the full text of the bill be included in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, at a time when we risk the ever coarsening of our public affairs, we would do well to remember a man whose service to this country was distinguished as no other for civility and elegance. I ask that this tribute to Clark M. Clifford by Sander Vanocur be printed in the Record. The tribute follows. Tribute to Clark Clifford (By Sander Vanocur) The following anonymous poem was sent to Clark Clifford's daughters, Joyce and Randall, by their sister, Faith, who could not be here today: Think of stepping on shore and finding it Heaven, Of taking hold of a hand and finding it God's, Of breathing new air, and finding it celestial air, Of feeling invigorated and finding it immortality, Of passing from storm and tempest to an unbroken calm, Of waking up, and finding it Home. In the secular sense, Clark Clifford found that home in Washington more than fifty years ago. And having found that home, let it be said that while he was here, he graced this place. It was a much different place when he and Marny came here, smaller in size but larger in imagination, made larger in imagination by World War II. It may have been, then and for a good time after, as John F. Kennedy once noted, a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm. But it was also, at least then, a place where dreams could be fashioned into reality. Being an intensely political city, dreams, as always, had to be fashioned by reality. And it was in this art of political compromise where Clark Clifford flourished. He was known as the consummate Washington insider. Quite often the term was used in the pejorative sense. It should not have been. If you believe as he did in what George Orwell meant when he wrote that in the end everything is political, it should be a case for celebration rather than lamentation that he played the role, for if he had not played this role who else of his generation could have played it quite so well, especially when the time came to tell a President of the United States, who was also a very old friend, that the national interests of this nation could no longer be served by our continuing involvement in Vietnam? We know of his public triumphs. Some of us also know of his personal kindnesses. Many years ago, at a very bleak period in both my personal and professional life--you know in this city it is bleak when your phone calls are not returned by people you have known for years--there were two individuals in this city who faithfully returned my calls. One was Ben Bradlee. The other was Clark Clifford. When Clark first invited me to his office during this bleak period to offer encouragement and guidance, he closed the door, took no phone calls, sat behind his desk, his hands forming the legendary steeple and listened and advised. On that first visit to his office I looked down on his desk where there appeared to be at least fifty messages, topped by what seemed to be inaugural medallions. I thought to myself on that first visit that Clark Clifford had put the word on hold just to listen to me. But the third time I cam to his office, it occurred to me that it was just possible those messages had been there for twenty years. Clark Clifford's final years were not what he would have wished for himself nor what his friends would have wished for him and his family. They seemed to echo the first lines in Chapter Nine of Henry Adams' novel ``Democracy,'' perhaps the best novel ever written about this city. The lines are: ``Whenever a man reaches to the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.'' On this occasion, I cannot speak of his enemies, but I can say that his friends will not be critical or exacting. We will think, instead, of Othello's words just before he dies: Soft you; a word or two before you go. I have done the state some service, and they know it-- No more of that. I pray you, in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate. Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. We who loved Clark Clifford will do that and more. We will say now and henceforth: Clark Clifford did the state some service and we know it.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, Thomas Carlyle remarked, ``A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.'' Carlyle could have written these words, if construed as a double entendre, about my rare, dear friend, Russell Baker. Baker's last ``Observer'' column appeared in the New York Times this past Christmas, ending a 36- year run. Over the course of some 3 million words, by his own reckoning, Russell Baker has displayed grace, gentle wit, decency, and profound insight into the human condition. Nearly fifteen years ago, I stated that Russell Baker has been just about the sanest observer of American life that we've had. He has been gentle with us, forgiving, understanding. He has told us truths in ways we have been willing to hear, which is to say he has been humorous . . . on the rare occasion he turns to us with a terrible visage of near rage and deep disappointment, we do well to listen all the harder. He leaves a huge hole I doubt any other journalist can fill. As Boston Globe columnist Martin F. Nolan observed last month, ``the most bathetic braggarts and most lubricated louts among us never thought we were as good or as fast as Russell Baker.'' A life well-spent? He's a patriot, having served as a Navy flyer during World War II. For nearly fifty years, he has been married to his beloved Miriam. They have three grown children. His