Arlen Specter

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Yes, it is the intention of the committee to concur with the House report language concerning a name change.

Mr. SPECTER. Yes, I would.

Mr. SPECTER. The recent review by a panel of experts of the Centers for Disease Control's past work and future direction in CFIDS was a significant step forward in the Federal response to CFIDS. The committee applauds that initiative and urges the CDC to carry out the recommendations expeditiously.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Finally, I now turn to the introduction of legislation. I ask this be under a separate heading in morning business.

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I wish to comment briefly on a report on damage to United States troops from exposure to Iraqi poison gas back in 1991 during the gulf war. This is a subject on which there was a joint hearing earlier this week, on Wednesday, of the Intelligence Committee, which I chair, and the Veterans Affairs Committee, on which I serve, chaired by Senator Alan Simpson. During the course of those hearings, we heard from the chief medical officer of the Department of Defense, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, as well as representatives from the CIA and the Veterans Administration. The views expressed by Senators on both sides of the aisle were that the Department of Defense had not done nearly enough to respond to the ailments which came out of that exposure to Iraqi chemical warfare agents. There were those, principally Senator Simpson, who made the point in his customary strong way that the evidence was inconclusive, saying that people had not shown the effects of the poisonous gas immediately and that would have happened if there had really been a problem, and was in defense of the Department of Defense. Virtually every other Senator--and I think some 14 attended, from both sides of the aisle--was very critical of what the Department of Defense had done. And perhaps no one was more critical than Senator Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat, on the Veterans' Affairs Committee. He has sent a letter, which I was about to cosign but could not quite review fast enough on Thursday, over to the Pentagon and Secretary Perry asking for more action. In that letter, Senator Rockefeller was very explicit about what the Department of Defense had not done in acting on the complaints of the service men and women in the area. This morning the Washington Post has a story, page A18, which I will ask to be made a part of the Record as if read in full, which is headlined ``Pentagon Alters Stand on Gulf War Testing.'' The second paragraph--almost completely reversing comments made at a Pentagon briefing Thursday, that is, the day after our hearing--says that our troops were not told the drug was being used on an investigational basis and might have side effects, but said that information was not deliberately withheld from them. Mr. President, it is a little hard at this stage to say that where you have withheld some key facts, it was not deliberate. After all, why wouldn't people on whom the drug was being used on an investigational basis be told? How can you say it is not deliberate if you do not tell people that they are, in effect, guinea pigs or not tell them that it might have side effects. Any person is entitled as a matter of fundamental fairness to know that. How can you subject someone to a drug testing without them being told that? It is more than a little incomprehensible. The article then goes on to say: ``On Capitol Hill, Senator John D. ``Jay'' Rockefeller called on Defense Secretary William J. Perry to fire the Pentagon's top health official.'' Saying that the Department of Defense had squandered its credibility, which is a conclusion reached by the staff of a Presidential commission which I brought out at last Wednesday's hearing. Then the article concludes by noting that Secretary of Defense Perry and Deputy Secretary of Defense John D. White ``continue to have the full and utmost confidence'' in the health leadership at the Department of Defense and that no ``health changes'' in ``health leadership are being contemplated.'' That, of course, again is a little surprising in the context that Secretary Perry could not conceivably have had an opportunity to review the Senate hearing since he has been at a NATO meeting. And when we have a hearing like that and many Senators are present and express themselves and facts are brought out, one would at least think that the Secretary of Defense would review the matter, or the Deputy Secretary also could not have had an opportunity to go through the complex matters which were raised at that time. I ask unanimous consent a copy of this Washington Post article be printed in the Congressional Record.

