Don Nickles

Mr. NICKLES

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation to provide that restaurant buildings are depreciated over 15 years instead of the current-law 39 years. My legislation will ensure that the tax laws more accurately reflect the true economic life of restaurant buildings. Under current law, real estate property and any improvements thereto generally must be depreciated over 39 years. However, restaurant buildings undergo excessive wear and tear, and are renovated on average every 6 to 8 years. Requiring restaurant owners to depreciate these renovations over 39 years leads to a mismatch of income and expenses, thereby increasing the tax consequence of making such improvements. The long depreciation period simply makes no economic sense. In recent years, Congress has changed the depreciation schedules for competitors of owner-occupied restaurants. For example, convenience stores are depreciated over 15 years. In addition, leased properties, including leased restaurant space, can take advantage of the temporary bonus depreciation incentives contained in the 2001 economic stimulus bill. I believe that our tax laws should be updated to treat restaurant property in a more rational manner. That is why I am introducing legislation to reduce the depreciable life of restaurant property from 39 years to 15 years. My legislation would ensure that all restaurants, either leased or owner-occupied, are treated equally. It would also ensure a level playing field between restaurants and their competitors. By reducing the time period over which all restaurants are depreciated, my bill will more accurately align a restaurant's income and expenses. According to the National Restaurant Association, enacting this legislation would generate an additional $3.7 billion in cash flow for restaurants over the next 10 years. This is money that could be reinvested and, in turn, generate new jobs. I look forward to working with my colleagues to enact my legislation that will provide more rational tax-treatment of restaurants on a permanent basis. by doing so, we will take an incremental step toward modernizing the tax code's outdated depreciation rules.

Mr. NICKLES

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of the conference report to accompany H. Con. Res 95, the concurrent budget resolution for fiscal year 2004.

Mr. NICKLES. Certainly.

Mr. NICKLES. Did the Senator say they have the intention of yielding most of their time?

Mr. NICKLES. I am happy to work with my colleagues to find a mutually agreed upon time for debate and for final passage. We have up to 10 hours, as my colleague knows. That would have us voting at 8 o'clock tonight. I hope we can reduce that. I will work with colleagues on both sides to make it mutually agreeable.

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, for the information of our colleagues, I urge our colleagues to stay in town today on this particular Friday before an April Easter recess. We have a vote on the Senate budget conference report, which we are now debating. We have a vote on the urgent DOD request, the war supplemental. That will be voted on today. I expect we will also have a vote on debt limit extension. Maybe that can be done by voice, maybe not. I urge colleagues to be here today. Those are the three very important issues to be resolved today. We will try to work with all of our colleagues to expedite consideration of all three measures, and I will be happy to accommodate and yield time and work with people. We need to pass all three bills. I look forward to working with all involved Senators to come to the conclusion of all three bills.

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I appreciate the comments of my colleague and friend from Nevada. I will bump that up to a higher level between the majority leader, minority leader, and my friends. It was my understanding it needs to be done this week before we left. I have not consulted with Treasury--the Secretary of the Treasury in the last week or so. It was my understanding it really needed to pass before the April break. Maybe that is not the case. It may be my friend from Nevada and others have done their tax returns and paid such enormous taxes that we are in great shape. There is usually an April bump in revenues. That is my main concern. We don't like being in the situation where we are borrowing funds from civil service retirements and so on, which has happened in the past, and may be happening now. I will be happy to bump that up to the majority and minority leaders. It was my understanding it needed to be done prior to our leaving for this break.

