Rick Santorum

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Will the Senator from Indiana tell me, were the Democrats who signed this conference report--my understanding was that a majority of the Democrats on the committee signed this conference report, is that correct?

Mr. SANTORUM. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. SANTORUM. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I want to say this bill was a long time coming. We have been hassling through a variety of different amendments. I want to thank Senator Leahy, Senator Kennedy, and others for their cooperation in finally getting this bill to pass. This is a bill that really is a tribute to a friend of mine and many here in this body, Bill Emerson, who recently passed away after a long bout with cancer. Bill did tremendous work in the area of nutrition on the Agriculture Committee in the House. This is a fitting tribute, a bill that will bear his name, that will provide much more food for food banks to be able to feed needy families all over this country. I am very proud to have been involved with this effort. Thank you, Mr. President. Mrs. HUTCHISON addressed the Chair.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the bill be deemed read the third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. SANTORUM. I ask unanimous consent the amendments be agreed, to en bloc.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of H.R. 2428, which is at the desk.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. I think the Senator has articulated the arguments on the merits very well. This is an appropriate remedy. I just ask the Senator from Minnesota if he has ever heard of the drug Daypro. It is a competing drug that had the same problems going through the FDA as Lodine, the same problems, the same delay. But in the 1996 omnibus appropriations bill, Daypro got an extension. I don't recall the Senator from Minnesota objecting to that extension, asking for that to be removed. But they got one, too. So what we have now is a competitive disadvantage. We have one company with a similar drug, a similar prescription, getting an extension and another drug with the same FDA problem not getting an extension. This is a health care bill. The Chair has ruled that it is within the scope of this bill. So I think what is going on here is, frankly, not a special interest, but simply a matter of fairness that we are trying to address. I think what has gone on here is really a lot of actions that--as the Senator said, this bill passed here in the Senate, passed in the House. It is not a new provision. It has had committee discussion. This thing is not anything new to any Member of this floor. We should have left it alone and created the fairness that this Senate acted on and the House acted on in the past. Again, I agree with the Senator from Minnesota, and I don't agree with sticking things in conference that weren't originally there. I understand that objection. But this is not a red herring proposal. This is a sound proposal. This is a fair approach, and I think we are going to see either this or, frankly, the repeal of the Daypro. One or the other is going to happen again sometime in the next couple of months.

Mr. SANTORUM. In that case, I will yield to the senior Senator from Pennsylvania.

Mr. SANTORUM. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I yield myself 15 minutes.

