Bill Nelson

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Would the Senator yield for a comment and a couple of questions?

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I want to commend the Senator from Rhode Island for his extraordinary, eloquent, and very insightful comment into some of the machinations behind closed doors that we have seen going on in this administration that absolutely perplexes the mind; that governmental agencies that are set up for the purpose of serving the people and protecting the public and, indeed, the EPA is supposed to be the Environmental Protection Agency, that they go off on these half-cocked ideological ideas. The Senator has said it so eloquently. I thank him for it. I thank him for his leadership. I thank him for calling attention to the hearing that is going to be held next week. And as the Senator has been speaking--and I have been mesmerized by what he said--completely off the top of my head I remember, for example, 3 years ago the EPA decided that it was going to do a study in my State, in Jacksonville, FL. Now, get this. You will not believe this. It was going to expose toddlers to pesticides to see what the effects were. And, of course, where do you think those toddlers were going to be? They were going to be in a minority neighborhood. It was going to be in a low-income neighborhood. And the EPA had concocted this scheme. It was sending out these flyers. In order to get a household to participate, it said: We want you to participate in this study. I cannot remember the amount of money they would pay, but they were going to give them a T-shirt; they were going to give them a certificate that they completed this process over several months; and they were given a camcorder that then, at the end of the study, if they successfully completed it, they would keep. And the study was, they were going to put pesticides all over this house and see what the effects were on these toddlers. This was the purpose of the study. You could not believe it. I happened to discover it about the same time that the chairman of the environment committee--she was not the chair then. Senator Boxer was the ranking member. And the two of us collaborated. We had a press conference. We blew this thing sky high. As a matter of fact, now that it is coming back to me, Senator Boxer held up the nomination of the newly appointed EPA Administrator until he finally relented and said he was not going to have this study before she would allow the confirmation. Yet he ``bumfuddled'' around and tried to dodge and weave and not even answer the question. I mean, it defies description. The Senator from Rhode Island has given a number of examples, and that one leapt to my mind. I want to give the Senator from Rhode Island another example. In the little agency that I cherish so much, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, can you believe that one of the most distinguished and noted scientists in that institution of NASA, Dr. Hansen, little underlings in the PR department of NASA--and when I say little underlings, I don't remember what their job description was, but I think they were in their twenties. They had the audacity to go in and change the wording on Dr. Hansen's conclusions with regard to a climate change study. Finally, this came out. Ultimately, his words were restored. I will give you another example in that little agency. They have an inspector general in NASA who is just running amok. There was a theft of a $2 billion rocket design in the NASA computers, and he refused to investigate. Then when the rest of us tried to get him dismissed, the buddy-buddy club wouldn't allow him to be fired. I will give you another example. This will just blow your mind. For years, the Florida Everglades have been on the endangered list in a list that is kept by the United Nations, a list of the most environmentally endangered sites in the world. A third-ranking Department of State employee took it upon himself, in a conference in New Zealand, to speak and to have the Florida Everglades stricken from the list of the most endangered environmental sites, something we work on every day in Everglades restoration, in combination, the Federal Government with the State of Florida, in trying to restore the Everglades to something of what Mother Nature intended. These are things that have popped into my mind of what we have seen over and over again, of the ideological rigidity, the excessive partisanship, which, when you combine the two, is lethal to common sense and to protection of the public. Yet that is what we have seen. Then when some of us, in our role of oversight, try to start changing it and get accountability and responsibility in the executive branch, they won't do anything about it. The NASA IG is still there. That third-tier Department of State employee was there until he finally retired. The EPA Administrator is still there. So here we are. I thank the Senator for yielding. I thank him again for his eloquence today and for his service to our country in representing his State.