Mr. NICKLES. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, as we begin the debate on the budget for fiscal year 2004, I will make a couple of comments. One, I compliment my colleague, Chairman Nussle, in the House. It has been a pleasure to work with him. Passing a budget is never easy. I have been critical in the past, such as when last year we did not get a budget passed, but I have a better appreciation for how difficult it is. Particularly when we have a great big number of 51 on our side, it is not an easy job. So I compliment Chairman Nussle and thank him for his work and cooperation. We had many hours working together trying to formulate a budget that would pass both the House and the Senate. It is a great deal easier said than done. We have come forward with a budget this year that accomplishes a lot of major objectives. We balance the budget. We balance the budget in 9 years, not 10. When we brought it before the Senate, it was balanced in 10 years, in 2013. Now we balance it by the year 2012. It is a budget that allows and encourages growing the economy. The economy has not been growing. Frankly, we will never balance the budget if the economy is not growing. This budget allows and provides for a growth package. This is a budget that will help us win the war on terrorism. We fully fund the President's request for national defense and homeland defense. It includes the war supplemental that Congress is going to pass tonight. The Senate passed it a week ago, and we will end up passing it as well today. It fully funds homeland security and the President's request. It also is a budget that allows us to modernize Medicare. We did not get that done last Congress. We should have, but we did not. Almost everybody says they are in favor of it, but because we did not have a budget, we did not have protection on the floor. We did not even have markup in the committee. We did spend some time on it on the floor, but we were not successful. This is a bill that says we will spend up to $400 billion not just to provide a drug benefit but also to strengthen and improve Medicare, not just for the current beneficiaries but for future generations as well. It is a budget that maintains spending discipline. It grows domestic nondefense discretionary, but barely--about 2.3 percent over 2003 levels before the supplemental. We limit spending with enforceable caps for the next 2 years. Budgets are not easy. They are not pretty. The process is difficult. It is long. It is tedious. It is tough. It is not the easiest committee of which to be a member. I thank all members of the Budget Committee who helped us build this budget. When we convened early this year, we had seven Budget Committee hearings. The President submitted his budget on February 3. We passed a large appropriations bill, the 2003 appropriations bill, on February 13. These were appropriations from the previous year. We did not get a budget last year, and we did not get appropriations last year. Why did we not get the appropriations bills done? Because the House and the Senate were arguing what the appropriate level would be. There was never a budget, so this was not an agreement on how much we should spend. And because we did not have the agreement, we could not manage. It just did not work. And the Congress did not work. Last year was a very frustrating year, largely because we did not have a budget. In February of this year, we ended up passing last year's appropriations bill. Eleven of the thirteen bills passed in February. On March 7, CBO submitted the reestimate of the President's budget, and then on March 12 and 13, the Senate Budget Committee marked up the President's budget. We had 2 days of markup. We had 32 amendments considered, 23 rollcall votes, and we passed it out of the committee on March 13. Then we had the longest consideration of the budget maybe in Senate history. I will have to look back, but we had 7 days of debate on the floor. The Budget Act provides for 50 hours, but we had 50 hours plus many more hours because we had a very extended number of rollcall votes. We had 81 amendments considered on the floor. Fifty-one were decided by rollcall votes, and 31 by voice votes which adds up to 82, including final passage. We have had a challenging conference. We had a very challenging conference, after both the House and Senate passed a bill, because we had differing expectations of what could pass, particularly as it related to the growth package. The House wanted, and they passed, a growth package of $726 billion. The Senate passed a package of $350 billion. The Senate could not pass more than $350 billion, it looks like, and the House would not accept $350 billion. It is kind of hard to have reconciliation in a conference agreement if there are irreconcilable differences. What did we do? Well, we were a little innovative and we came up with giving different instructions to the House and the Senate, certainly legitimate in parliamentary procedure. It has not been done before, so we gave an instruction to the House. The House has an instruction of $550 billion on the growth package. The Senate has an instruction of $350 billion on the growth package. The difference is to be decided by the conference. I think I know where the votes are. I will tell my friends and colleagues, I know Chairman Grassley very well. I expect that I will be a conferee, and we do not expect to bring a bill out of conference unless it will pass the House and the Senate. We want it to become law. We do not want to make political statements. We want to help the economy grow. That is our objective. So hopefully we will have a budget and a growth package. I think it is more important to have a budget than even having a growth package. I think we have to have fiscal discipline. The budget amounts to $2.2 trillion. The growth package is somewhere between $350 billion and $550 billion over 10 years. Over 10 years, we are going to spend about $30 trillion. I think we have to have some management of that $30 trillion in the next 10 years. If we did not pass a budget last year and we do not pass a budget this year, then we have really no budget. The former Director of the Congressional Budget Office said the budget process is dead. I called him and told him: I beg to differ with you, but if we were not successful in passing a budget this year, it would be dead. If we had 2 consecutive years and Congress did not pass a budget, then certainly it would be dead, for all practical purposes. There would be no budget enforcement. There would be no pay-go. There would be