Bill Nelson

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Would the Senator believe the latest iteration of objection by the other side to this Wall Street reform effort is what I heard this morning: that they now say this legislation should not be rushed through the Senate? My question to the distinguished assistant majority leader is, How many months have we been working, and working in a bipartisan fashion, on this legislation?

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I rise today to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day. This week, in America and throughout the world, Jews observed Holocaust Remembrance Day in synagogues, reciting prayers. Families gathered in their homes to light candles and remember those loved ones who perished. Young people listened to the stirring testimonials of grandparents and survivors of one of the worst atrocities committed by humankind. These rituals are recited each year in an effort to remember. But, also to ensure that we as a human race never forget. Florida has the largest number of Holocaust survivors in the entire country. Each time I visit the Miami Jewish Health Systems and other centers in our state, I am reminded of our solemn obligation to care for those survivors, whose numbers dwindle with each passing year. This week, we pause to remember those who lost their lives simply because of their faith and their heritage. We also remember others who suffered persecution and were murdered by the Nazis: Gypsies and Poles, the handicapped, gays and lesbians, political dissidents, prisoners of war, and the brave civilians who risked their own lives to save their neighbors. Last June, a lone gunman attacked the Holocaust Memorial Museum here in Washington. This morally depraved man shot and killed a guard and terrorized countless visitors before he was brought down. The shots were fired on the day the museum was scheduled to show a play based on the life of Anne Frank, a girl whose story serves as a disturbing reminder of the Nazis' campaign of terror and also the heroism demonstrated by a few decent people to protect those whose lives were in jeopardy. January 11, 2010, Miep Gies, the last of those who protected Anne Frank passed away. She was a woman who did not want to be called a hero, but it is her heroism that we must honor, remember, and pass down to future generations. A survivor recently informed me that on Holocaust Remembrance Day she wanted people to remember the kindness that she received during the Holocaust. She said that kindness helped her survive. Mr. President, it is amazing that survivors, when asked about a period of unimaginable horror, can recall sentiments of thanks and an appreciation for life. The good that individuals can do is not limited to the past. Americans today are continuing to help those survivors by documenting their experiences and educating our communities. This past January, I attended the 30th anniversary celebration of the Holocaust Documentation & Education Center. The center is in the process of creating the first South Florida Holocaust Museum. There is still great work to be done and I am proud of the Americans who are committed to this important effort. Congress also has a responsibility to ensure that the memories of those dark days are recalled to ensure that nothing like it happens on this Earth again. In respect for the victims of the Holocaust and surviving relatives, I introduced a resolution on restitution or compensation for property and other assets seized by the Nazi and Communist regimes in postwar Europe, in anticipation of the International Conference on Holocaust Assets that was held in Prague in June 2009. At this conference, the United States signed the Terezin Declaration, which among many declarations reminds us about the need to take care of Holocaust survivors' social welfare as they increase in age. I also introduced the World War II War Crimes Accountability Act to encourage foreign governments to prosecute and extradite wanted criminals, and to bring them to justice. We are in a race against time. Each year, more Holocaust survivors are laid to rest. Let us work together quickly to let them see a measure of justice done in their lifetime. Finally, our government has made solemn commitments in the past that the horror of the Holocaust will never be repeated. And yet we are all well aware of the grim stories of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the mass murder of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, and the genocide in Darfur. America must be a moral leader among nations in working to halt and prevent genocide. I urge President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Rice to continue the battle against ignorance, intolerance, and instability that contributes to genocide and to confront those governments that engage in genocide. America must make every effort to ensure that those who commit these horrific crimes face justice.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, the American people are asking: Why can't those guys get together up there and get something done? They are asking: Whatever happened to common sense? They say: People are out of work. Why can't you extend their unemployment benefits? All of this is what the vast majority of the American people are saying. Yet we allowed, over 2 weeks ago, unemployment compensation to cease for certain people hurting in this country. It is important for us now to temporarily extend unemployment benefits, as well as the ability for someone who is out of work to continue their health insurance coverage through what is known as the COBRA program. These important programs expired. We are going to have a procedural vote later today. As is typical in the Senate, we don't get to the actual, substantive vote today. We vote on a motion to proceed, and we have to cut off debate with a motion to cut off debate, called a motion for cloture, just to get to the motion to proceed to get to the bill. But that is what has taken place today. We will get it done. We will use the better part of this week going through all of this parliamentary falderal. When they call the final roll, we will get it extended. But why can't we get together? Why did one Senator, over 2 weeks ago, hold up the whole works on something so obvious? Folks are hurting in most of the country. They certainly are in my State. Over 40 percent of Florida homeowners are under water on their mortgage. The banks are pulling back on credit to small businesses. When you get right down to it, the blame for failing to temporarily extend this eleemosynary help, this commonsense help to people who are hurting, falls solely at the feet of the Congress because we couldn't get it together, through our parliamentary rules. Our people are hurting. It is our responsibility to extend these programs to provide some little pittance for people who can't get work and financially have a desperate need. Unfortunately, for many Americans these benefits are the only thing keeping food on the table as they struggle to find a job and make financial ends meet. I certainly hope we are not going to let these programs lapse again. There are encouraging signs in the economy, but unemployment always lags the recovery of other parts of the economy. Therefore, we need to give some little measure of stability to these people, these poor families out of work, instead of us continuing to have partisan gamesmanship that we have seen so often over the course of the last couple months.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. I ask unanimous consent to speak for 15 minutes.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, after the extension of unemployment benefits is accomplished--and we will get it done--we will take on financial reform. Remember back, the failure of Lehman Brothers and the near collapse of our financial system and, as a result, the passage of $700 billion of taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street? Back in the fall of 2008, the break down in our financial system fueled one of the worst economic downturns since the early part of the last century. The stock market plunged. The credit and capital markets froze, and real economic activity took a nosedive. While we are seeing some slight improvement in both the markets and the economy as a whole, too many people remain unemployed and underemployed. In Florida, the unemployment rate has surpassed 12 percent. The unemployment rate in Florida is now the sixth highest in the country. Since the crisis began in the fall of 2008, a lot has happened. We elected a new President. We passed an economic recovery bill. We passed health reform. We passed an enhanced home buyer tax credit. We passed several measures of tax relief for small businesses. But there is one thing we have yet to do that is at the top of the list; that is, to try to help clean up Wall Street and our excesses in the financial system. We owe it to taxpayers so they do not face another $700 billion bailout in the future. Never again should we use taxpayer money to bail out reckless and freewheeling Wall Street bankers. Our colleagues on the Banking Committee have put forth one proposal. It includes a new consumer financial watchdog. It also includes new rules for the regulation of derivatives--those things that have fancy names such as credit default swaps, which are insurance policies on losses that you would have in other investments. Listen to what one of the richest people in the world, the sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett, says. He refers to all of those very clever financial instruments as ``financial weapons of mass destruction.'' That is Warren Buffett. If there is one lesson from the former Goliath insurance company, AIG, it is that we better get serious about regulating derivatives. The Banking Committee bill includes new rules for liquidating large financial institutions when they become insolvent. It tightens rules related to capital requirements, liquidity, and the use of leverage. But when the Banking Committee bill comes to the floor, we must strengthen and improve the legislation to rein in the greed that ran amok, that nearly brought down our entire financial system altogether. Of course, we can expect a vast army of lobbyists who will descend to protect various financial fiefdoms from these new transparency and accountability rules. I will offer a number of amendments on the floor. I want to mention one today, the Wall Street Compensation Reform Act. This bill I