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I came to the floor to discuss another matter. I thank the Senator from Rhode Island. As a matter of fact, before the Senator from Rhode Island departs the Chamber, he might want to hear what I came to talk about. It is actually a little success story, but it is borne on another failure we have seen. This, I am sad to say, is a failure for American women who are contractor personnel serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, when sexually assaulted, when raped. They have not been able to have their assailants prosecuted, as contractor personnel. We dramatically brought this to light in a hearing about 3 weeks ago. Two very courageous Americans stepped forward, one for the first time publicly. In her particular case, she had been drugged and then gang- raped by not only fellow American contractor personnel, KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, but in that case also participated in by members of the military. When she tried to seek help, it was all swept under the rug, and in her particular case, she did not even get any medical attention until 3 weeks later. Well, the little success story we have, Mr. President, is that in the passage of the Defense Authorization Act, which occurred on Wednesday in the Armed Services Committee, there is inserted a new requirement under law. That requirement is that contractors to the Department of Defense--and, mind you, we have tens of thousands of those contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan--No. 1, will be required to report the offenses of sexual assault to the appropriate investigative authorities; No. 2, they will have the responsibility of providing victim and witness protection and assistance to contractor employees. If we can maintain that position in the Defense authorization bill as it works its way here to the floor of the Senate and then to work out the final product with the House--and I think we will be able to protect this because who is going to vote against it--that is one little happy victory that will give some additional protection to American women who are serving in harm's way, who are not members of the military but, in fact, are Americans serving overseas as contractors to the military. Over and over, the testimony was they are assaulted, they cannot find someone who will investigate; if they have any evidence--in other words, they have been able to get to a doctor and have the evidence from a rape kit--indeed, that evidence is lost, the counseling is not there, and they are left on their own. The United States military actually has done a pretty good job of this for military personnel, not so with contractor personnel. There are laws on the books that protect contractor personnel. But out of the 26 known cases we know of, of raping American women--contractor personnel--not one of them has been prosecuted. So the amending of the Defense Authorization Act with this new requirement will require--you would think common sense would tell you the contractors would do this. But, no. In 26 alleged cases, there has not been one prosecution, and certainly no conviction. So it is my hope this will mandate to the contractors they have to report the offenses and they have to provide the victims and witnesses protection and assistance. In this one case, which was so dramatic, Mrs. Dawn Leamon had come forth for the first time when she testified to our subcommittee. The intimidation of her not doing anything about this gang rape was so severe that when she finally left the forward operating base to go to another forward operating base, where she could first seek assistance, she was given a thumb drive of photographs. Normally, these would just be photographs of the fellow contractors and so forth. But let me tell you what one of those photographs was. And one day I am going to bring that photograph over here in its blown-up form, which we showed in the committee, so that the Senate can see how dramatic this is. There are three of her male contractor personnel. As they are all three facing the camera, one of them is like this, another one is like this, and the third one is like this: Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil--a message that there is no sense in her trying to do anything, that they do not know anything. This is the kind of lack of protection that is allowed to have been going on that has to stop. I thank Senator Levin, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Senator Warner, who is the acting ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, for letting this Senator bring that to the attention of our committee when we marked up and amended the Defense authorization bill. Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Would the Senator recognize that the area in yellow there on the west coast of Florida that he indicates for future drilling--would he recognize almost that entire area is the largest testing and training area for the U.S. military in the world? The military is on record at all levels, of all generals and admirals, that drilling should not be done in that area to compromise our training and testing mission for the U.S. military.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Would the Senator mind putting up his map with the State of Florida on it?

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, will the Senator further yield?

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Would the Senator recognize that the area in yellow there on the west coast of Florida that he indicates for future drilling--would he recognize almost that entire area is the largest testing and training area for the U.S. military in the world? The military is on record at all levels, of all generals and admirals, that drilling should not be done in that area to compromise our training and testing mission for the U.S. military.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Would the Senator mind putting up his map with the State of Florida on it?

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, will the Senator further yield?