Mr. SANTORUM. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, I speak as someone who has worked on this issue for now 4 years. This is a very meaningful thing for me personally. But I think, as I look at this legislation and as I look at the process it has been through, I can't help but think what we are doing here is probably the most significant piece of social welfare legislation that we passed maybe since the mid-1960's, and I would even suggest possibly since the 1930's. So it is a very significant day. We are making monumental decisions here that are going to affect millions of people. I understand that the passions run very high on both sides of the aisle on how desperately we need these changes, as some suggest, and how erroneous these decisions are by others who oppose the bill. If I can for a moment, because I know there has been a lot of debate about why we need to make these changes and what the bill does or does not do, or should or should not do, let me talk for a minute as to how this bill got here. I think, if you look back at the genesis of this proposal, you have to go back to the House of Representatives. A task force was put together by Newt Gingrich, a task force on welfare reform when we were in the minority over in the House back in 1993. He asked me, as the ranking member on the Ways and Means Subcommittee of Human Resources, to chair a task force of members of the subcommittee and other people, including the former Governor of Delaware, Michael Castle, the Governor from Missouri, and a few others, to sit down and try to put together a bill that would follow through on ending welfare as we know it. We got all sorts of testimony from people. We talked to literally hundreds of people all over the country about the problems in the welfare system and listened to all of the experts and pseudoexperts on the issue of welfare--frankly, not just from conservatives but from across the spectrum--as to the pitfalls that we might encounter. Let me first state that this was an extraordinary thing to do. We actually took this very seriously. When you are in the minority, when you work on a major issue like this, most people do not pay much attention to what you do. ``You are not going to pass this bill. It is not going to become law.'' So there is sometimes a feeling, ``Well, let's just sort of put together what we can, sort of patch together some popular ideas, throw it out, and it will get a story for 1 day and no one will pay much attention to it after that.'' I can tell you that myself, Nancy Johnson, Clay Shaw, Michael Castle, and a whole lot of other folks who were in the House last term took this as a real serious responsibility. We met literally for, I think, 6 or 7 months, every week, hours upon hours each week, just over every single item in the legislation. It was a wonderful experience for me. But I think it was a great experience for all of us to see the real complexities of what we are dealing with. I think we got a real understanding of some of the concerns that Members have expressed here. We came out with a bill in November of 1993. It addressed for the first time issues like the paternal establishments which are in this bill. The provisions we wrote in this bill almost 3 years ago are almost identical. In fact, I suggest they maybe are identical to the provisions that are in the bill today that we addressed--the issue, for the first time ever, of immigration and benefits to legal aliens. It was the first time the bill had come up and addressed that issue. And those provisions are in this bill today. We addressed the issue of illegitimacy. Again, that was a word that, frankly, we were not supposed to use anymore. It was a politically incorrect word. You were supposed to use the word ``out-of-wedlock birth.'' We addressed that issue for the first time and really brought the attention of the welfare debate on this scourge in our Nation. I know it has been cited here before, but in 1965, the illegitimacy rate in this country was about 5 or 6 percent. Today a third of the children in this country are born out of wedlock. I am not saying that welfare is the sole cause of that. It certainly is not. But it certainly is a contributing factor, in my mind and, I think, in other people's minds. We were trying to come up with ideas, some of which were included, and, frankly, a lot were not. But we pushed the envelope for the first time. We put this in the forefront and made it an issue of debate. Yes; we had time limits on welfare. Yes; we had work requirements--real work requirements. And those time limits of 2 years without having to work and 5 years total on welfare are in this bill today. If you go back and look at that original draft, I think you are going to see a lot of similarities in child support enforcement and a whole host of other areas that are in the bill today. And I think it is a remarkable compliment to the men and women who worked in that group that their hard work, seemingly fruitless at the time because we were a minority, had absolutely no hope that we would ever be in the majority but cared enough--I think that is the point I am trying to make--we cared enough about this system and the destruction that the system was causing, we cared enough to spend hours and hours of time to put together a bill that we felt truly would change welfare and end the despair and the dependency that this system has created. So I congratulate my friends in the House who made a tremendous contribution to the original bill, and I congratulate others for the successor bills, the bills that were introduced in the Senate by Senator Packwood and in the House subsequently by Clay Shaw, who was a member of that original working group. They took the next logical step and moved the ball forward on a few issues, fell back a little bit on others, but that is how the legislative process works. We tried to meet the concerns of, frankly, both sides of the aisle. And I know when Senator Packwood, and then subsequently when Senator Roth took over the