career has taken him from the Baltimore Sun's London Bureau to the Times' Washington Bureau. He has covered presidential campaigns, and he has accompanied Presidents abroad. He has met popes, kings, queens--and common people, too, for whom he has such enormous and obvious empathy. And now he is the welcoming presence on Mobil Masterpiece Theatre. A life well-written? The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley calls Russell Baker ``a columnist's columnist,'' writing, ``Baker broke his own mold. He was, simply and utterly, sui generis.'' I would not use the past tense, because I doubt Russell Baker is done putting pen to paper. But the sentiment is spot on. A life well-written? Baker has won two Pulitzer Prizes--one in 1979 for Distinguished Commentary and another in 1983 for his 1982 autobiography, ``Growing Up.'' He has written thirteen other books and edited The Norton Book of Light Verse and his own book of American humor. Russell Baker isn't just one of the best newspaper writers around, as Yardley puts it; he is ``one of the best writers around. Period.'' Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Russell Baker's last regular ``Observer'' column entitled ``A Few Words at the End'' (New York Times, December 25, 1998) appear in the Congressional Record following my remarks. I further ask unanimous consent that Martin F. Nolan's column, ``A journalist, a gentleman,'' (Boston Globe, December 9, 1998) and Jonathan Yardley's column, ``Russell Baker: A Columnist's Columnist,'' (Washington Post, January 4, 1999) also appear in the Record following my remarks. [From the Boston Globe, December 9, 1998] A Journalist, a Gentleman (By Martin F. Nolan, Globe Staff) San Francisco.--American journalism has marinated in wretched excess in 1998, and the year closes with the ultimate deprivation and indignity. This month, Russell Baker files his final column for The New York Times. For readers, this means losing that rare sense of anticipation, glancing at a byline as a guarantee. Baker's byline delivers good writing, good humor, and a ruthless honesty about himself. He does not bluff or pontificate. Readers know: Character counts. Russ Baker's sensibilities have enriched the op-ed page of the Times since 1962, longer than any other columnist on that newspaper. Ink-stained wretches still in harness will miss him as a role model, which in journalese means an object of fierce and unrelenting envy. The green-eyed monster squats daily over every newsroom word processor, presiding over pointless arguments: ``I may not be good, but I'm fast'' vs. ``I may not be fast, but I'm good.'' But the most pathetic braggarts and most lubricated louts among us never thought we were as good or as fast as Russell Baker. He has written 3 million words for the ``Observer'' column, few of them out of place. His lasting contribution to American letters was ``Growing Up, ``his 1982 memoir, which ignored politicians to focus on his mother, Lucy, who hectored him about ``gumption'' and often said, ``Don't be a quitter, Russell.'' He's hardly that. He began reporting for the Baltimore Sun in 1947, as he wrote, ``studying the psychology of cops, watching people's homes burn'' while trolling the same precincts as H.L. Mencken 50 years earlier. Instead of Mencken's bile, he infused his prose with bemusement. He moved from street reporter to rewrite with no illusions: ``I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches.'' Gulp. Also ouch. A profile in The Washingtonian this year quoted Calvin Trillin on Baker as a 1950s guy: ``No complaining, no dancing in the end zone.'' One lesson of ``Growing Up'' is that war and depression are more character-building than peace and prosperity, so Baker sought no slack and no other short cuts, which were notoriously unavailable at the Washington bureau of The Times, which he joined in 1954. ``In those days plain English was under suspicion at the Times,'' he once recalled. ``Many stories read as if written by a Henry James imitator with a bad hangover. Incomprehensible English was accepted as evidence of the honest, in inarticulate, reporter; plain English botherd people.'' But the copy desk yielded. Because Baker knew the difference between ``disinterested'' and ``uninterested,'' because he could navigate the perilous waters between ``flaunt'' and ``flout,'' his news stories penetrated the philistine phalanx with lines like: ``Senator Everett M. Dirksen, the Illinois Republican and orator, looking Byronically disheveled . . .'' Such a phrase would vanish in the hyena cacophony that passes for political discourse on television today. It is all the more fitting that Baker has become a TV star as host of ``Masterpiece Theatre.'' In 1993, when PBS searched for Alistair Cooke's successor, Christopher Lydon and other lobbied heroically for Baker, one of the best-read reporters ever to meet a deadline. Baker admired his fellow Virginian, Murray Kempton, the columnist who set out in New York every day to take the luck of the day. Writing in retirement, Baker hopes to ``take the luck of the year.'' In an ancient newspaper joke, a butler informs his employer that ``Some reporters are here to see you, sir, and a gentleman from The Times (or Transcript or Tribune).'' He may still identify with the typical Washington correspondent of his day, a dirty-fingernailed hustler ``who services a string of small papers in the Gadsden Purchase.'' But Russell Baker adorns this increasingly rude trade because he is a true gentleman.