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, there is a colossal waste of taxpayers' money that is occurring at Patrick Air Force Base in the State of Florida near my home of Melbourne, FL. Happily, the Senate Armed Services Committee has addressed the issue to try to expose the spotlight on the problem to get the U.S. Air Force to come clean as to what has happened in this huge fiasco of waste of taxpayers' money. It is born out of the privatization of housing for military families. Throughout the country, there has been some success at other military bases, but on a particular contractor, a contractor who got the contract to build housing for the Air Force on four Air Force bases, including Patrick Air Force Base and three others in other places such as Georgia and Arkansas, the contractor went belly up and now, in order to try to keep some semblance of housing being built, what is happening is the Air Force now wants to use all of the land that is supposed to be for housing at Patrick Air Force Base as the equity to build the houses on the other bases in three other States. You will be surprised when I tell you how bad this is. There were 300 acres on the barrier island south of Patrick Air Force Base. This is in the town of Satellite Beach in Florida. It is near Cape Canaveral and the Cape Canaveral Air Force station. The 300 acres were basically given by the Air Force to a joint venture, a corporation, that included this developer that ultimately went bust. The deal was so bad that the Air Force agrees, of the 300 acres, they are going to outright give 100 acres to the developer. The developer goes off and sells it for something like $13 million or $15 million and pockets the cash. On the remaining 200 acres the developer is supposed to build 550 new homes for airmen and their families and commensurately tear down the old dilapidated housing that had been there for several decades. The developer only builds 163 houses and then stops, and all these other old dwellings are there, of which the developer has the authority to rent on the market, and since they are run down, almost slum-like conditions, you can imagine the kind of tenants you are now getting living next to Air Force families. The Air Force's idea of rescuing this is to say we are going to take that remaining 200 acres, we are going to give it to a new developer, and that equity is going to help that developer build additional houses, but not at Patrick, no, in these three other States. So Patrick Air Force Base and our Air Force families who thought they were going to get 550 new homes now only have 163 homes sitting next to slum dwellings, and the Air Force is going to give away the rest of this 200 acres? Well, something smells awfully fishy. Fortunately, this has come to this Senator's attention. I am happy to say I had to strain and grunt a little bit to get my point of view across to the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday in a markup, but when the test came on a recorded vote, it was 22 to 0 in favor of the amendment that would require the Air Force to do a cost-benefit study before they can transfer the property. That is the policy set forth in the Defense authorization bill. I want to say a word to the U.S. Air Force: No, technically, you don't have to pay attention because legally you can go on and transfer that property now because our Defense authorization bill is not law. It has only been passed out of the Senate Armed Services Committee. But it is going to be law once it gets through the House and the Senate and goes to the President for signature. I strongly suggest to the U.S. Air Force, and I am memorializing these comments in a letter to the Secretary of the Air Force, Secretary Wynne: Withhold, forbear on any transfer of the title to a new developer utilizing that very valuable asset of barrier island, oceanfront land until you do the cost-benefit analysis so we can bring this out into the full light of day and we will know how we can best protect the taxpayers' investment. We want to serve the U.S. airmen and their families, we want to serve the U.S. taxpayers and their families, and the best way to do that is get this story out in the open with this cost-benefit analysis. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Madam President, the statement by the Senator from Idaho with regard to the need for drilling has been articulated by a very respected columnist, Robert J. Samuelson, who recently wrote his column, published in the Washington Post, that in essence said we ought to put oil rigs off the protected shores of Florida and in the preserved wilds of Alaska. Once again, we are going to hear statements such as that of the Senator from Idaho and read statements in the written press by Mr. Samuelson as gas prices are hitting record highs. We are going to see the renewed push by the Bush administration and by the oil industry to drill in areas that are protected, such as the Gulf of Mexico off Florida, as articulated by the Senator from Idaho, as well as the area known as ANWR, which is in the preserved wilderness of Alaska. Drilling right away in environmentally protected areas was the centerpiece of Mr. Samuelson's solution to the rising gas prices. There is not one of us in this Chamber who does not want to do something about those gas prices. What Mr. Samuelson said in his column was that to oppose drilling in those protected areas--as indicated also by the Senator who has just spoken--to oppose drilling in those protected areas, he said, is sheer stupidity. And he said further it is a ``prejudice against oil companies.'' That is the same thing the oil companies say every time there is a spike in prices. They have their long-term remedy that would expose these wilderness areas, and Florida's beach and tourism-driven economy, our areas of an environmentally sensitive nature, as well as the military interests I asked the Senator from Idaho to acknowledge, and they would put all that at risk. It is these same oil companies that are now, because of the high price of gasoline, going to make