Finance Committee, we actually crafted a bill here on the Senate floor last year that got 87 votes and then recrafted another bill, very similar to the bill that passed last year, and got 74 votes, and I suspect we will get maybe even a few more than that this time around. They did the same thing in the House and continued to get more bipartisan support as we worked through some of the difficult issues of welfare reform. The core of those bills remains the same, and that is that we are going to do something about illegitimacy. There is an incentive now sponsored by Senator Abraham, one of the improvements to the bill, for States to reduce their illegitimacy rates, and there is a cash bonus for States that are able to reduce that statistic, that cruel statistic to children. And I say cruel because go through all of the evaluation criteria: Children who are born to single-parent households are more likely to be poor, are more likely to be on welfare, more likely to do poorer in school, more likely to be victims of crime. You can go on down the list. We are doing no favors to children when fathers are told that they are expendable. In the welfare system that we are creating here today, fathers are no longer expendable. Fathers are going to be required to be responsible for the children. Mothers are going to be required to cooperate with the Government in establishing paternity--two things that were in the original bill that we drafted 3 years ago that have stood the test of time and scrutiny in both Houses of Congress, because it is the right thing to do. We have stood up and said families are important under this bill. We have stood up and said communities are important. Senator Ashcroft, in another good addition to this bill, said that religious, civic, and nonprofit organizations in the local communities are going to be much more able to be part of the system of welfare, of support of the poor than they are today, are going to be eligible for more funds and more opportunities to help the poor, which they do much better, much more efficiently, but, frankly, even if they did not do it more efficiently, they do it more compassionately. They do it with love for their neighbors and the people in their communities, not out of some sense of duty because it is their job. We have changed welfare in this bill, and we have done it over a long process. Those who would suggest this is just something that was thrown together at the last minute before an election do not know the work, or either choose not to recognize the work that has been put into this bill, the time and the debate, the hours of the debate here on the floor and over in the House, in the conference committees, to try to come up with a carefully crafted bill that is truly compassionate and not compassionate in the sense that the Federal Government is going to go out and take care of every person's need who is poor. I think we have shown that that system is truly not compassionate because when the Federal Government comes in and takes care of every aspect or every need that even a child has, then the Federal Government, in fact, becomes the replacement for the others whose responsibility it truly should be to take care of that child. We have said to the father, again, you are not necessary. We have said to mothers, you do not have to work; we will provide--some distant bureaucrat will send a check to provide for you. That is not compassion. Compassion is having a system that builds families so there is an environment there for children to flourish. Compassion is a system that supports neighborhoods and civic organizations, mediating institutions that Dan Coats talks about so often that provide the values and community support for families that they need to help take care of children, to create the neighborhoods where children are no longer afraid to go out and play on the playground because they could step on some drug-infected needle. No, this bill is all about creating a community, creating a support network and environment at the level most important to that child as opposed to that bureaucrat sitting behind the bulletproof window passing out the check every month, saying to that person on the other end receiving that check that you, because of your poverty, are unable to provide for yourself and your children and you need to be dependent upon us for your life. The Senator from Arkansas said it is a tragedy that one in five children in this country are in poverty, and I agree it is a tragedy. And he said it is going to get worse. I suggest he is wrong. I suggest the tragedy is as bad as it is going to get, and there are plenty of organizations as a result of this bill that are going to get the opportunity to step forward, including the family. I feel very good about what we are doing here, and I would say, as my friend and colleague in the House, Clay Shaw, said many times, I am not suggesting this bill is perfect. I grant you this bill is not perfect. No bill is perfect. But I can guarantee you that this is a dramatic step forward that this country has asked for and is getting from a Congress that is listening. Yes, we will make mistakes. Unlike those who crafted the current system in the thirties and in the 1960's, we are going to be willing to come back here and look at those mistakes. We are going to be willing to come back and face those problems, because we understand, unlike those who crafted the last system, that we do not have all the answers here, that we do not have the omnipotence here to decide what is best for everyone. This is a grand experiment, one that we must take if we are going to save children in this country and, more importantly, to save the fabric of America for the next and future generations. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Mr. EXON addressed the Chair.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. In turn, under this section, grocers are expected to display or make available this information in whatever manner best works for that retail store.