have already introduced, and which I will offer as an amendment, hopefully will restore some sanity and common sense to executive pay practices on Wall Street. The legislation is simple. It encourages large banks and financial institutions to adopt widely accepted compensation practices. Banks that fail to adopt those standards would lose the benefit of certain tax deductions. They could no longer deduct the large compensation payments they make to highly paid employees. I have read with astonishment the recent reports that Wall Street banks continue to pay outlandish bonuses to undeserving executives. Many of these institutions--and this is what gets your blood pressure going up--are still living on taxpayer-funded life support. In most business professions, executive pay will follow performance. Managers and executives usually are rewarded for creating lasting value. Unsuccessful managers and executives are shown the door. But apparently these basic commonsense principles have been lost on a lot of the Wall Street firms. This year, Wall Street bonuses were in the range of $150 billion. Eighteen months after the fall of Lehman Brothers, it is back to business as usual for the major banks. We have been here before. We had the same debate last spring when AIG paid those absurd bonuses to the financial traders who managed one major accomplishment: They drove their company into the ground. Although we had lots of legislation introduced, Congress again failed to act. The army of lobbyists descended to make sure that was the case, and here we are again. I daresay there is almost a unanimous recognition that poorly crafted executive pay practices at major financial institutions contributed to the near collapse of the financial system--what ultimately brought about the $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout. The general counsel of the Federal Reserve Board has testified that compensation practices in the banking sector were a contributing cause to the crisis. In January, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation found that ``excessive and imprudent risk taking remains a contributing factor in financial institution failures and losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund.'' Current pay practices encourage excessive risk taking because short- term gains are heavily rewarded even if they are unsustainable. The negative consequences of severe losses in a company are often externalized and shifted to the shareholders or to the public. The Federal safety net for financial institutions encourages traders and executives to take unnecessary risks. The most obvious example is the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. Executives who should have left without their shirts instead left with golden parachutes. Real and meaningful financial reform must include changes to the existing compensation culture in the finance industry. And, oh, are we going to get resistance as we put forward this idea. Under the amendment I am going to offer, major banks and financial institutions could only deduct their large executive compensation payments if the pay complies with rules that focus on rewarding long- term performance. The principles were developed by the Financial Stability Board, the council of major central banks. The Federal Reserve was instrumental in developing these compensation principles. Under the amendment I will offer, tax deductions for major banks and financial institutions are going to be conditioned on the following: compensation payments over $1 million must be performance based and at least half of the performance-based compensation must vest over an extended period of 5 years or more. This is going to tie compensation not only to performance but to long-term performance. Another part of this amendment requires that, for executives at public companies, at least half of the performance-based compensation must be paid in employer stock. Compensation agreements for top executives must include a claw-back provision that retracts the deferred compensation in the event of ethical misconduct. Also in the amendment, compensation agreements must prohibit employees from engaging in personal hedging strategies, such as compensation insurance, that undermine the very risk alignment principles we are creating. This amendment creates a new and meaningful executive compensation disclosure requirement in order to empower the company's shareholders and the company's investors to hold banks accountable for what they pay their senior executives. The special interests certainly are going to argue that Congress should not get involved in compensation decisions. They are going to say the private marketplace knows best. They are going to argue if Congress passes measures like this, Wall Street is going to pack up its bags and move to greener pastures abroad. Unfortunately, right now, what the market knows is that big, short- term gains lead to big bonuses, and big losses lead to taxpayer-funded bailouts. Enough of this. We are going to have the opportunity to take real steps to reform compensation practices. It is my hope--perhaps naively so--that the Senate would unanimously approve this concept. It will not be unanimous, but I believe we can get 60 votes to break a filibuster, and I think we can pass it. The American taxpayers' funds are at stake. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I would like to ask the chairman of the Committee on Finance and its ranking member a question on the application of the legislation to Professional Employer Organizations or PEOs. As they know, there are millions of individuals throughout our country who are working for small businesses which are in PEO arrangements. The clear objective of this legislation is to create incentives for health care coverage and not to provide disincentives. I would like the chairman to clarify that, for purposes of the application of section 2716 of the Public Health Service Act (Prohibition on Discrimination in Favor of Highly Compensated Individuals) and for purposes of Internal Revenue Code sections 45R (Credit for Employee Health Insurance Expenses of Small Businesses) and 4980H (Shared Responsibility for Employers), to any health plans sponsored by a Professional Employer Organization, PEO, or a PEO client organization, the rules would be applied to each client organization separately and eligibility for the small business tax credits and employer shared responsibilities would also apply to each client organization separately, and not at the PEO level.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. I thank the Presiding Officer and the chairman. For the first time as a nation, we are recognizing that people have a right to not be destroyed by sickness. Under the Senate bill passed by the House and signed into law yesterday by the President, folks are no longer going to have to choose between their health and their pocketbooks. Parents will no longer have to worry about whether they can afford to get their kids to the doctor. Seniors will not have to wonder if Medicare will still be there for them several years down the road. Health care reform doesn't mean people would not have to continue taking responsibility for themselves. The bill we passed, and even the one we are now debating, improves health care affordability and access for all, but it still requires folks to do their part. Families who can afford to will be asked to contribute to the cost of their coverage. People are expected to get regular primary care so they do not end up in the emergency room with something that could have been treated easily and cheaply if it had been addressed sooner. But, very importantly, we are also going to hold the insurance companies accountable. We are finally telling them: You can't drop someone just because they get sick; you can't cap someone's benefits just because you are tired of paying for their care; and you can't decide not to offer someone coverage because they have a preexisting condition. We are telling them: No more, no more, no more. We are also saying to our seniors that we, as a nation, remain unwavering in our commitment to protecting and preserving Medicare for today, tomorrow, and the next millennium. There has been an awful lot of misinformation going around about Medicare and something called Medicare Advantage. The fact is, the original Senate bill proposed an unfair way to fix overpayments to these private Medicare HMO insurance plans. The fix would have come at the expense of seniors living in areas with high medical costs, such as my State of Florida. I was able to pass an amendment in committee that fixed that problem fairly. Under this reconciliation bill, the President has proposed another way to rein in those Medicare Advantage insurance companies, and this, upon close inspection, also treats seniors fairly. It puts companies on the hook for their performance. If they do not provide quality service, their reimbursements are cut. Their enrollees--the seniors--are going to demand that they provide quality service. I appreciate the President's leadership on this issue and the fact that he heard the concerns expressed by a number of us, including Senator Schumer and Senator Wyden. But having said all this, we have left something undone in this Senate bill that is now law and even in this reconciliation package. I am not happy this legislation lets the drug companies pretty much off the hook. You all know that over the past few years I have been voicing the concerns and fears of residents in my State about what is happening to their drug prices. I also hear from the folks who can't afford their medications when they hit the prescription drug coverage gap known as the doughnut hole. They skimp on food or split their pills or stop taking them altogether. While this bill offers a discount to seniors in the doughnut hole, there is nothing to keep drug companies from continuing to jack up the prices until that discount is meaningless. I also hear from folks who are frustrated that in other countries folks are getting the very same drugs for much less than we pay here. I had an amendment that would have required the drug industry to pay its fair share of the tab for health care reform. It required the drug manufacturers to give the government price breaks on drugs for a lot of our low-income seniors, and that would have saved us $106 billion of taxpayer money, which was more than enough to fill the doughnut hole altogether and then make a dent in offsetting the Federal deficit. So I intend to come back and revisit this. In the meantime, I want to say this reconciliation bill deepens and extends the promise of the health care reform bill that was signed into law just yesterday. I stood with the President when he put pen to paper yesterday. I think it is great we have begun the process of health care reform. It has been said by many folks in many different ways that we are not put on Earth for ourselves, but we are placed here for each other. Well, here we are, and here we are debating legislation that stands to improve the lives of tens of millions of Americans. So despite its flaws, I will vote to pass this legislation. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I rise today in support of two amendments, S.A. 3574 and S.A. 3575, offered by the junior senator from Florida. I am concerned the student loan reforms in the bill will lead to a substantial loss of jobs in my State. That is why I recently led a group of six Senators in asking Majority Leader Reid to consider alternative ways to reduce the cost of student loans. Unfortunately, that has not happened. The provisions in this bill could prove detrimental to thousands of employees who serve in the student loan industry throughout this country, about 700 who are located in Panama City, FL. Therefore, Mr. President, I urge the Senate to pass this amendment.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, the House is on my mind right now, since the House seems to have something important going on with regard to something known as health care reform and health insurance reform. We are waiting expectantly to hear information that the House will get the votes together and pass the Senate-passed bill on health reform that we passed on Christmas Eve. But I came to speak about another subject today, something I voted on when I was a young Congressman, way back in 1980, and that something was known as the Clean Water and Clean Air Act. One of the parts of that legislation--it has a fancy name, but in essence that is what it was, clean air and clean water--one of the major thrusts of the legislation was that we had these toxic waste dumps all over the country. They were first exposed by a toxic canal, called Love Canal, in the State of New York. The cause for the toxic dump, the company, was long since gone, probably bankrupt, and, therefore, there was no financial means by which we could go about cleaning it up. We couldn't get to the responsible party because they had long since left town or they had long since gone through a series of bankruptcies and there were no funds available to clean it up, and that left it on all the rest of us--the taxpayers. What we found was there were a lot of these places all over the country. This was particularly true in my State of Florida. All of these sites are now called Superfund sites, named after the trust fund that was being set up, filled with trust fund money that would come from a fee being imposed upon the industries that were doing the polluting. The concept was that the polluter was going to pay instead of the average taxpayer, and they called this trust fund the Superfund. So they called these sites the Superfund sites. In my State, we have 52 of these sites, and we have another 13 identified. But nationwide there are over 1,200 of these sites that have already been named and which need to be cleaned up. Here is the problem. Why aren't they cleaned up? Well, as I said, when I was a young Congressman and we passed this new law, we were going to have the financial means to clean up these sites by having the industries that were polluting pay a fee that annually would go into this trust fund and, in return, they were getting something. They were getting relieved of any financial liability. That was the deal. This law operated along fine for about 15 years, and it came up for renewal, and lo and behold, those industries activated their lobbyists and they killed the reimposition of that fee in the mid-1990s. So they got off scot free because they don't have any more liability, but they are not paying their fair share. The industries were the petroleum industry--and it was a minor tax that was imposed on the production of oil and the importation of foreign oil into this country--and the chemical industry, in 42 chemicals that were produced, and there was a small fee that was assessed for that which went in and filled up this fund basically to the tune of about $1.3 billion a year. But along come the mid-1990s and those industries activate their lobbyists and they kill the fees on a going-forward basis--but they didn't kill their relief from liability. What we have now is a trust fund that is depleted of money. We have over 1,200 sites all over the country that desperately need to be cleaned up. There is no money except going to the American taxpayer and getting the money to keep cleaning up these sites. What we need to do is to reimpose the fee so we go back to the original agreement with these polluting industries; in other words, the polluters paid into the trust fund and they got that in exchange for relieving them of liability for the pollution that left these toxic dumps. I am introducing legislation that would cause this to occur. The President has recommended it. He has recommended a provision by which it would fill the trust fund partially by $1.3 billion in the first year from these fees and thereafter $2.5 billion a year. I am changing the recommendation from the President a little bit because the President is imposing a corporate fee as well and I do not think that corporations that did not have anything to do with polluting ought to be paying this fee. I think it ought to be assessed only on those corporations that were a part of the polluting under the original theory of the law back in 1980, so that is how I have changed the legislation from what the President has recommended. I will be introducing this shortly. I am going to send it around to our colleagues and I hope they will join me as cosponsors. I want to tell you about one of these sites I visited this morning in Jacksonville, FL. It is right on the St. Johns River. It is right next to one of the main sites of the Port of Jacksonville, which is a major national seaport. It is 31 acres and it is all fenced, with signs with a skull and crossbones that say: Don't go on the property because you could get cancer. As a matter of fact, EPA has done an analysis of this. They say the toxic chemicals on this site, if somebody were to drink the water, if somebody were to live there, if somebody were to go and scratch around in the sand, they could be exposed to cancer-causing agents. Can you imagine. That is right in the middle of a big city, next to the St. Johns River where the runoff is going into the St. Johns River, and guess who is ingesting that? The fish in the river and the mammals in the river. What we need to do is clean up these sites. This site is a typical one. It started over a century ago, in the late 1890s. It was a fertilizer plant. It operated for almost a century. It was shut down in the 1980s and then it was declared a Superfund site a few years ago. Analysis showed just what kind of toxic things were there. EPA, doing an analysis of this, has said it could affect nervous disorders; it could cause cancer. They have gone through a whole list of potential terrible health effects that could occur from something that could come from somebody being exposed to this site. There is another reason we want to close up this site. That is that this 31 acres is sitting right next to the major part of the Port of Jacksonville, which is going to significantly expand once the Panama Canal is widened and the superships that have these cargo containers on them are able to come from Asia, through the Panama Canal to the east coast of the United States. The Port of Jacksonville will significantly expand and this particular location called the Talleyrand part of the Port of Jacksonville will be able to expand by 31 acres, right on the St. Johns River, right next to the Port of Jacksonville. That is highly desirable real estate, of which you cannot dare even go through the fence and walk on the land because of the potential toxic exposure. Remember, this is just one of 1,200 sites across America that needs to be cleaned up. That is the reason people now should clearly understand, under the theory that the polluter pays, why we need to reinstitute the original agreement struck in 1980 for the trust fund to be filled by the fee associated with these toxic substances and therefore be able to clean up these sites for the benefit of the American taxpayer. I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I would like to ask the chairman of the Finance Committee and its ranking member a question on the application of the pending legislation, H.R. 2847, the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act, to Professional Employer Organizations or PEOs. In my State we have over 700,000 workers in Florida who are working in PEO arrangements regulated by Florida law. PEOs in my State work with over 50,000 businesses, most of them small, providing a range of human resource-related services. I would like to ask the Senators to confirm that for purposes of the retention credit for newly hired individuals contained in the legislation the rules for eligibility and calculating the credits would be applied to each business working with a PEO as if the business was not in a PEO relationship. In other words, the retention credit would be claimed by the business in these cases.