no rules against spending on extraneous measures. This budget has enforcement. I will mention a couple of other things. We have inherited a very difficult thing. A lot of people are going to come to the floor today and they are going to decry how large these deficits are and say: Woe is me, how come we have all of these deficits? It is because of the tax cuts. That is not actually factual. The fact is we have large deficits because revenues have declined dramatically--not because of tax cuts but because of the economy. Revenues fell 2 years ago, 1.7 percent. Last year, they fell 7 percent. Combined, that is about a 9-percent reduction in revenues in the last 2 years. Simultaneously, spending went up 12 percent; revenues went down 9 percent. Spending went up 12.2 percent, and we went from a surplus of $129 billion to a deficit of $159 billion in 1 year. What caused that? A soft economy, a stock market collapsing. People will later say that is because of President Bush's policies. That is not correct. The NASDAQ fell 50 percent between March of 2000 and December of 2000, so the market started collapsing under President Clinton. I want to make sure people know where this collapse came from. Revenues started falling like a rock because the stock market started collapsing. Maybe the stock market had irrational exuberance going up, but it fell dramatically and that cut off revenues. A lot less capital gains, less personal income tax, and revenues declined to the Federal Government. Also, we had something called a terrorist attack on the United States on September 11 in the year 2001. That has cost this economy and it has brought a lot of outlays to the Federal Government--outlays to respond to terrorism, outlays to protect us against terrorism, outlays to rebuild both New York and Washington, DC. As a result, outlays have gone up and expenses to the economy have been dramatic. It is hard to calculate how significant it has been. So we have the confluence of several things. We already had a stock market declining dramatically, we had a soft economy, then we had September 11 on top of that, which has made revenues go down and expenditures go up. What can we do? We have to show fiscal discipline. We have done that in this budget. Despite attempts by many to increase spending by over $1 trillion, we held the line on nondefense spending. It will only grow by a couple of percentage points. That is compared to spending that has been growing at dramatic increases in past years. The year before last, it was 12 percent alone in discretionary spending. When I talk about spending, sometimes we talk about discretionary and sometimes we talk about entitlements, but discretionary spending, the amount of money we control, had been increasing at enormous levels. We contained that growth. In nondefense, as I mentioned, spending growth has been limited to a couple of percentage points. We do a couple other things. We reinstill discipline. We have caps on discretionary spending. We have enactment of changes. If you want to call something emergency, you have to have 60 votes. We prohibit advance funding which was done more often than it should have been, advance funding where you not only appropriate for the next fiscal year but maybe for the next couple of years. We prohibit that. Let me mention a few more. Spending growth in 2004 will be 4 percent. Defense spending in 2004 is 2.4 percent in budget authority. The last 5 years it has been 7.6 percent; nondefense spending growth in 2004, 2.9 percent. The average was 7.9 percent. In defense, I mentioned we fully fund the President's request to fight the war on Iraq. We have included the war supplemental. We fully fund homeland security. That is an increase of 18.4 percent in 2004. We have a $3 billion increase over the President's request in 2000 for the Department of Education. Those are programs such as IDA, title I, No Child Left Behind. Veterans health care is the largest increase ever, 14.7 percent. I have mentioned Medicare and our efforts there. We also have a pay-go point of order, to limit mandatory increases or revenue decreases in excess of those provided in the budget. We did something else, and I want to make sure my colleague from North Dakota listens to this because we can work together on this. The House--to their credit, I would say--proposed hundreds of billions of dollars in savings in entitlements. The President did not propose those; we did not propose those. I had to think maybe we need to be looking at entitlements. We did not get that done in this budget when we had the opportunity. We did not do it. And I did not call for it to be done because I didn't think Congress was ready. I want Congress to get ready. I want the authorizing committees to start doing oversight. We require in this resolution the House and the Senate authorizing committees to submit findings to the Budget Committee identifying instances of waste and fraud and abuse in programs within their jurisdictions. There are a lot. We have not had extensive oversight on a lot of programs in years, for whatever reason. Blame me, blame all of us; we need to do more. We are requesting and actually directing each of the committees to give us identified areas where they think we can make savings. Those need to be submitted by the authorizing committees by September 2 of 2003, and we will use those in the Budget Committee to develop future budget resolutions. We do not want to dictate to the authorizing committees, but we want to work with the authorizing committees to get real results, real savings, real oversight. It bothers me a lot when we find out we have actually hundreds of billions of dollars estimated to be lost in errors or waste--in some programs it is 20 or 30 percent. Regarding the earned-income tax credit program, I believe CBO did a study, and it was something like an error rate of close to 30 percent. That is not acceptable. We need to make sure Government is more efficient and more effective. I look forward to the debate on this resolution. I hope our colleagues consider it vitally important to pass a budget. We will be grossly irresponsible if we do not. It is easy to throw stones and sticks and say I don't like this so we will just vote no. But, conversely, we have to govern. We considered alternatives, and they did not pass. I urge our colleagues to consider this budget. I urge Members to vote for final passage some time later this afternoon. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that quorum calls be charged equally from now on during the course of the debate.