Mr. SANTORUM. As we prepare to vote on H.R. 1627, I wish to seek clarification on the consumer right to know section if Chairman Lugar would be kind enough to respond.

Mr. SANTORUM. It is also my understanding under this section that a supermarket would not be held liable for any civil or criminal penalties in the event that the store were to be depleted of its supply of brochures or whatever information is provided by EPA, USDA, and FDA. Nor would a grocer be held liable or have products deemed misbranded if the information is not always available, or in the event the Government fails to provide the information to supermarkets.

Mr. SANTORUM. I appreciate this clarification on the consumer right to know section of the legislation.

Mr. SANTORUM. It is my understanding that under the consumer right to know section, the administrator of EPA in consultation with the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of Health and Human Services will develop and distribute to large retail grocers information relating to the risks and benefits of pesticide residues in or on food items that are purchased by consumers.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, the reason the market price is always above the quota price is because the peanut program is not just a price program, it is also a quota program. It limits the supply. So, of course, the Secretary tells peanut growers how much they can plant, and they tell them to make sure that the demand is always higher than the supply. Therefore, the price, yes, is always higher than the quota price because the program makes it that way. That is No. 1. With respect to these deficiency payments, I would be happy to meet in the back with the Senator from Alabama and would be very willing to get rid of the loan program that peanuts have and turn it into a target pricing scheme. I would love to do that. In fact, it has been offered many times to the peanut growers to do that, but they don't do that. Why? Because the system they have right now is so ridiculously lucrative, they would never opt for something like that. Peanut quota holders get twice--twice--per ton for their peanuts than what the world market price is. They get almost $700 a ton for their peanuts, and the world price is $350 a ton. No wonder they don't want to go to a target pricing scheme or some other scheme. They have the best deal in town. What we want to do is say, ``OK, you've got the best deal in town.'' I can't beat him. The Senator from Alabama, bless his heart, whops me every time I come to the floor on this amendment. I say, if we are going to have this program, at least limit the benefits to the folks who deserve the benefits, and that is the small- and medium-size farmers. Quit subsidizing, to the tune of--and there is a farm out there that gets $6 million of guaranteed prices, twice what the world market is for peanuts. Now, is that what we want to do? Is that what this program is all about? It certainly is not what the arguments of the folks who support the peanut program are all about. What they say it is all about is helping these small farmers, these poor dirt farmers in rural areas that really need this to make ends meet. Fine, this is not going to bother them. Mr. President, $125,000 is not a small dirt farmer. That is about 150 to 200 acres. What we are talking about here are the big guys, less than 2,000. I remind Senators that 22 percent of the quota holders in peanuts own 80 percent of the quotas--22 percent, a little over 6,000 quota holders own 80 percent of the poundage for peanuts. The big guys are what drive this program, who lobby here, who contribute the money. What I am saying is let's get these big guys out of the picture and let them divest from some of these quotas they hold and spread it around a little bit, give it to some of these additional growers who are dirt farmers who don't get a lot of money for their peanuts, let them have a little bit of it.