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Texas for yielding me the additional 3 minutes. She had been presiding and has been waiting now to speak, and I will conclude briefly. THE PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania is recognized. MR. SPECTER. I thank the Chair. (The remarks of Mr. Specter pertaining to the introduction of S. 2154 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Mr. SPECTER. I ask unanimous consent for 3 additional minutes, Mr. President.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, Pennsylvania is proud to host some of the world's most innovative pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device and health care product companies. The United States, of course, is the world's leader. These companies are developing the new medicines and new products that are extending and improving life for people around the world. Current law often unnecessarily slows the introduction of new technologies and new medicines and increases costs to producers, and therefore, ultimately, to consumers. I have consulted with consumer and other patient advocacy representatives, as well as pharmaceutical manufacturers and the biotechnology industry, in an effort to gather sufficiently diverse and constructive suggestions for meaningfully addressing this problem. While this is certainly an issue critical to Pennsylvania's economic future, it is most of all a critical issue for our citizens who suffer from costly and debilitating conditions for which no adequate drug therapies exist today, including Alzheimer's, AIDS, heart disease, cancer, et cetera. We cannot, and should not, keep these patients waiting any longer than absolutely necessary. We have a very basic problem in America about research expenditures for drugs that benefit sick people. These drugs benefit everybody, particularly the elderly and the young. We need medical research. We need these wonder drugs to be produced. It is a matter of fairness as to how we are going to compensate those who produce them. If we are to have these drugs for consumers, we will have to be able to pay for them. If we are to have the kind of research, productivity, and the great miraculous advances in medical science, we are simply going to have to ensure a reasonable rate of return on the patent period. The purpose of the legislation I am introducing today, the Pharmaceutical Equity Act of 1996, is to provide a one-time adjustment to the patent terms of certain drugs that received unfair treatment as a result of the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984 (the Hatch-Waxman Act). Where applicable, these drugs would receive a 2-year extension of their patent terms. My legislation is intended to provide regulatory relief on a principled basis, as opposed to a piecemeal effort to address these concerns. Under the Hatch-Waxman Act, Congress provided patent term extensions to restore part of the patent lives of drugs that were lost due to approval time lags at the FDA. The Hatch-Waxman Act provides up to 5- year extensions for most drugs. However, the statute also limited the patent term extension to 2 years for any drugs that had already begun clinical trials before September 24, 1984, and for which a patent had already been issued. Drugs falling into this category are often referred to as the pipeline drugs because they were in the regulatory pipeline at the FDA upon enactment of the Hatch-Waxman Act. In making the distinction between pipeline drugs and other drugs in 1984, Congress believed that pipeline drugs would receive FDA approval shortly after 1984 and would not require lengthy patent term extensions. Although FDA approval times improved generally, for several drugs the delays were inordinantly long, in some cases involving over 10 years of FDA review time. As a result, these drugs lost critical portions of their patent terms. Therefore, the limited 2-year Hatch- Waxman patent extension for these drugs simply does not adequately compensate these companies for the lengthy regulatory delays incurred, particularly when other similarly situated companies with non-pipeline drugs could receive patent extensions as long as 5 years for such delays. The Pharmaceutical Equity Act covers any pipeline drug patent where the New Drug Application [NDA] for the drug was reviewed by the FDA for more than 5 years and where the total review time at the FDA, which includes the clinical trials for investigational new drugs [IND], exceeded 10 years. This limited extension period would thus only apply in those egregious cases where FDA approval times far exceeded average approval delays for other drugs. Even if granted, the additional patent extension would also still be less than the maximum 5-year extension allowable for post-pipeline drugs suffering FDA delays. This legislation is not intended to grant an extension to scores of drug patents. Rather, it will only apply in limited circumstances where FDA delays were inordinate long. One of the fundamental powers assigned to Congress under article I, section 8 of the Constitution, is the power to promote the progress of science by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their discoveries. This is a power which carries with it a tremendous obligation. In the pharmaceutical arena, for example, this obligation includes the need to ensure that our laws encourage the development of life- saving and life-enhancing new drugs and technologies. My legislation fulfills this obligation by providing equitable treatment for pharmaceutical innovators, including the appropriate degree of market incentives for new innovation. Unless we have an equitable system of patent protection, including a mechanism for remedying delays by the FDA which deprive patent holders of their full patent terms, we will undermine the very incentives the law intends to give to research and development companies that undertake the enormously expensive and risky process of searching for the wonder cures of tomorrow. There should be no misunderstanding about the source of drug innovation. The vast majority of new drugs are discovered and developed by private for-profit research-based pharmaceutical companies. Incredibly, 90 percent of FDA-approved drugs that consumers use for every type of disease, from cholera to cancer, were first synthesized by private industry. A recent survey by the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturer's Association [PhRMA] shows that research-based pharmaceutical companies are in the process of developing 215 drugs for over 20 different types of cancer. There is also an enormous research and development effort aimed at combating AIDS and AIDS-related conditions, with more than 110 products at