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to introduce a resolution that notes with approval the International Labor Organization's new Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, which was agreed in June 1998 at the 86th International Labor Conference. This resolution simply urges the prompt and effective implementation of this important Declaration and its monitoring mechanism. The impact of globalization on working conditions and, indeed, on workers' rights in general, has arisen as an important, and somewhat difficult, issue in the debate over the direction of America's trade policy. In 1997, I suggested to the Administration that they might look to the International Labor Organization for assistance in addressing this matter. After all, the ILO was established in 1919 for the express purpose of providing governments that wanted to do something to improve labor standards with a means of so doing--international conventions-- that would not compromise their competitive advantages. I worked with the Administration to incorporate into the President's 1997 fast track proposal language recognizing the important role of the ILO, and in September 1997, the distinguished Chairman of the Finance Committee agreed to include the ILO provisions in his own fast track bill. In July 1998, the Finance Committee updated the bill to reflect its approval of, and hopes for, the new Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and its monitoring mechanism. In essence, the ILO has bundled together, in a single declaration, four sets of fundamental rights--the core labor standards embodying the broad principles that are essential to membership in the ILO. Having declared that those rights are fundamental, the document then provides for a monitoring system--a ``follow-up'' mechanism, to use the ILO term--to determine how countries are complying with these elemental worker rights. The four sets of fundamental rights are: freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining; the elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labor; the effective abolition of child labor; and the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation. These rights flow directly from three sources. First, from the ILO Constitution itself, which was drafted by a commission headed by Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor and became, in 1919, part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles. Second, from the immensely important Declaration of Philadelphia, which reaffirmed, at the height of World War II, the fundamental principles of the ILO, including freedom of expression and association and the importance of equal opportunity and economic security. Adopted in 1944, the Declaration of Philadelphia was formally annexed to the ILO Constitution two years later. And, not least, these four groups of core labor standards flow from the seven ILO conventions that are recognized as Core Human Rights Conventions. These seven conventions are not the highly technical agreements that make up the vast majority of the ILO's 181 conventions. Rather, they directly address the rights of working people. They are Convention No. 29, the Forced Labor Convention of 1930; Convention No. 87, the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize Convention of 1948; Convention No. 98, the Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining Convention of 1949; Convention No. 100, the Equal Remuneration Convention of 1951; Convention No. 105, the Abolition of Forced Labor Convention of 1957; Convention No. 111 on Discrimination in Employment and Occupation, which was done in 1958; and Convention No. 138, the Minimum Age Convention of 1973. They are extraordinary conventions. The Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995 identified six of these ILO conventions as essential to ensuring human rights in the workplace: Nos. 29, 87, 98, 100, 105, and 111. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has classified them as ``International Human Rights Conventions.'' The Governing Body of the ILO subsequently added to the list of core conventions Convention No. 138, the minimum age convention, in recognition of the importance of matters relating to child labor. These conventions embody the broad principles that are basic to membership in the ILO. The Director-General of the World Trade Organization, Renato Ruggiero, was solidly behind the ILO's efforts, as we discussed at length in Geneva during a visit in January 1998. In the end, the tenacity of Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman and her able Deputy Under Secretary for International Labor Affairs Andrew Samet, Abraham Katz, President of the United States Council for International Business, and John Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO, paid off: the Declaration was approved in June 1998 by an overwhelming margin. The Declaration can play a useful role in advancing core labor standards if it is carried out with energy and determination. The key will be its follow-up mechanism, and the extent to which that tool evolves into an effective means of monitoring compliance with these fundamental worker rights and securing their enforcement. This may take a period of years, but much good could come of it. The resolution I have introduced today recognizes both the significance of the Declaration and the useful role it could play in addressing workers' concerns about the global economy. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full text of the Declaration and its follow-up mechanism be printed in the Record.