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, just a parliamentary inquiry: I would like to remind my colleagues the rules of the Senate are to address the Chair, ask questions through the Chair, not to have colloquies between two Senators.

Mr. NICKLES. I remind my colleagues, they need to ask questions through the Chair, and they need to ask questions and answer questions.

Mr. NICKLES

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, first, I compliment my friend and colleague, the chairman of the Finance Committee, for his leadership, for his courage, for his service on both the Finance Committee and on the Budget Committee. He full well realizes we need both a budget and a growth package, and he has helped us and enabled us to do that. I also thank my colleagues from Ohio and Maine as well. I yield the floor.

Mr. NICKLES. I thank my colleague, Senator Domenici. Personally, my admiration for him has gone up dramatically, recognizing that he was either chairman or ranking member for 22 years of the Budget Committee, and every year he was chairman, he was able to get a budget passed. It is not an easy process. I also thank him because he has given me some excellent staff and they have been a great asset. Hazen Marshall is the chief of staff who put together a great team, many of whom were former employees of my very good friend. Senator Domenici, who is now chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is doing a fabulous job. This year we will have an energy bill and it will be passed out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. When marking it up, it had a lot of amendments. We had a lot of amendments on the budget package in committee and on the floor, and I am sure we will in the energy bill, but I am sure we will have an energy bill to contribute to our country's energy security. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NICKLES. I yield such time as he may consume to the Senator from Colorado.

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, just for the information of our colleagues--I appreciate the comments that have been made by many of our colleagues--I think we are close to wrapping this up. I inform people it is our expectation we will be voting probably no later than 5:30. So if colleagues are off Capitol Hill, at least they can have that in mind. The rollcall vote will probably be starting maybe at 5:20, 5:25, 5:30. So I just want to make that notification.

Mr. NICKLES. I understand the concern of the distinguished senior Senator from New Mexico about mental health parity, and I would concur with my colleague's assessment. The conference report does assume the revenue impact of enacting mental health parity legislation.

Mr. NICKLES. Thank you.