various stages of development. Many more medicines for a wide range of diseases and human afflictions are also being developed, including 132 drugs for major diseases of aging, 118 for neurological disorders, 107 for heart disease and strokes, and 64 for mental illness. The list for other major medical ailments is virtually endless. Such innovation does not come cheaply. A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group found that pharmaceutical companies expend approximately $500 million and 15 years bringing a new drug to market. These innovative drug research companies will spend nearly $16 billion in research and development costs this year. That is more than the entire government budget for biomedical research, and represents an increase of 9.6 percent over 1995 levels. These pharmaceutical companies spend an average of almost 20 percent of their income from sales on research. Part of this research and development expense is due to the complexity of the diseases being fought--for every 6,000 new drugs that are researched and developed, only a single drug emerges as an approved new product. A large portion of the expense, however, is also due to the sheer volume and duration of FDA approval requirements for safety and efficacy. New drug applications by pharmaceutical innovators typically require hundreds of thousands of pages of information and years of clinical trials to complete. The time required to complete the clinical trials for new drugs has ballooned from an average of 2.5 years in the 1960's to nearly 6 years in the 1990's. The high cost of drug development and the limited numbers of drugs that receive approval and actually are available to the public combine to create a system where the few successful drugs must pay for all the research and development expended on those drugs that did not succeed. More significant from a consumer standpoint, however, these successful drugs provide profits and incentives which support the research and development of the new cures for the diseases of tomorrow. Apart from the immeasurable benefits people around the world enjoy from improved health and the new cures made possible by pharmaceutical innovation, we must also realize that the pharmaceutical producers themselves provide great economic benefits to communities across the United States. One of these benefits is through high-paying, quality jobs. Recent data indicate that pharmaceutical companies employ over 33,000 people in my State of Pennsylvania. Nationally, these companies provide over 150,000 jobs. A large portion of these jobs are scientific jobs in research and development, exactly the types of jobs we are trying to create to maintain American competitiveness in a global marketplace. Another economic benefit is through expanded exports. In 1994, the U.S. exported $7.565 billion in pharmaceutical products around the world. Use of proper drug treatments can also save consumers and the government millions if not billions of dollars every year. Experts have calculated that pharmaceutical products are often far more cost- effective at treating disease than alternative treatments such as surgery or hospitalization. Several examples illustrate just how much money families can save through drug therapy in particular circumstances. Cancer patients whose immune systems are weakened by chemotherapy have been helped by a drug containing a colony stimulating factor. The treatment saves $30,000 per patient in hospitalization costs for bone marrow transplants. For heart disease, a New England Journal of Medicine study showed that patients on ACE inhibitor drugs for heart failure avoided nearly $9,000 per patient in hospitalization costs over a 3-year period. Nationwide, the potential savings from these drug treatments are up to $2 billion per year. More importantly, however, the drug also reduced patient deaths by over 15 percent. Drug therapy for schizophrenia, according to a 1990 study, has enabled many patients to receive treatment in nonhospital settings. Although annual drug costs for such treatment are approximately $4,500, the savings are tremendous when compared with annual costs of over $73,000 for treatment in state mental hospitals. Post-surgical recuperation is another area where the use of immuno- suppressive drugs has improved the effectiveness of treatment and reduced costs. In organ transplants, for example, success rates were dramatically higher with the use of these drugs. One drug was found to reduce average hospital stays by as much as 10 days, and also reduced re-hospitalizations after surgery. In the case of ulcers, the advent of antacids and other products have led to a decline in surgeries from 97,000 in 1977 to 19,000 in 1987. The annual cost of drug therapy for each patient amounted to $900, versus approximately $28,000 for surgery. In the aggregate, use of these antacids and other products reduced medical costs by approximately $224 million per year. The evidence is irrefutable about the tremendous benefit our society enjoys, from the physiological to the financial, from pharmaceutical innovation. Without a strong and fair patent system which provides the necessary incentives to continue this innovation, we will lose these benefits. The Pharmaceutical Equity Act, with its narrowly-targeted fix of an unanticipated problem, will take an important step toward restoring the equity and incentives to ensure that we enjoy those benefits for many years to come. Mr. President, to reiterate, this legislation would provide fairness to pharmaceutical companies which research and develop lifesaving and health-improving pharmaceutical products. I am offering this legislation, and I do so at the very end of the legislative session. The point of this legislation is to deal with the problem which arises when the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] delays approval on patented pharmaceutical products for sometimes as long as 17 years, 11 years, very lengthy periods of time. As I said earlier, these delays affect not only the companies which produce these drugs, but they also affect the consumers--people suffering from heart ailments, schizophrenia, ulcers, AIDS, Alzheimer's disease--the whole panoply of ailments that are affected when these products are not brought to market. It takes $500 million and 15 years to bring a new drug to market, and out of every 6,000 drugs subjected to research and development, only one new product is produced. In 1996 alone, some $16 billion will be spent in private investments by the pharmaceutical industry. I speak as a U.S. Senator, because it is a national issue. I also speak as a Pennsylvania Senator, where we have so many companies in my State which are involved in developing