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, today I am submitting a concurrent resolution recognizing the life of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died on February 23, 2010, in Cuban custody, and calling for a continued focus on the promotion of internationally recognized human rights, listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Cuba. Mr. Zapata was a political prisoner facing 36 years in prison for defying the Cuban regime. Originally arrested during the ``Black Spring'' of 2003, along with other peaceful supporters of the Varela Project, Zapata was originally sentenced to three years in prison but was later convicted of additional ``acts of defiance'' and resentenced to a total of 36 years. In 2003, Amnesty International declared Zapata a ``prisoner of conscience'' in recognition of his extraordinary courage. Mr. Zapata went on a hunger strike in December 2009 to demand respect for his personal safety and to protest his inhumane treatment by the prison authorities in Cuba. According to Zapata's mother, Reina Luisa Tamayo, her son was beaten repeatedly, tortured, and denied water during his incarceration. While in prison, Mr. Zapata courageously demanded basic dignities and resisted the regime's repression. In the end, he was prohibited from receiving medical attention and lost his life in what Freedom House has called Cuba's ``deplorable prison conditions.'' To Orlando Zapata Tamayo's mother, family and friends, the United States Senate sends our sincere condolences for your loss. To Mr. Zapata's former colleagues and freedom fighters, we stand in solidarity with you in your struggle against the forces of repression and totalitarianism. While there has been disagreement within this body in the past over the most effective way for the U.S. to help the Cuban people, I think we can all agree that the United States must continue to support policies that focus on respect for the fundamental tenets of freedom, democracy, and human rights in Cuba. This resolution reaffirms those principles. When we talk about the promotion of internationally recognized human rights in Tehran and Pyongyang, we must never forget the political prisoners suffering in the cells of Camaguey and Havana. According to Human Rights Watch, ``Cuba remains the one country in Latin America that represses virtually all forms of political dissent. The government continues to enforce political conformity using criminal prosecutions, long- and short-term detention, harassment, denial of employment, and travel restrictions.'' A Human Rights Watch report on Cuban prisoners last year documented how critics of the regime who report violations are subjected to extended periods of solitary confinement and beatings, and denied medical treatment, family visits and telephone calls. This resolution calls for the immediate release of all political prisoners detained in Cuba and the rights of all Cubans to be able to enjoy due process and the right to a fair trial. It also denounces the use of intimidation, harassment, or violence by the regime to restrict and suppress freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press. This resolution underscores our support for freedom of speech and the rights of journalists and bloggers in Cuba to express their views without repression by government authorities. These rights are universal, but are all but absent in the Cuba of today. Orlando Zapata Tamayo's death is a sad reminder of the tragic cost of oppression and a dictatorship that devalues human life. At the same time, it's a reminder that the Cuban people continue to fight for their freedom. Courageous Cubans like Mr. Zapata continue to suffer abuses merely for engaging in peaceful efforts to exercise their basic human rights. We have seen the regime crackdown on other dissidents and political prisoners in the wake of Zapata's death. Orlando Zapata Tamayo did not die in vain. Freedom-loving people everywhere must hold the Cuban regime responsible for the fate of Orlando Zapata Tamayo and for all the political prisoners and dissidents in custody in Cuba.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, that great philosopher, that observer of the national scene, Yogi Berra, once said: ``You better be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you may not get there.'' A bit of that policy is now the perception of President Obama's manned space program. There is a concern that the administration doesn't know where they are going and they may not get there. I said ``perception'' because in reality the President has laid out a visionary manned space program. However, the way the administration rolled out the space program--much to the chagrin of a number of us who were trying to get through to the White House about the way they should roll it out--it was rolled out as a part of the budget and left for people to draw their own conclusions. Among the aerospace and space community, particularly in areas such as Houston at the Johnson Space Center, Huntsville at the Marshall Space Flight Center, and Florida at the Kennedy Space Center, I can tell my colleagues that the perception is that the President has killed the manned space program. In fact, that is the farthest thing from President Obama's mind. He is an enthusiastic fan of the space program. As a matter of fact, we heard him speak many times about how as a little boy his grandfather took him to see the return of some of the Apollo astronauts coming back from the Moon. When he tells that story, his face lights up and you can see the enthusiasm he has. As he interacts by radio with the astronauts on board the space station and on board the space shuttle, you can see the enthusiasm he has. Unfortunately, some of his advisers have not given him correct information about how to lay out his vision. So, happily, over the course of the weekend, the President has said he is going to come to Florida on April 15 and he is going to lay out his vision for the space program. What is it? Well, we can anticipate that the President will say what he already had his Administrator of NASA say in our committee hearing last week, which is that the goal is Mars. Mars is the next logical goal. We were on the Moon 40 years ago. There could well be interim steps on the way to Mars: possibly the Moon; possibly rendezvousing and landing on an asteroid; possibly--and very likely--to go to one of the moons of Mars such as Fobos, before going actually to Mars. Why? Because it would expend a lot less energy to land on a moon of Mars and return than it would to go on down to the red planet. The President actually laid out in his robust budget proposal to the Congress a $6 billion increase for NASA over the course of the next 5 years. Compared to other agencies of the government, NASA did very well. The President is also to be commended for his budget proposal in which he said what everybody knew he had to say--which the Bush administration had ignored--which was we have this $100 billion asset up there in orbit called the International Space Station. We are completing it now and we are equipping it now where we can get a crew of several astronauts--not just one, two, or three--on board to use it as a national laboratory, as it is technically designated. What he said was that we are not going to stop it in 2015. We are going to at least carry it out to 2020. Again, that was the logical thing that everybody knew. But if you can believe it, in the previous administration, it had not been budgeted to continue beyond 2015 the International Space Station which we haven't even completed yet, and of which the last four flights will not only complete the construction, the equipping, but will take up major scientific experiments such as the alpha magnetic spectrometer which, if it works, is going to open our understanding of the universe and what the origins of the universe are. So the President laid out a fairly good plan that had some good things in it, but he left himself open to misinterpretation so that not only is there the perception that the President has killed the manned space program, but there is outright hostility toward President Obama and his proposals for the Nation's human space program. Why did that occur? Well, No. 1, the President didn't make the declaration. Why is that important? Because only a President can lead the Nation's human space program. Of course, the best example of that was that after the Soviets had surprised us in the late 1950s with Sputnik and then they surprised us again in 1961 by putting the first human in orbit, Yuri Gagarin--and we didn't even have a rocket that was strong enough to get us into orbit with our little Mercury spacecraft. We had the plan to go into suborbit with Alan Shepard, and after Shepard came back, it took that bold stroke of President Kennedy to say, In 9 years, we are going to the Moon and will return safely. That is leadership. That is a declaratory judgment. That is stepping out and being bold. If we are going to Mars, it is going to take the President to say that; not to tell his NASA Administrator in the Space Subcommittee hearing in the Senate last week that the Administrator can say that the goal is Mars. It has to take the President to say that and he has to set out a specific timeframe. It can be approximate, but it has to be a reasonable timeframe. He then has to say to NASA: You figure out the architecture; you set the benchmarks. So is it to go back to the Moon for a temporary mission? Is it to go to an asteroid? Is it to go on and try to go straight to Mars? Then we will unleash the creative spirit, the human ingenuity of Americans as we have seen in this extraordinary program. The heartbeat of every American is a little faster when they see some of the extraordinary, heroic accomplishments we have had in the American space program, both manned and unmanned space accomplishments. The President let himself be misinterpreted. He said in his budgetary message that he was cancelling the Constellation program. The Constellation program was a program that was announced 5 or 6 years ago by President George W. Bush, but the Bush administration never funded it. In fact, they starved NASA so that the building of the new rocket is not ready when the space shuttle is now being set for retirement. Why is that? Well, that decision on the space shuttle came as a result of the destruction of Columbia over the skies of Texas on reentry back in 2003. The investigation commission, headed by a Navy admiral named Gehman, called the Gehman Commission, otherwise known as CAIB, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board--they refer to it as the acronym CAIB-- they said, after a decade, at the end of the decade: If you are going to continue to fly the space shuttle, you are going to have to recertify all these orbiters that have been going on since the early eighties. The decisions were made to shut down the space shuttle program at the end of the last decade. We find the shuttle program is, in fact, coming to an end without the new rocket being ready and, therefore, we have the angst that is in this aerospace community, this close-knit family called the NASA family who are going to be seeing so many of the men and women who are so dedicated to this program being laid off because if you are not launching Americans on American rockets, then the jobs are not there. Unfortunately, those decisions we tried to avert over and over. In the last 5 or 6 years in the Senate, we put additional money into NASA's exploration program to