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, for the information of our colleagues, we are going to be voting momentarily. I have a lot of colleagues who say they want to catch planes, and a lot of the debate has cycled around once or twice. It has been a pleasure to work with Senator Conrad. I am not totally surprised that he will not vote for the budget resolution-- maybe a little disappointed. I hope we return to the days of having bipartisan budget resolutions. There will be some Democrats who will vote for this. I hope there are several. When we passed this budget 3 or 4 weeks ago in the Senate, there were several Democrats who voted for it. I hope we will get several to vote for it today. I have heard a lot of complaint about it, most of which is excessive tax cuts. I beg to differ. We have tax revenues over the next 10 years of about $28 trillion, and the reconciled portion of this tax cut, at maximum, would be $550 billion, but probably more like $350 billion. That is a small percentage. Some colleagues say: Wait a minute, there are more; in the outyears, there is $600 billion, and that is basically continuing present law. If you don't do that, you are going to have massive tax increases in 2011, 2012, and 2013. A lot of those tax increases will be on low-income people, raising their rate from 10 percent to 15 percent, reinstating the marriage penalty, or it would be eliminating the $1,000 tax credit per child. I don't want to do that. I don't know that we are going to do it this year. We don't have to do it this year. We should do something to stimulate the economy. We have a small stimulus package--$350 billion for the Senate. So I hope our colleagues will support this package. I will make one comment about deficits. Are deficits too high? You bet. Some people say--and I have heard this a lot--they were caused by excessive tax cuts in 2001. But I disagree with that. There are two equations: how much revenue you are taking in, and also how much money you are spending. We have been spending a lot of money because of national defense needs, because of homeland security and, frankly, Congress got in the habit of spending a lot of money during the later years in the Clinton administration when we had a lot of growth revenue. We had spending compounding at double-digit levels--12, 13, 14 percent. We cannot continue doing that. This budget has fiscal discipline. It does say that the discretionary amounts, compared to last year prior to the supplemental, will grow at about 2.5 percent. We have caps on entitlements, points of order against growing entitlements, and we say that entitlement changes in Medicare should be limited to $400 billion after a bill is reported out of the Finance Committee. We didn't put that in reconciliation. We want Medicare, and we want a prescription drug bill, and we think we can get it as a result of this bill. Last year, we had no budget. When we had no budget, we didn't get appropriation bills done. We didn't pass 11 of 13 appropriations bills last year because the House and Senate didn't have numbers with which they concurred. We didn't get a prescription drug bill. We didn't function or manage. I urge my colleagues, let's not be totally focused just on the size of the growth package--and a lot of people have different opinions, such as it is not large enough, it is too big; some want zero, some want $350 billion, some want more, and some may want more than that. Let's also keep in mind that that is a tax figure over 10 years, and it is a very small percentage compared to what we are spending per year, which is $2.2 trillion. This budget is the only game in town if you want to have any control over the growth of that total expenditure. We didn't pass the budget last year. If we don't pass one this year, the whole budget process is dead. I urge my colleagues, let's be fiscally responsible. This is the only game in town. For people to say, wait a minute, this is too high-- the only thing they are talking about being too high is on the tax side. That doesn't count the trillions of dollars they were trying to add on spending. I urge my colleagues to be responsible. Let's work together and pass a budget that can pass. This can pass. Let's reinstate some discipline that we didn't have last year. I urge my colleagues to support this budget. I yield back the remainder of my time and I ask for the yeas and nays on the conference report.

Mr. NICKLES. I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I thank all of our colleagues. This has been a challenging process. I especially thank Senator Conrad. We have had a good debate, a challenging process, needless to say, but we now have a budget. I thank all of my colleagues for their support in making that happen.

Mr. NICKLES

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation to clarify the tax rules governing the depreciation of wireless telecommunications equipment. I am joined by my distinguished colleague from Arkansas, Mrs. Lincoln. Our current depreciation system, the Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System, MACRS, was last reformed in 1986. At that time, the wireless telecommunications industry was in its infancy. Therefore, wireless telecommunications equipment, which is primarily computer- based technology, was not assigned to a specific asset class. The IRS has provided only limited guidance with respect to the depreciation of wireless telecommunications equipment. In 1998, the IRS issued Technical Advice Memorandum, TAM, 98-25-03, which asserted that the classes of assets used to provide wireless telecommunications services are comparable to wireline telecommunications assets and, thus, should be assigned to wireline asset classes. The TAM concluded that mobile switching centers should be classified in the same asset class with computer-based telephone central office switching equipment, 5-year property. However, the TAM failed to take a clear position with regard to the classification of cell site equipment, so there is no practical guidance for IRS revenue agents or taxpayers to follow. Over the past decade, the IRS and wireless telecommunications companies have expended significant resources in audits and settlement disputes involving the depreciation of wireless telecommunications equipment. This has resulted in ad hoc, inconsistent, and costly case- by-case determinations of the appropriate class life for this equipment. It has created the current situation in which similarly situated companies are being treated differently, with some being required to depreciate their wireless telecommunications equipment over 5 years, and others over 10 years or longer. I believe Congress should act to clarify the depreciation rules for wireless telecommunications equipment to provide certainty to the IRS and the taxpayer, thereby putting an end to the costly dispute settlement process; to ensure a level playing field for taxpayers; and to provide fair tax-treatment of wireless telecommunications equipment. Given the nature of this equipment and the rapid technological advances in the wireless industry, I believe the most appropriate classification for wireless telecommunications equipment is as ``qualified technological equipment'' with a 5-year depreciable life. The bill I am introducing with my colleague from Arkansas would make this important clarification to the tax laws. I look forward to working with my colleagues to enact my legislation that will provide more rational tax-treatment of wireless telecommunications equipment. By so doing, we will take an incremental step toward modernizing the Tax Code's outdated depreciation rules.