another end run--very possibly next week--and try to bust the ban, the longstanding ban on coastal drilling. Of course, they are going to cite what they do every time the oil prices spike high. They are going to cite the high gasoline prices. I am basing my predictions of what is going to happen in the next couple of weeks, I am basing this assertion on the oil industry's track record and on the comments made Tuesday by the President, renewing his call for drilling. I am basing it on the suggestions we see in this newspaper column. In advance of this likely new assault, this Senator wants to make clear oil that is still deep in the ground has no direct link--none--to today's pump prices. Any oil in the ground will not be in the marketplace for another 10 years. More important, no matter what anybody says or what anybody writes, the United States only has 3 percent of the world's oil reserves while the United States consumes 25 percent of the world's oil production. In other words, it is, to use Samuelson's term, ``sheer stupidity'' to think the United States can somehow drill its way out of the energy crisis. We are a nation that is hooked on oil. Drilling along the Florida shore or in wildlife preserves will not break the habit. By the way, one of the main reasons oil prices have gone up so sharply in recent years is the volatility of major producer nations, such as Iraq and Iran--not even to mention Venezuela and Nigeria. History reflects similar spikes, circa 1973, when we had an OPEC oil embargo related to a war in the Middle East; then again in 1979 with the Iranian revolution; again in 1990 with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the first gulf war; and again, since 2003, with the war in Iraq, concomitant with increasing Asian demand. The common denominator in all these spikes is they are fueled by the subsequent increase in oil speculation. The common denominator is trouble in the Middle East and especially in Iraq and Iran. More drilling along protected U.S. coasts, in bays and harbors and in the pristine wilderness of Alaska, will not stabilize Iraq and it will not guarantee Saudi Arabia's long-term friendship. Nor will it end the unregulated speculation that has driven the price of oil to more than $118 a barrel when the price should have been no more than $55 a barrel, based on present supply and demand, according to an industry leader's testimony before Congress. That means the law of supply and demand has been broken and we are paying at least $63 per barrel over and above what supply and demand would produce--a price of $55. We are paying that extra $63 per barrel to enrich investment bankers, speculators, and oil companies. As Mr. Samuelson says in his column: ``What to do?'' The U.S. failed in the 1970s to enact a real energy program to get us off oil. The result is it is Brazil that runs on ethanol today--not the United States. Germany leads the world in solar power, not the United States. In the meantime, oil companies are awash in record profits, more than $155 billion in profits alone last year, at the same time not spending enough on refineries or alternative energy, while guess who is getting it in the neck: the consumers at the pump. Then, even worse, it took the United States more than 30 years to raise mileage standards on cars and trucks to a paltry 35 miles per gallon, something that will not even be in effect until the year 2020. And is it not interesting that most of Europe and the cars U.S.-based manufacturers sell there already average 43 miles per gallon, and in Japan the cars are approaching 50-miles-a-gallon. In other words, we are wasting, flat out wasting billions and billions of gallons of oil. So, again, what are we to do? Well, about half of the oil we consume goes into transportation, and it should not take a rocket scientist to realize that is where we ought to focus. So, first, if we start to enact serious conservation measures, and things such as a 40-miles-per-gallon mandate for the fleet average of our personal vehicles, and if we provided greater tax breaks for hybrid cars, and ultimately hydrogen-powered and electric-powered cars, then we are going to start making a difference. Second, the Government, our Government, led by our next President, is going to have to enact and subsidize a national energy program to transform us from our energy dependence on oil, especially foreign oil, to alternative and synthetic fuels to power much of the transportation sector. Members of the Senate, it has been done before. Remember in the 1960s, President Kennedy led us to conquer the bounds of Earth, to go to the Moon and return, and all of that occurred within a decade. So we have got to act with the same urgency. And while we are at it, we are going to have to make ethanol, ethanol that we will make from things we do not eat so we do not reduce our food supply. While we are at that, we are also going to have to pay attention to how we power not only our cars and our trucks, but our homes and our industry. We are going to need to develop solar, wind, thermal energy, and hydroelectric. And who knows the advances of technology in harnessing renewable energy sources. We are going to have to look for electricity that is from safer nuclear power. Now, this is what our Presidential candidates ought to be hearing and ultimately before this election they ought to be making a pledge to the American people that they are going to do this. In the 10 years going forward that it would take to bring in new oil rigs fully to market, in that 10 years, if we are good stewards of what we have, we will have conserved more oil than we ever get out of the ground, and we will be mostly free from foreign oil by enacting this energy plan. Our future will not be realized by looking backward to the short-term polluting and dirty energy solutions of the last century, solutions they still offer for the future, solutions by people who do not want to change their ways, such as oil companies. So should we start drilling right now in very environmentally sensitive areas? To use Mr. Samuelson's words in his column, ``That is sheer stupidity.'' 