try to speed the development of the rocket. Over and over, the previous administration cut us off at the knees, would not support it, and we could not get the votes in the House of Representatives to keep that additional money. As a result, we have a rocket that is just in its testing stages, a capsule that has not been built, and, as the President's advisers looked at it, they saw it was going to be well on into this decade before it would be ready, so they up and announced they are going to cancel this program called Constellation, which was the development of the Ares rocket and the development and construction of a capsule called Orion. But they also said: We want the R&D of a heavy-lift vehicle. There came the disconnect because people who do not understand the space program were making decisions. I lay it at the feet of some of the folks in OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. If you are going to build a heavy-lift vehicle, the likelihood is you cannot do that entirely with liquid rockets; you need solid rockets to propel that massive weight up into low Earth orbit. The solid rockets are what we are testing now. Thus, the President allowed his administration to be perceived that they were killing the manned space program when, in fact, there was nothing further from what he intended. What are we going to do about it? Let's go back to the announcement made over the weekend. I commend the President. I am very thankful to the President that he has said he is coming to Florida for a major discussion and announcement on the human space program. This will occur April 15. It will occur in Florida. I assume it will be at the Kennedy Space Center or somewhere close by, which is the logical place, from whence we have sent Americans into the cosmos. I think that is a step in the right direction for the President. But he needs to be prepared with specifics because of the perception that he has killed the manned space program. Because of the hostility he has generated because of that perception, the President needs to be prepared with specifics of the goal, the timeframe, the benchmarks, the suggested architecture, and how he would take his budget to flesh out moving toward that goal. May I give some suggestions to the President on how he might achieve that. In the first place, there are four additional shuttles manifested to fly and, with that, the completion and the equipping of the International Space Station. But there is a fifth shuttle that can fly because the external tank is there. It is referred to as the ``mission on demand'' because, in effect, it is a rescue shuttle to go up, if a space shuttle got marooned, and rescue them. What about a rescue for the last and the fifth shuttle? The risk is minimal because the mission would be to the space station. If the worst happened on launch, just like Columbia, that a piece of the delicate silicon tiles fell off and knocked a hole in the wing, of which they then could not come back into Earth without burning up, then they could take safe sanctuary in the International Space Station because now it is large enough to accommodate additional crew members until a rescue spacecraft could come to rescue them to take them back to Earth. The risk to safety is minimal on a fifth shuttle flight. The President should announce he is asking NASA to do that fifth flight. By the way, the money is already there. If the four flights, as scheduled, get off between now and the end of the fiscal year, September 30, there is the money in the first quarter of fiscal year 2011 for an additional flight. You don't have to get any additional money. It is budgeted. The President should announce that. The next thing the President of the United States should do is say we are going on a full-scale, aggressive R&D program to develop that heavy-lift rocket that is going to get us up into low Earth orbit so we can assemble things and go to whatever the next station is--the Moon, asteroid, the Moon of Mars. That aggressive R&D effort should be the continued testing of a solid rocket booster, not unlike the one that has already been successfully tested. Concurrent with that, there should be the development of a crew exploration vehicle, otherwise known as a capsule, that would carry astronauts up into low Earth orbit on this heavy-lift vehicle that would allow us to do the assembly and all the other things we want to do. This does not have to take away from the President's proposal that commercial companies are encouraged to compete against each other to have a cargo and human ferry service to and from the International Space Station, for that can go on concurrently. Although I must say, in a couple weeks, we are having a hearing in our Space Subcommittee. We are going to look at the commercial rocket competitors and whether they need the $6 billion the President has recommended over the next 5 years in order for them to get humans to and from the International Space Station. The President should then clearly say we are going to do an aggressive R&D effort to build a heavy-lift vehicle. Because of the angst among space workers in the middle of a recession, some of whom have already been laid off, others of whom are getting pink slips and others of whom fear for their jobs, let us remember a recession is not a recession if you have been laid off from your job. It is a depression. The angst of this economic recession with losing their job and not knowing where to turn elsewhere is among them. Therefore, my next recommendation to the President would be that he address those fears. He has already said he wants to spend $2 billion to help the center that is going to be the most impacted. I have had estimates that with the layoff of the shuttle program, it is about 5,000 jobs. The President should address that point. He should point out in his budget the $2 billion he offered to modernize the Kennedy Space Center, how that will affect jobs, and what part of that 5,000 could be ameliorated. Then the President should say--and it is my humble, respectful suggestion--there are plenty other jobs in the aerospace community, and he is going to try to bring them into places such as the Kennedy Space Center, that is going to feel the effects of these layoffs, to help people on a temporary basis until we can get back into the business of launching humans. I humbly, respectfully request that the President say: The commercial boys who are bidding in a competition to be the service to and from the International Space Station have to hire, if they are the successful bidders, those people who are so skilled and who have not missed a beat in all these, lo, many years of which the American space program has been so tremendously successful. That is the next thing I would respectfully ask the President to do. Then, I think the President has to directly confront his critics, those who, in political parlance, are taking cheap shots at the President--and he has left himself open to those cheap shots--that he would directly confront them head on and say: The American space program is not a partisan program, it is not an ideological program; it is an American program, and it has always been run that way. That is the way he should say he is going to continue to run that program and that he should get those people to quiet down, get in the harness, and let's all pull together what we all want to do, which is go out there and explore the heavens. By the way, on that fifth shuttle flight, some people have asked me: What can it do? What is its function, other than just flying an additional shuttle? There is a lot of equipment, a lot of experiments that can be put in it, and it can take up an additional component, attach it to the space station and add volume to an already expansive space station that will allow us to do experimentation in the zero gravity of orbit for years and years to come. For all these reasons, I am so grateful to the President that he has stepped forth and said he is going to come and address this issue. I respectfully request that he consider some of the suggestions I have made. At the end of the day, it is what he wants, it is what the Nation wants because every American heart beats a little bit quicker when they happen to witness the extraordinary feats of Americans in space and the peeling back of the frontiers and the new knowledge and scientific results that we have of the spinoffs as we develop these incredible flying machines. Mr. President, it is an urgent plea that I make to the White House. Listen to some advice. Stop listening just to the budget boys and OMB. Listen to the cries of an American people who once again want to be challenged and inspired, as President John F. Kennedy inspired the Nation and the Nation came together and did what was considered to be almost the impossible. It wasn't impossible. It was extraordinary, and it was an American achievement. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, this is an amendment to restore some sanity and common sense to the executive pay practices that have outraged all of us that we have seen on Wall Street among the biggest financial institutions in this country. It is very simple and straightforward. It encourages large banks and financial institutions to adopt widely accepted and sound compensation practices. Banks, under this amendment, that would fail to adopt those standards would lose the benefit of certain tax deductions, such as the tax deduction of their executive compensation as a cost of doing business over $1 million per executive. In other words, they could no longer deduct the large compensation payments they make to highly paid employees. But we do not limit it to $1 million compensation. The bank could pay whatever it wanted. We are just going to get some commonsense practices in here. With the status of financial reform legislation uncertain, I believe we are going to have to deal with this issue immediately because of the angst in the country. I think all of us have read with astonishment the recent reports that Wall Street banks continue to pay outlandish bonuses to the executives who may not be so deserving. Then, just to add insult to injury to the American taxpayer, many of those institutions are still living on taxpayer-funded life support. In most business professions, pay for executives should chase performance. Managers and executives are rewarded for creating lasting value to their companies. Unsuccessful managers and executives are shown the door. But these basic commonsense principles have been lost in these