Mr. SANTORUM. I ask unanimous consent for my additional 30 seconds.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, the second amendment we will be voting on today is not a peanut amendment. It is an ethics amendment. It has nothing to do with the peanut program. It does not change the peanut program. It does not retroactively or prospectively alter anything in the peanut program. This is an ethics amendment. This amendment is very simple. It says the people who are the quota holders, the people who benefit from the program, should not also be the people who manage the program, who operate the program, who help promulgate regulations to oversee the program, who also do the enforcement for the program. That is virtually unprecedented in ag policy. I am not changing anything in the peanut program with this amendment, not one thing. All I am saying is the Secretary of Agriculture--this is what the amendment says--the Secretary of Agriculture shall determine whether these co-ops who oversee the program, who also are the beneficiaries of the program, violate the Federal ethics law. That is all this amendment says. That is not a change in the peanut program. That is just saying we should have some ethics in dealing with this issue. There have already been letters filed, to the Secretary of Agriculture, back on June 5 requesting the Secretary to take action. The Secretary has not responded. What we are suggesting is the Secretary should respond. They should make a determination whether these co-ops, that--again I remind my colleagues--they oversee the program, they enforce the program, they help promulgate regulations on the program, and they are also the beneficiaries of the program. That is apparent, to me, a conflict of interest. But I am not suggesting that. I am not saying that it is. I am saying the Secretary should determine it. That is all this amendment does. So we can have all this debate, as I am sure you will hear from others that this is an amendment that hurts the peanut program, that changes the rules of the game halfway through--it is just not the case. The case is this is an ethics amendment about how the Federal Government should run its ag programs and I hope we could get very strong support for something that is, I think, a relatively simple amendment that I was hoping we could have agreed to. Amendment No. 4995 The first amendment I am going to talk about is another equity amendment. This is an amendment that simply says that peanut quota holders, unlike any other ag commodity, should be limited as to the amount of Government largess that they receive. Historically, all of the other crop programs, and now in the future all the other payments to farmers under the new freedom to farm bill, are limited to $40,000 per person. There is no limit in the peanut program. There are peanut farmers who can put their peanuts on loan and collect $6 million from the Federal Government. And we are saying they should be limited to $125,000. The limit on the subsidy payments to all other crops is up to $40,000. I am saying $125,000. That affects less than 2,000 quota holders. Mr. President, 2,000 quota holders are affected by this, the wealthiest, the biggest. If you hear the argument, as you will from the other side: Wait a minute, this program is designed to help these small- to medium-size peanut growers who are really struggling, who are in poor areas--fine. We do not touch them. All we say is those who are the big quota holders, many of whom do not even farm their own land, they rent their quota to someone else to do the work for them--what we are saying is they can only avail themselves of the largess of getting twice what the world pays for peanuts for their peanuts up to $125,000. I think that is, again, a very minor adjustment to the program. I will admit that is an adjustment to who benefits from the program. But we do not fundamentally restructure the peanut program here. All we are doing is redefining how much people can benefit from it. We do not change the program. We just change how much people benefit from it. I think $125,000 of guaranteed income from the Federal Government at twice the rate of what people will get paid everyplace else in the world for peanuts, is a pretty good deal for most of these quota holders and they should be happy with that limitation. I yield the floor.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, let these little guys get a little piece of the pie here. If you are really for the small- and medium-size peanut farmer in Alabama or Georgia, then what you want to do is you want these folks to divest from these big quotas and start spreading it around a little bit for the little guys to have a bite of the Federal largess. If we are going to have a Federal largess, at least let more people benefit from it, let the little guy benefit. That is what this amendment does, this is a vote for the little guy. It actually will expand your base of support for the program and more will benefit from it.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, this is a very simple amendment that has nothing to do with the peanut program. This does not change the peanut program at all. This actually does not change anything in law. All this amendment does is ask the Secretary of Agriculture to determine whether the regulatory body that oversees the peanut program is in violation of the Government ethics statute. That is all this amendment does. Why do I ask the Secretary to do that? The reason I ask the Secretary to do that is, unlike virtually any other agriculture commodity program, the folks who oversee the program, who manage the loan policies, who help promulgate the regulations, the very same people who regulate this program, who enforce the program, who actually impose penalties on the quota holders are, themselves, the quota holders. The people who benefit from the program run the program. That is unlike any other program, with the exception of one, in this country. What we want to do is simply ask the Secretary of Agriculture to examine the applicable Federal statutes to determine whether there is a conflict of interest here, and then take action. Frankly, the reason I am here on the floor with this amendment, some additional growers out West in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and a lot of other places, had asked the Secretary to make this determination 2 months ago. They asked him in a letter. He has not responded to that letter. So what we are trying to do is say, Mr. Secretary, let us look and see if there is a conflict of interest. We do not prejudge it. We ask them to examine to see whether this is a proper setup for the regulation of this program. It does not change the program. It does not alter it in midstream. It simply asks the Secretary to take a look at a potential conflict of interest. I hope we can get very strong support for this. Mr. HEFLIN addressed the Chair.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I move to table the Graham amendment and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I just say to the Senator from Alabama that my amendment merely says if the Secretary of Agriculture determines, using standards established to carry out title II of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, that a member of the Board of Directors of the association has a conflict of interest with respect to the program. You say that is something informally being done. If we have an agreement here, I would be happy to move the amendment and, hopefully, we can adopt it by consent.