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. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an incredible little Federal agency that has pulled off extraordinary feats and continues to do so--defying the laws of gravity, utilizing the principles of physics to do wondrous things-- as we begin to continue our exploration of the heavens. But NASA is going through a very difficult time. First, NASA has been starved of funds. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in its human space program, has not been allocated enough money by this administration and a series of Congresses over the last several years in order to do everything they want to do. This was particularly acute earlier in this decade when we lost the second space shuttle, the Shuttle Columbia, in its breakup in the atmosphere upon reentry over Texas. NASA spent $2.8 billion just in the recovery of that disaster and in the recovery of flight. Unlike the loss 20 years earlier of Challenger and the cost of recovery from Challenger, which was provided outside of the NASA budget, this time NASA had to eat the cost of recovery out of its operational budget, therefore leaving almost $3 billion less for NASA to operate on to do all it wants to do. What are the things it wants to do? What do we want it to do? To fulfill the vision as enunciated several years ago by the President, that we would build a new vehicle after the space shuttle, the capsule called the Orion, the rocket called Aries, a program called Constellation that would have a new vehicle, like a capsule, like the old Apollo capsule that only carried three astronauts, that would carry six. It would be a new human vehicle to get to and from the space station, much safer than the space shuttle, more economical, but then that the program would then expand on for us to go back to the Moon by 2020 and establish a habitation on the Moon to learn from dealing in that environment, as ultimately humankind is going to go to Mars. That is the program called Constellation. But NASA was never provided with enough money. Over the past couple of years, this Congress, this Senate has tried to provide NASA with the money. Indeed, last year we were successful in the NASA appropriations bill in getting an additional billion dollars just to partially pay back NASA for the money it had eaten out of its operating budget on the cost of recovery of the space shuttle disaster, the Space Shuttle Columbia. But when we got to the House, in the negotiations, the White House--specifically the White House budget director--would not support the additional billion dollars. The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee then insisted that it be taken out of the budget. NASA is right back in the place where it found itself, with not enough money to do everything it is trying to do. It is like saying you want to take 10 pounds of potatoes and stuff them into a 5-pound potato sack. It doesn't fit. Hopefully, the new President will understand this. Does America want a successful space program and does America want a successful human space program complementary to those robotic spacecraft that do so many successful things? I think the answer is clearly yes. We have always had the high ground. This country's technological achievements have always kept us at the cutting edge as the leader in the world. Remember when the Soviets surprised us by putting up the first satellite sputnik, and we were scrambling to catch up. Remember when they surprised us and put the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit and that surprised us. And we hadn't even gotten Alan Shepard up in suborbit, and it was 10 months later before we could get the first American in orbit, former Senator John Glenn, one of the great heroes of this country. After that, then our resolve, the Nation's focus, a Presidential declaration by a young President who said: We are going to the Moon and return. With all of that combined, along with a space race with the Soviet Union, we clearly became the leader. The spinoffs from that program into everyday life, the technological achievements--Velcro, microminiaturization, new products, a lot of the modern miracles of medicine--are direct spinoffs from the research and development of the space program. When going to the Moon, we had to have highly reliable systems that were small in volume and light in weight. That led to a microminiaturization revolution of which we are all beneficiaries today. The question is, Are we going to retain that leadership in space? Yet if we keep bleeding NASA of resources, we are not going to be able to. We are already facing a situation where we will not have human access to space for 5 or 6 years, when the space shuttle is shut down in 2010, and the Administrator of NASA tells us that we are not going to be able to fly the new vehicle Orion with humans until the year 2015, if that. What does that mean to us? It means we have a $100 billion investment in orbit right now called the International Space Station that is supposed to be used for scientific research, and we are not even going to have an American vehicle to get there for 5 or 6 years. That is unacceptable. How are we going to get there? We are going to pay the Russians to get a ride for our American astronauts on their Soyuz vehicle which had a problem last week on reentry with a too steep reentry, a ballistic reentry, 8 Gs experienced by the cosmonaut and astronaut on board. So we are going to have to negotiate with Vladimir Putin during this 5- year period, which we are going to have to buy. We are going to be laying off American space workers at the Kennedy Space Center, and we are going to be funding jobs in Moscow at who knows what price Vladimir Putin will charge us because he knows it is the only way we have to get to the International Space Station. And, by the way, if that is not enough to cause heartburn, we can't pay Russia for space flights, of which we have to go about and contract right now if they are going to build a spacecraft for 2011, when we would need it. We can't pay them for it because we are prohibited by a law that says, since they are helping Iran, a nation that we are concerned about proliferating nuclear weapons, we have to get a waiver of that law. All of this is to say that we have a mess. If this Nation wants to be a leader in space, which I believe every American believes we should, we have to start helping NASA. We have to get the next President attuned to this issue. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