Mr. NICKLES

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation to clarify the tax rules governing the depreciation of wireless telecommunications equipment. I am joined by my distinguished colleague from Arkansas, Mrs. Lincoln. Our current depreciation system, the Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System, MACRS, was last reformed in 1986. At that time, the wireless telecommunications industry was in its infancy. Therefore, wireless telecommunications equipment, which is primarily computer- based technology, was not assigned to a specific asset class. The IRS has provided only limited guidance with respect to the depreciation of wireless telecommunications equipment. In 1998, the IRS issued Technical Advice Memorandum, TAM, 98-25-03, which asserted that the classes of assets used to provide wireless telecommunications services are comparable to wireline telecommunications assets and, thus, should be assigned to wireline asset classes. The TAM concluded that mobile switching centers should be classified in the same asset class with computer-based telephone central office switching equipment, 5-year property. However, the TAM failed to take a clear position with regard to the classification of cell site equipment, so there is no practical guidance for IRS revenue agents or taxpayers to follow. Over the past decade, the IRS and wireless telecommunications companies have expended significant resources in audits and settlement disputes involving the depreciation of wireless telecommunications equipment. This has resulted in ad hoc, inconsistent, and costly case- by-case determinations of the appropriate class life for this equipment. It has created the current situation in which similarly situated companies are being treated differently, with some being required to depreciate their wireless telecommunications equipment over 5 years, and others over 10 years or longer. I believe Congress should act to clarify the depreciation rules for wireless telecommunications equipment to provide certainty to the IRS and the taxpayer, thereby putting an end to the costly dispute settlement process; to ensure a level playing field for taxpayers; and to provide fair tax-treatment of wireless telecommunications equipment. Given the nature of this equipment and the rapid technological advances in the wireless industry, I believe the most appropriate classification for wireless telecommunications equipment is as ``qualified technological equipment'' with a 5-year depreciable life. The bill I am introducing with my colleague from Arkansas would make this important clarification to the tax laws. I look forward to working with my colleagues to enact my legislation that will provide more rational tax-treatment of wireless telecommunications equipment. By so doing, we will take an incremental step toward modernizing the Tax Code's outdated depreciation rules.

Mr. NICKLES

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be authorized to meet to conduct a markup on Friday, April 11, 2003, at 10 a.m., in Dirksen Room 226. I. Nominations: J. Leon Holmes to be U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Arkansas; Susan G. Braden to be Judge for the Court of Federal Claims; Charles F. Lettow to be Judge for the Court of Federal Claims; Cecilia M. Altonaga to be United States District Judge for the Southern District of Florida; and Patricia Head Minaldi to be United States District Judge for the Western District of Louisiana II. Bills: S. 274--Class Action Fairness Act of 2003; S. 731--Secure Authentication Feature and Enhanced Identification Defense Act of 2003 (``SAFE ID ACT''); S. Res. 108--Designating April 21 through 27, 2003, as ``National Cowboy Poetry Week'' [Burns, Hatch, Reid, Brownback]; S. Res. 111--Designating April 30, 2003 as ``Dia de los Ninos: Celebrating Young Americans'' [Hatch]; and S.J. Res. 8--A joint resolution expressing the sense of Congress with respect to raising awareness and encouraging prevention of sexual assault in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month [Brownback, Biden, DeWine, Schumer].