major Wall Street financial institutions that we have seen uncovered over the last several months. This year, total Wall Street bonuses exceeded $20 billion. In less than a year and a half after the fall of Lehman Brothers, it is back to business as usual for some of our major banks, and that is inexcusable. We have been here before. We had this same debate last spring. Remember when AIG paid absurd bonuses to financial traders who had managed one major accomplishment? And what was that accomplishment? They drove their company into the ground. Although we talked and talked on the floor of the Senate and legislation was introduced, Congress failed to act back then, a year ago. And here we are again. There is an old saying that comes to mind: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. If we are going to right this financial ship of state, we are going to have to tackle all of the flaws in our financial system, and that includes executive pay, and executive pay specifically on Wall Street. There is now almost unanimous recognition that poorly crafted executive pay practices at major banks and financial institutions contributed to the near collapse of the financial system and the need that we had to step up to that almost caused financial meltdown, the need of a $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout called TARP, Toxic Assets Relief Program. Think: Just last week the general counsel of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors testified that the compensation practices in the banking sector were a contributing cause to the crisis. In January, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, FDIC, found that ``excessive and imprudent risk taking remains a contributing factor in the financial institution failures and losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund.'' The FDIC attributes these continuing failures and losses in part to bank compensation practices. Current pay practices encourage this excessive risk taking because short-term gains are heavily rewarded, even if they are unsustainable. The negative consequences of severe losses are often externalized and shifted to the shareholders and ultimately, when we have to bail them out, to the public taxpayers. The Federal safety net for financial institutions encourages traders and executives to take unnecessary risk, and the most obvious example is the $700 billion Wall Street bailout which I and other Senators initially opposed. Executives who should have been left without their shirts instead were left with golden parachutes. Let's take an example. The CEO of Bank of America resigned at the end of last year with a $73 million severance package. Bank of America is one poster child for a poorly managed financial institution. Why? It received $45 billion in taxpayer funds to avoid insolvency. To put that in perspective, that is almost $150 from every man, woman, and child in this country. It is the equivalent of every American writing a check for $150 to Bank of America's management. Once the CEO was basically asked to step down, he walked away with a $73 million severance package. Did Bank of America respond by ramping up lending to small businesses to help get the economy going? That is what we begged them to do. That is what we have been begging, through the TARP and the stimulus bill, to make programs for loans to small business available. Did Bank of America do that? No. But they did manage to find $73 million for their CEO's severance package. What we find is that Wall Street all too often has rewarded failure with bloated bonuses and outrageous severance packages. If we want to get to real and meaningful financial reform, it is going to have to include changes in the existing compensation culture in the financial industry. I know what the response is going to be: Why should you penalize us? In order to get good executives, we are going to have to pay these big compensation packages. As far as this Senator is concerned, that is fine. But we need to make sure a huge compensation package is tied to performance. The amendment I am offering is going to put an end to the reality disconnect on that street known as Wall Street that has rewarded failure and that emphasizes short-term stock appreciation over long- term growth. This amendment does so by putting some basic and well-accepted principles of sound compensation practices in the Tax Code. For example, major banks and financial institutions would only be able to deduct their large executive compensation payments if the pay complies with the rules that focus on rewarding long-term performance. These principles were developed by the Financial Stability Board, the council of major central banks. These are fellow bankers who set up these principles. The Federal Reserve was instrumental in developing those compensation principles. So the tax deductions for major banks would be conditioned on the following: If you are going to have a compensation executive package over $1 million, it must be performance based, and at least half of the performance-based compensation must vest over an extended period of 5 years or more. This will tie compensation not only to performance but to long-term performance. For executives at public companies, at least half of the performance-based compensation must be paid in employer stock, and compensation agreements for top executives must include a clawback provision that will retract deferred compensation in the event of ethical misconduct. Lastly, the compensation agreements must prohibit employees from engaging in personal hedging strategies, such as compensation insurance, that undermine the risk alignment principles. In addition, the employer's bonus pool must take into account the institution's liquidity needs, reserve requirements, and the risk that future projected revenues will not materialize. Finally, this amendment I am going to offer creates new and meaningful executive compensation disclosure requirements so that shareholders can be empowered and investors can be empowered to hold banks accountable for compensation practices that fail to fully comply with these new tax rules that are there by virtue of the principles adopted. Of course, the special interests are going to come in and argue that Congress should not get involved in compensation decisions, that the market knows best. They will argue if Congress passes measures such as this that Wall Street is going to pack up its bags and move to greener pastures abroad. Unfortunately, right now, what the market knows is that big short-term gains lead to big bonuses, and big losses lead to taxpayer-funded bailouts. And the American taxpayer is fed up. This is only going to apply to the largest 57 banks in this country. This is not going to apply to most of the banks in this country. We need to take real steps now to reform compensation practices, and it is my hope that the chairman of the Finance Committee is going to be able to get this amendment accepted without opposition. It is common sense, it is desperately needed, and the American people are crying out for reform. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I had hoped to call up an amendment I have. Of course, I would have had to have gotten unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment in order to do that. It is my understanding that we will attempt to do that parliamentary procedure at a later time. What I would like to do at this point is explain the amendment I will be offering. May I proceed?

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Madam President, I speak today to commemorate the life of a true friend of Florida, Mr. Sam Hamilton, who passed away on Saturday. In September of last year, Mr. Hamilton became the Director of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. That was a fitting position for a man who had dedicated 30 years to protecting the Nation's natural resources and wildlife. Long before he was Director of Fish and Wildlife, Mr. Hamilton was committed to this country's wild spaces. Just last month, I was fortunate enough to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for an Everglades restoration project called the Picayune Strand, and Mr. Hamilton was there. It was a proud day for us all, but certainly for a man who had worked so long on Everglades issues and knew how much this project would benefit the endangered Florida panther. On that unusually cold morning, he spoke about his experience in the Youth Conservation Corps at 15 years old in Mississippi and how that molded his dedication to wildlife conservation. Mr. Hamilton started his career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Texas. He moved up the ranks to become the southeast region's director based in Atlanta. During his time in Atlanta, he oversaw the Service's role in restoring the Everglades ecosystem. He took the Service's role of advising Federal agencies with regard to the Endangered Species Act seriously. He knew the ins and outs of the Apalachicola-Chatahoochee- Flint River Basin, and worked to protect the threatened and endangered species that call that system home, like the gulf sturgeon and the purple bankclimber mussel. Mr. Hamilton was an avid fisher and hunter, and this gave him perspective on how to work with people from different backgrounds towards a common goal of conserving America's wildlife and the habitat that sustains it. I know that I echo my friends at the Department of the Interior like Secretary Ken Salazar and the Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Tom Strickland when I say that Mr. Hamilton will be sorely missed and his great contributions to my state and the country at large will not be forgotten. And to his family: wife Becky, sons Sam Jr. and Clay, and grandson Davis, you are in our thoughts during this difficult time. Thank you for helping your husband, father, and grandfather to serve this country.