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

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I want to address the Senate on two subjects. I will be brief. The task has fallen to this Senator from Florida to continue to try to press the chairman of my party and its executive committee, in the form of the Democratic National Committee, to recognize the votes of 1.75 million Florida Democrats who went to the polls on January 29, a turnout of twice any previous turnout in a Presidential primary, to express their preference for the nominee of our party. They did so in those huge numbers, they did so in a duly called election by Florida law, which caused all of the rhubarb in the first place because the legislature of the State of Florida moved ahead of the date set by the two parties after which they would then be punished by the party rules. Both party rules provided that the two parties would be punished if they moved earlier than the date of February 5 for their primary. The party rules in both parties said that half of the delegates would be taken away. Indeed, that is what the Republican National Committee did. But not so the Democratic National Committee, for they decided to take a full pound of flesh and take away all the delegates and say the election didn't count. There are some people who are thinking, even though they felt passionately about it at the time, the way all this worked out, since we don't have a nominee yet at an early day like the Republican nominee, I think some people are thinking maybe this should have been worked out a long time ago, such as last summer, before this ever came to a head. But it is what it is, and all the attempts at finding a compromise that can seat the Florida delegation at the convention have all come to naught because of the inability of the two candidacies to come to a conclusion as to what they would be able to accept. The bottom line is that seating Florida, whether you seat them according to the DNC rules, taking away half the delegates, or seating the whole delegation, advantages one candidacy and it disadvantages the other candidacy. As a practical matter, I think it is going to be difficult to get an accommodation and agreement to do it. But I want everybody to understand that the Democratic National Committee can take away delegates--they have that authority. But the Democratic National Committee cannot deny the certification of a legal election by Florida voters. You can't deny that. It is a fact. It is a certified election under Florida law. That was a legal election under Florida law and it was a clean election under Florida law. The Democratic National Committee cannot deny that certification of that legal election. Sadly, one of the byproducts of all this is that in listening to what the latest Gallup poll says, one-half of all the Democrats in the United States think all of this fracas is hurting the party--one-half of all the Democrats in the country. When you combine that latest Gallup Poll with the fact that months ago a poll in Florida showed that 22 percent of Independent Florida voters, 22 percent of Independents in Florida, would be less likely to vote for the Democratic nominee in November because of the way that Florida is being treated by the Democratic National Committee: Democratic National Committee, you better wake up. We have a problem on our hands. What we ought to be doing is looking at November. As the old colloquialism says, we better watch out or we are going to be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, it is hard for me to understand how the Senate cannot support equal pay for equal work, the same for women as for men. That happened yesterday, on a vote of 56 in favor of proceeding to the bill on equal pay for equal work and 43 against. I do not understand that. What is worse is my wife and many other spouses of Senators cannot understand that. I assure you, they are letting their husbands and spouses know how they feel--that they cannot understand how the Senate cannot proceed to a bill for equal pay for equal work for women. I hope the next time we try to move to a bill for which we have to hit the 60-vote threshold to get over the filibuster to get to the bill--we need 4 more votes--I hope somewhere over there we are going to be able to get them when we bring up equal pay for equal work for women. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

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

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, the underlying bill that the Senators from Hawaii and North Carolina have put together is a step in the right direction: increasing life insurance benefits, increasing disability benefits--particularly for traumatic brain injury--and doing that retroactively. There is another portion in here that makes a lot of sense. If under current law a veteran who is deployed to a war zone can get out of his apartment rental contract, why should not he be able to get out of his cell phone lease contract? That provision is in here. That is in the underlying bill. Let me tell you what is not in here--I am going to have to take this up on the Defense authorization bill--taking care of the widows and the orphans in the offset between survivor benefits plans and dependents' indemnity compensation--SVPDIC. The veterans' survivors, the widows and orphans, are entitled under both by law--but by law they offset each other. Thus widows and orphans are suffering. We will address that in the Defense authorization bill. I want to expand on what the two Senators from Hawaii have said. There is one thing that America should never do, and that is break her word. When we have allies who are side by side with us in war, and they are depending on our word that we are going to take care of them, it is the obligation of America to do that. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I rise to speak in favor of the technical corrections bill. In large part, we have a technical correction in the bill affecting a major interstate project in Florida that needs to be passed. Now, the story I am about to tell you is going to amaze some people of what happened. A few years back, when we passed the highway bill, they passed the version in the House, and we passed the version in the Senate, and they got merged so they were identical. The bill was getting ready then--the same bill that had passed both Houses--to go to the President for signature. But a strange thing happened on the way to the White House because someone--identity yet unknown--went in and changed the language, which was, ``Widening and Improvements for I-75 in Collier and Lee County''--a matter of $10 million in the highway bill--and changed that to be, instead, $10 million for a study for an interchange on Interstate 75 at Coconut Road. Now, the long and short of it is, you simply cannot do that once it passes the House and passes the Senate in identical form and then goes to the President in that identical form for signature. Somewhere in the process of enrolling the bill to send it down to the White House, someone is not permitted to go in and change the meaning of the appropriation--in this case, $10 million for widening Interstate 75, which has become a parking lot at 7 o'clock in the morning and 5 o'clock in the afternoon because of all the traffic. That is why we want to widen Interstate 75 in southwest Florida to six lanes instead of the existing four lanes. Someone went in and changed the intent and wording of the bill. So what we have in the technical corrections bill is a technical correction to have the law read, in fact, what it was intended to read, and what it, in fact, did read until somebody went in and tampered with it. Now, in the meantime, we have had correspondence from the chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure in the House of Representatives to the local metropolitan planning organization, which has, under State law, the authority for setting up the priorities for road projects, saying to them that you need to follow the law--the law as it went to the President for signature. We have correspondence back from the metropolitan planning organization--in this case, many letters, but in the one I have in my hand to me--stating there was an error in the enrollment of the bill and the metropolitan planning organization wants the original intent of the legislation to be what governs, which is the widening of Interstate 75, and the $10 million used for that. So, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record both of these pieces of correspondence.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. So we come to this point. It is absolutely critical that we pass a technical correction so that the law, as it was intended by the passage in the House and the Senate, be honored. The question is, What about the tampering? Well, we need to find out. Mr. Coburn, the Senator from Oklahoma, has taken great umbrage at this tampering. I can tell you, as the senior Senator from Florida, I am very grateful to him for him being upset and wanting to do something about this. This Senator and my colleague from Florida have signed on to an amendment by Senator Coburn trying to get to the bottom of who did the tampering and how did it occur so this kind of stuff will never happen again. There is some question about the way Senator Coburn's amendment is drafted, that it would be a direction to the House of Representatives which might meet some constitutional problem, in which case what we are trying to work out is that there would be a future amendment where there would be an investigation by the General Accounting Office and maybe some resolution with regard to the Justice Department saying that this matter ought to be investigated as to a violation of the laws of this country in that you cannot tamper with legislation like this. Whatever we resolve, I hope we will get it in because we have that separate issue of the tampering that needs to be dealt with, and it needs to be exposed to the light of day so people will understand you just do not take a bill that is duly passed by the Congress of the United States and, while it is en route from Capitol Hill to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, change the meaning of the bill. It is my hope that as we get into all these other issues that seem to have cropped up that have nothing to do with Interstate 75, we can get these other issues resolved so the technical correction can proceed and that we can get this particular technical correction adopted into law. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. A couple days ago, we had General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker in front of our Senate Armed Services Committee in the morning, and then I had a chance to visit with them again in the afternoon in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. These are two very dedicated and bright public servants, and their public service is certainly appreciated, and we expressed that--I think every Senator who questioned them. The bottom line for this Senator from the State of Florida is that if we go back and look at what was the initial reason stated for the surge, which was over a year ago, it was stated that it was to bring some stability and give some time in order that the Sunnis and the Shiites could have more reconciliation so they could start charting a more stable government for themselves. When pressed on whether that political reconciliation had occurred, both General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker said they thought it had. And then when I asked, well, what laws have been