Mr. NICKLES

Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, over the past few days we have seen dramatic proof that the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein is nearing its end. Like many Americans, I have been thrilled and heartened by the dramatic images of United States troops helping Iraqi citizens tear down statues and paintings of this brutal tyrant. For the first time in their lives, many Iraqis are tasting freedom, and it is beautiful. I am proud of our military and America's commitment to make the people of the Middle East more free. While our fighting men and women will surely face more difficult days ahead, the end of this war is in sight, and I rise to honor four men who made the ultimate sacrifice one can make for their country. One of them was a native Oklahoman, and three were adopted Oklahomans by virtue of their service at Fort Sill in Lawton. I consider each of them heroes. LCpl Thomas Alan Blair was Oklahoma's first known casualty in Operation Iraqi Freedom. This 24-year-old Broken Arrow native was killed on March 23 in a fierce battle near Nasiriyah when an enemy rocket propelled grenade hit his amphibious assault vehicle. Tommy graduated from Broken Arrow High School in 1997, but had decided long before then that he would be a marine. He chose his career nearly a decade ago when he watched his older brother, SSgt Al Blair, graduate from boot camp. In a way, he followed in his brothers's footsteps, but his family will tell you that he would have been a marine no matter what. ``He truly wanted to help people,'' said his brother. SFC Randall S. Rehn, 36, was a veteran of the first gulf war. His wife and baby daughter expected him to come home to Lawton in August. In his last known contact with his family, Rehn expressed his desire to come home quickly and his hope that ``this is the last time I'm leaving my family for so long.'' Friends testify that Randy's greatest passions in life were people, family, and friends. Randall Rehn died April 3 amid fierce fighting for control of what is now Baghdad International Airport. He is survived by his wife Raelynn and daughter Megan, of Lawton, as well as his family in Colorado. Two fellow members of his Multiple Launch Rocket System of C Battery, 3rd Battalion, 13th Field Infantry Regiment from Fort Sill died in the same fight: SGT Todd Robbins and SP Donald Oaks. One of eight brothers and sisters, Todd Robbins, 33, served in the Navy for the first gulf war before joining the Army. He leaves behind a wife at Fort Sill and a 13-year-old son. ``He always wanted to be in the Army,'' said his father Dale Robbins. ``He lived, ate, and slept the Army. He loved it.'' Donald Oaks would have turned 21 on April 26. He was a bright young man who was good at math and computers. Also, he enjoyed playing baseball and fishing with his dad. He joined the Army to get money for a college education after his service. His mother Laurie Oaks said, ``He was my best friend and was always my hero. He still is.'' He was engaged to be married. Tragically, the deaths of SGT Robbins and SP Oaks were said to be a result of friendly fire in the form of coalition bombs. While our military always works to prevent such accidents, they always occur during war fighting. The fact that their deaths were accidental in no way diminishes their sacrifice. They gave their lives to protect us, our freedoms, and to make people they had never met, half-way around the world, free in their own country. As reports from Iraq begin to tell the story of Iraqis enjoying their long- awaited freedom, it is important that we remember men like these who paid for that freedom with their blood. Before our troops so bravely put their lives on the line, there was no such freedom in Iraq. Iraqi citizens were subject to the cruel and brutal whims of a mad dictator. They lived every moment in the oppressive grip of a regime whose power knew no limits. They lived in fear with rape, torture, and murder always in their minds. Because LCpl Blair, SFC Rehn, SGT Robbins, and SP Oaks were willing to lay down their lives for freedom, many citizens of Iraq are awaking to a new day, and the world is now a safer place. As we watch the final days of Saddam Hussein's evil regime unfold, let us never forget that the freedom we enjoy every day in America is bought at a price. LCpl Blair, SFC Rehn, SGT Robbins, and SP Oaks did not die in vain. They died so that many others could live freely. And for that sacrifice, we are forever indebted. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families today and with the troops who are still fighting to liberate Iraq. Mr. President, I yield the floor.