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Madam President, the President of the United States has come forth with a budget for the future of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I can tell you that, among the aerospace community, it has not been well received. The perception is that when the President's proposed budget is to cancel the Constellation Program, which was the program from the previous administration that was to take us to the Moon by 2020--a position, by the way, that then-candidate Senator Obama had embraced--it has not been well received because the perception is that it is killing the manned space program for the United States. That perception is not entirely true, but we live in a world here in the government where we have to set policy and flesh out that policy with authorization and then appropriations for that policy. We live in a world where perception often governs instead of the actual substance. It is my hope, as we have a hearing in our Science and Space Subcommittee of the Commerce Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, that we can start to separate the perception from the substance. What the President has proposed actually has some very good things. In the first place, this ridiculous idea from the previous administration that we were going to shut down the International Space Station in 2015, when, in fact, it hasn't even been completed--as a matter of fact, the mission that took off, I guess it was last night, that has the last major component to go up to complete the International Space Station, and then the remaining four flights of the space shuttle will take up additional experiments and equipment, and then the station will be fully ready for business. The idea from the previous administration that we were only going to have it until 2015, of course, was ridiculous. The Obama administration has come out and said we are going to extend it until 2020. That is a good thing. That is the right thing. The administration also has said NASA is one of the few civilian agencies it is recommending, to the Congress, get additional funding, and it is no small amount. It is an additional $6 billion the President is recommending over the next 5 years. That is substantial, given the fact that the NASA budget is a very small budget compared to the rest of the Federal agencies. However, that amount is only half of what was recommended by the Obama-appointed blue ribbon panel, called the Norman Augustine Commission, looking at the future of spaceflight--only half but it is substantial. I should note that is a step in the right direction. The Obama administration has also recommended a substantial increase in research and development and particularly with regard to a heavy- lift vehicle that will change NASA's mission from just going to and from low-Earth orbit, where we have done all our work in the last three decades with the space shuttle--to and from low-Earth orbit, either to the space station or certain projects such as the Hubble space telescope, which has been miraculous, and the refurbishing missions that have kept that space telescope alive and has opened our understanding and knowledge of the heavens and is peering back into the beginning of time. That has been extraordinary. The President has said: Let's get out of low-Earth orbit and explore the heavens. That is all a good thing. But here is where the President, in his rollout of his recommended budget, made the mistake and has given the perception that he has killed the manned space program. He just said we are going to cancel Constellation. They did not explain: But we have to do an aggressive effort toward building the new heavy- lift vehicle to take us out into the heavens. They put all their eggs in the basket to say we are going to let these commercial companies develop rockets that are going to take us to and from the space station, first with cargo, and then we are going to human rate them for human crews. But the first commercial rocket, Space X, is supposed to have flown six times by now. They have not flown that Falcon 9 rocket yet. They are saying they are going to fly it this spring. Let's hope they do, and let's hope it is successful. But what if it isn't? There is another one, a much smaller rocket called Orbital Sciences. They want to take cargo. Ultimately, they would like to take humans. But they have not gotten off the ground with the first test rocket. For us, where safety ought to be primacy--and one of the key fundamentals for the Constellation Program was to create a rocket and a follow-on heavy-lift rocket that was going to increase, by a factor of 10, the safety for astronauts because the space shuttle has 1,500 parts, any one of which, if it malfunctions, that is it. It is tube city. It is a catastrophic loss. The idea is to have a rocket that builds in a lot more safety for the humans going to and from the space station and ultimately a heavy-lift rocket that gets us out of low-Earth orbit. What I think the President needs to do, he has to repair the image because the perception is he has killed the manned space program. He does not want to do that. I know the President. The Presiding Officer knows the President. He is a great space aficionado. But the perception is there, and it has to be corrected. The first thing he should do is set a goal. Presidents are the only ones who can lead America's space program. A Senate committee cannot do it. The Administrator of NASA cannot do it. Only Presidents can set the vision and the goal, and that goal ought to be what we all know is where we want to go and that is to the planet Mars. If you think I am reaching too far, no less than one of the most critical editorial pages of NASA in America this morning endorsed the goal of going to Mars. That is the New York Times editorial page. This is what a bunch of us have been saying for years: The goal is Mars. We have to develop the technology, the vehicles, the safety systems, the life support systems to get there. But the President needs to set the goal and set the vision that this is where we are going. If the President would do this, and then if he would turn the architecture over to his science adviser and to his Administrator of NASA and that great team, and if they would continue with the testing of the rocket that has already flown successfully, that will be a precursor to building the heavy-lift vehicle--if they will continue that testing, then the President will be well on the way of doing what he wants to do, which is for America to be the leader in space exploration and combined with other countries, where it is appropriate, in international exploration, as we have on the International Space Station. I urge the White House to start listening to some of their most vigorous supporters in the Congress. I can tell you other Members on both sides of the aisle are not pleased with the way the President's message about the future of human spaceflight has been received. If we can work together, we can get the perception of our space exploration back on track. health care reform Madam President, I wish to say, in conclusion, I am hopeful that as we have seen over the last couple days, as we have been in this blizzard and we have had time to reflect and read and sometimes hear the commentary on the radio and TV, all the shrillness we have seen on display over the last several months is going to subside and, in a bipartisan way, the country can start healing. For the country to heal, we must change the discourse in the public square. Civility, not savagery, is the only way a democracy can proceed and succeed. Politics cannot be the blood sport that takes people down on a personal basis, where the attitude is that I am all right and you are all wrong because that leaves little room for consensus building, and consensus building is so essential to the functioning of a democracy. As we get into more of the discussion with regard to health care, health insurance reform, it is my prayer that we have much more conciliation and mediation and moderation in our views so we can build consensus. Consensus building is the finest hour of a democracy in representing all the people. (Mr. UDALL of Colorado assumed the Chair.)

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, there is a reason for this, and it is our Nation's budget is on a path toward crisis. We have to do something extraordinary, just as we did back in 1983. Over the last decade, we have spent billions to wage two wars, but we still proceeded with a tax cut for the wealthy and a prescription drug benefit that gave too much to the pharmaceutical industry as well as the health insurance industry, and what happened was the debt doubled. The Obama administration had to stem the bleeding, putting a tourniquet on the pending nationwide economic collapse, so it pumped money into the economy. That was primarily for infrastructure spending, teachers' salaries, targeted tax relief for small business, and targeted tax relief for the middle class. That same economic collapse did what one expects recessions, near depressions to do: It lowered the tax receipts, and thus put us in an even tighter spot. So now we have to face the realities of this fiscal situation. Due to the economic downturn, tax revenue, as a share of the economy, is at its lowest point in 50 years. It is less than 15 percent of GDP, whereas spending is now above. It is at 26 percent of GDP. You know when you take in less revenues but you spend more, that difference, which we call the annual deficit, means you are headed for trouble. The analysts are telling us that by 2019, the debt could be 114 percent of the GDP. We saw in the charts of the Senator from California how the interest rate in 2019 would balloon up to three-fourths of $1 trillion. The rising trend continues at an alarming rate even after 2019. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said: The challenge to contain this threat is more urgent than at any time in our history. Our Nation has never before had to confront so formidable a fiscal crisis as is now visible just over the horizon. This is not to mention this also affects our national security. Guess who is the biggest holder of our foreign debt. It is China. What happens if they suddenly want us to pay off all of those bonds they hold? Do you think China is an adversary? Well, if you don't, do you think they are an economic adversary? Do you think they would like to be a military adversary? Do you realize what they are doing in space in order to become a world power? I came to Congress a long time ago, and I have been talking about balanced budgets, but now this problem is so massive it can't be solved, as the Senator from California said, by regular order. We are going to have to take a good look at the whole picture. We need some commonsense folks who will work together, who will respect each other-- did you hear what I said, respect each other--and who will recommend the tough decisions that must be made in order to get this Nation's fiscal policy back on track. I realize on the one side you have folks saying: Does that cut Social Security? Does that cut Medicare? Then on the other side you have folks who say: Does that mean you worry about raising taxes? Those are legitimate concerns. Every one of us, every family member in America has to deal with these kinds of questions in their own family's budget. When we spend more than we bring in, we have to make choices. We have to make adjustments. It is the responsible thing to do. It will not be easy. It will not be easy politically, especially with people holding that club of the next election over their heads saying: I am going to beat you into the ground and beat you politically to death if you make these tough choices. But in the end I trust, because of the understanding of the American people of their government and their understanding of their own family budgets, they will trust a bipartisan group of lawmakers accountable to the American people who will have examined the budget, hashed out their differences, and agreed to a plan that will make us solvent again. Without drastic measures we risk saddling our children with debt that can never be repaid and credit that cannot be restored. We have the opportunity right now to try to fix it. I urge our colleagues to support this amendment, and I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I am speaking today in favor of the Conrad-Gregg amendment, of which I am a cosponsor also. While the Senator from California is here, I want to go back 27 years ago to one of the times in which government came together and worked best on a crisis. It was 1983. I had come to Congress a few years before, and we were suddenly at the point at which Social Security was going to run out of money within 6 months. Obviously, something had to be done. The good news was there were two wily old Irishmen who were leading the government. One was in the White House--his name was Reagan--and the other one was the Speaker of the House--and his name was O'Neill. Those two were great examples. They could fight like cats and dogs during the day, but when they walked out the door, they were personal friends. They had a personal relationship. When it came time to cutting a deal to get the performance of the government, they could do it. Realizing that Social Security was about to be in financial cardiac arrest, they said: We are going to do this. They appointed a blue ribbon panel, much like what we are talking about here in this Conrad- Gregg amendment. The difference between then and now is that we had leaders of both parties who were committed to making it work. I am not sure what we are going to see out here on the landscape today, unless the American people rise up and say: A pox on both your Houses. You guys better get together. That is what we are trying to do with this bipartisan amendment. The good news is that because of the deliberations of that panel and because those two Irishmen, President Reagan and Speaker O'Neill, said: We are going to take this off the table at the next election as a club, a bludgeon, to hit our opponents over the head with, that blue ribbon panel came forth, was presented to the Congress, passed overwhelmingly in the Congress, and it made Social Security solvent from 1983 well into this century. That is the kind of example we need here, of our coming together in a bipartisan way, with commonsense solutions. That is what I rise to talk about today. I thank the Senator from California for being not only erudite but eloquent in her presentation.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I do not think there was any person who lives on planet Earth, who saw the clip on CNN this morning of dying children in Haiti, who did not have emotion overwhelm them, as my wife Grace and I, having been to Haiti many times. We saw the fact that children are dying in Haiti because they cannot get medicine and/ or cannot get medical supplies. It is an inexcusable and intolerable situation. If you hear emotion in my voice, you will understand that the Nelson office has been working on this crisis for over the past week since the earthquake hit because we have been talking to our doctors and we have so many of our Florida physicians who are down there doing heroic work. A lot of the work is being done by the University of Miami School of Medicine. A lot of it is being done with the coordinated efforts of Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, some of the children's hospitals in Florida. As we have been on the phone with the various agencies trying to cut the redtape so that the supplies can get in or, in the alternative, we can get the critically injured children out, whether it be to a third country, to another part of Haiti, or back to the United States--critically injured--in order to save their lives, we are still having difficulties. Since we are not going to be voting on this debt ceiling raising that would be a critical vote here, I am taking off at 4 o'clock in the morning with a bunch of doctors from a Tampa charity directly into Port-au-Prince, where I will meet with one of the greatest heroes, Dr. Barth Green, one of the lead physicians, a neurosurgeon from the University of Miami and Miami Jackson Memorial Hospital, who has been down there since the day after the earthquake and has been begging for help. What I want to do is cut through some of this redtape. I want to give you an example. Here is the latest plea from Dr. Green: There are 3 critically burned Haitian patients, one in our [University of Miami]/Project Medishare Hospital and 2 on the USNS Comfort-- The naval hospital ship-- that needed to be medevacced to the Ryder Burn Unit tomorrow [morning]. This is an e-mail plea from last night. We need ok from the US Embassy [for patient] #1 or #2 or #3 to authorize the US Military to take on C130 aircraft. Please help save their lives. I need immediate [help] to do the right thing. We are trying to cut through this redtape. If it takes me going down there to try to whack through it myself, that is what I am going to do. Six of us are crowding into a little jet in the morning at 4 a.m., five doctors and me, packed with medical supplies to do that. I know the State Department, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security--we have been talking to all these folks--have been trying. But bureaucracy gets in the way. Let me share with you an e-mail from the State Department. Get this: Thank you for your email. We will provide information about your U.S. citizen constituent to the U.S. Embassy in Port au Prince as quickly as possible. That is a standardized e-mail. That doesn't say anything. It doesn't give specifics. I know they roll these things out, but don't send that kind of e-mail to me to try to placate me because it doesn't. I want action. I want to give another example. Senator Levin is making a plea. He called us when he found out I was going to Haiti. Senator Levin's office has a Haitian who is in Michigan, a dad. He is there legally. He is not a naturalized citizen, but he is there legally. His daughter is critically injured. This is addressed to me, and it is about getting this daughter air-vacced out of Haiti because she has critical injuries. This is from the Department of State. This is a little girl, a 17-year-old with a broken back. She is being denied being put on an aircraft. Mr. Nelson, Due to the fact that Samantha is neither an American citizen nor a U.S. Lawful Permanent Resident, she would be ineligible to board an aircraft to the United States. Currently, all visa operations at the U.S. Embassy in Port au Prince, including immigrant visas, have been suspended until further notice while our Embassy focuses its resources to assisting American citizens in Haiti. This little girl can't board an American aircraft because she has a broken back. She needs to be medevacced so that her life can be saved. We have another child with a collapsed lung. Dr. Green told us about this child. He cannot save that child with a routine procedure to save people with collapsed lungs unless he can get the proper medical attention and maybe they can get him out there onto that hospital ship. But this is the kind of bureaucracy we are running into. The Department of Homeland Security, which handles Customs and Border Patrol--and don't talk to me about people trying to sneak into the States. We live with this problem in Florida. We know what it is trying to make people legal in their immigrations. But the Department of Homeland Security--Customs and Border Patrol is telling me their agents on the ground, when these critically injured children come in, have the authority to give, in essence, what is called a medical waiver for a child who is obviously in extremis, and they assured us that will be the case. Well, I hope so. That is why I have come to the floor of the Senate, because I get these other e-mails and I get these pleas from physicians such as Dr. Green who are saying kids are dying because they can't get them out. We are not talking about a lot. We are talking about 200 whom I know of right now in order to be able to get them out. I will continue to work this problem all the rest of this day, until I get on that aircraft at 4 o'clock in the morning. Then I will work this problem when I get on the ground in Port-au-Prince. It is total chaos down there. The American military, the American civilian agencies, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, all the agencies, are making heroic efforts. It is mass chaos because of a critically poor nation that has no infrastructure. When a natural disaster such as this huge earthquake hits, it turns into ultimate chaos. Out of that chaos, we are trying to bring some order. I thank all those souls, American and otherwise, who are contributing to try to bring order out of this chaos. But sometimes we lose sight of the goal because we get so wound up in bureaucracy. That is what we need to get through. That is what I am sure we will get through. At the end of the day, we will find that Haiti will restore itself. Although Haiti's Government is in shambles, Haiti does, in fact, have a President who deeply cares and loves its people. President Preval is clean. You can't say that for all the past leaders of Haiti. I believe President Preval is clean. I don't believe all the people around him are clean, but I think he is. It is time for the industrialized nations of the world to come together and to help these people rebuild. The real crisis is right now, with the dying and the suffering we see in front of our eyes. That has to be attended to. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business up to 15 minutes.