passed, they named two or three, as if that were the example of political reconciliation, and I think it would be one indicia. I further asked had those laws been implemented. Of course, with each of the questions that narrowed the focus, the answer was less and less painting a picture that political reconciliation had occurred. We would certainly hope that political reconciliation would occur, because it would clearly be in the interest of the United States that Iraq could be stabilized. It is the opinion of this Senator that the political reconciliation has not occurred--while at the same time the aggressive diplomatic effort in reaching out to other countries in the region that are very important to bringing about political reconciliation in Iraq has not occurred. Therefore, the tremendous success and effectiveness of the surge, militarily, in fact has not borne the fruit of political reconciliation as we had hoped it would. That is a disappointment to this Senator. On the subject of Iraq, I need to bring to the attention of the Senate that yesterday I had the privilege of chairing a subcommittee in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the question of whether the rapes of American women who are contractor personnel in Iraq as a result of the war effort there--whether these rapes are being prosecuted. The answer to that is, sadly, no. We had dramatic testimony by a Mrs. Mary Beth Kineston, who is a rape victim, and Mrs. Dawn Leamon, who for the first time revealed her identity yesterday in the hearing. In the couple of times she spoke on the radio before, she was using a pseudonym. Of course, that testimony was exceptionally emotional, and it was very graphic as to the trauma that these two women had suffered, not only in the act of the sexual assault--and in the case of one of the women, a gang rape after she had been drugged by fellow Americans--but the trauma in the aftermath of the contractor trying to sweep it under the rug so that it didn't disturb the waters; and all of the trauma each of them went through and the way they were treated by their fellow American workers and fellow contractors in the aftermath of them not being able to get any help. In each case it was not until the military intervened that they actually got any help. In the case of Mrs. Leamon, it was 5 weeks after the fact when she was finally able to see a U.S. military doctor at another base from the forward operating base where the assault took place, and she in fact was told by the doctor that you need to continue to try to work through this and get help; you were drugged and you were raped. The second panel in our hearing was the Department of Justice, the Department of State, and the Department of Defense. To say the response on why there had not been a prosecution of 26 identified assaults among contractor personnel--not U.S. military--contractors, American women personnel and there had not been one conviction was, indeed, not only deeply disturbing but deeply disappointing. The way I tried to conduct that hearing, since I chaired the hearing, was to say to those representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, and Justice that we were going to conduct that hearing in a respectful way, and at the end of the day what we wanted was to graphically bring to light the problem that is occurring, not only with the assaults but the aftermath where American women cannot get justice, and that it is the responsibility of their ultimate guarantors, the very departments that are contracting out for the war effort, to see that justice is done. Hopefully, that may have occurred yesterday, to remind all those folks that in a very difficult environment, a war zone, we still have to obey the rule of law and, particularly, when it comes to the rights of Americans, and particularly American women, to be protected and to have the full extent of the law to support their rights. I bring this to the attention of the Senate because this is not the last time we are going to hear about this issue and, hopefully, the next stories we will hear in the aftermath of this drama that played out in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday will be more a story of success, of how the wheels of the Department of Justice will continue to turn to, as the Good Book says, love mercy and to do justice. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, we are in morning business, is that correct?

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I will speak as in morning business.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, is the parliamentary procedure that we are on the Mortgage Foreclosure Protection Act?

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I do wish to say a word about the Mortgage Protection Act, the protection against foreclosure on mortgages. Last Thursday, I had offered an amendment that will be considered perhaps tomorrow and will be voted on and it is a commonsense amendment which says that in order to save somebody's home and not have their mortgage foreclosed on, if they have a pile of cash sitting over in their retirement account, the 401(k), that they would be able to go in and get $25,000 out of their 401(k) retirement plan to use in order for them to forestall a foreclosure upon their home and, therefore, stay in their home. Now, that is plain common sense, to be able to do that, pull it out, without paying the 10-percent penalty under current law that you would have to pay in order to take money out of that retirement fund and set it aside. Why is it common sense? Because the symmetry of the current law is you can take money out of the retirement fund without paying the penalty in order to buy a home. If you can do that to purchase a home, why would you not want to give a homeowner the opportunity to keep their home from foreclosure by allowing them to go into the retirement fund or 401(k) fund? It makes common sense, and I am hoping the Senate is going to favorably consider that when we vote on this amendment. It is offered by me and a host of other Senators who are cosponsors.