and producing new pharmaceutical products. Quite a number of Senators have expressed an interest in cosponsoring this legislation, but we have not had a chance to work through all the details. I wanted to put it in the Record at this time so it may be considered on all sides, by consumer groups, by the pharmaceutical industry and by my colleagues. I do so in the wake of a contentious issue which was raised on a product called Lodine, manufactured by my constituent, American Home Products, in a place I visited recently in the Philadelphia suburbs. The extension was added for Lodine in a way that was not known to the managers of the recent health reform bill and was stricken on the floor of the Senate. Some had contended that it was done secretly. I said at that time that I was not a party to that and would not be a party to that and, in fact, had raised this issue in a public way in the Agriculture appropriations conference report. What should be done is this issue should be tackled in a principled way by considering, not simply one product, but by considering the industry as a whole. This legislation seeks to advance and extend the patent time for some 2 years, not 5 years, which is present under other circumstances by Hatch-Waxman, but for a more limited period of only 2 years. This is a matter of enormous importance to consumers. My record of protecting consumer interests is second to none in the U.S. Congress. In looking out for the protection and encouragement of pharmaceutical advances, I have the consumers at the top of the list. That is what the advances are for--for people to extend lives and to save lives. If we are to have these products, we are going to have to have a return on the enormous capital investment. When market approval on a patented drug is delayed for as long as 17 years, 11 years, other protracted periods of time, these products simply cannot be produced. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full text of my bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, Pennsylvania is proud to host some of the world's most innovative pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device and health care product companies. The United States, of course, is the world's leader. These companies are developing the new medicines and new products that are extending and improving life for people around the world. Current law often unnecessarily slows the introduction of new technologies and new medicines and increases costs to producers, and therefore, ultimately, to consumers. I have consulted with consumer and other patient advocacy representatives, as well as pharmaceutical manufacturers and the biotechnology industry, in an effort to gather sufficiently diverse and constructive suggestions for meaningfully addressing this problem. While this is certainly an issue critical to Pennsylvania's economic future, it is most of all a critical issue for our citizens who suffer from costly and debilitating conditions for which no adequate drug therapies exist today, including Alzheimer's, AIDS, heart disease, cancer, et cetera. We cannot, and should not, keep these patients waiting any longer than absolutely necessary. We have a very basic problem in America about research expenditures for drugs that benefit sick people. These drugs benefit everybody, particularly the elderly and the young. We need medical research. We need these wonder drugs to be produced. It is a matter of fairness as to how we are going to compensate those who produce them. If we are to have these drugs for consumers, we will have to be able to pay for them. If we are to have the kind of research, productivity, and the great miraculous advances in medical science, we are simply going to have to ensure a reasonable rate of return on the patent period. The purpose of the legislation I am introducing today, the Pharmaceutical Equity Act of 1996, is to provide a one-time adjustment to the patent terms of certain drugs that received unfair treatment as a result of the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984 (the Hatch-Waxman Act). Where applicable, these drugs would receive a 2-year extension of their patent terms. My legislation is intended to provide regulatory relief on a principled basis, as opposed to a piecemeal effort to address these concerns. Under the Hatch-Waxman Act, Congress provided patent term extensions to restore part of the patent lives of drugs that were lost due to approval time lags at the FDA. The Hatch-Waxman Act provides up to 5- year extensions for most drugs. However, the statute also limited the patent term extension to 2 years for any drugs that had already begun clinical trials before September 24, 1984, and for which a patent had already been issued. Drugs falling into this category are often referred to as the pipeline drugs because they were in the regulatory pipeline at the FDA upon enactment of the Hatch-Waxman Act. In making the distinction between pipeline drugs and other drugs in 1984, Congress believed that pipeline drugs would receive FDA approval shortly after 1984 and would not require lengthy patent term extensions. Although FDA approval times improved generally, for several drugs the delays were inordinantly long, in some cases involving over 10 years of FDA review time. As a result, these drugs lost critical portions of their patent terms. Therefore, the limited 2-year Hatch- Waxman patent extension for these drugs simply does not adequately compensate these companies for the lengthy regulatory delays incurred, particularly when other similarly situated companies with non-pipeline drugs could receive patent extensions as long as 5 years for such delays. The Pharmaceutical Equity Act covers any pipeline drug patent where the New Drug Application [NDA] for the drug was reviewed by the FDA for more than 5 years and where the total review time at the FDA, which includes the clinical trials for investigational new drugs [IND], exceeded 10 years. This limited extension period would thus only apply in those egregious cases where FDA approval times far exceeded average approval delays for other drugs. Even if granted, the additional patent extension would also still be less than the maximum 5-year extension allowable for post-pipeline drugs suffering FDA delays. This legislation is not intended to grant an extension to scores of drug patents. Rather, it will only apply in limited circumstances where FDA delays were inordinate long. One of the fundamental powers assigned to Congress under article I, section 8 of the Constitution, is the power to promote the progress of science by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their discoveries. This is a power which carries with it a tremendous obligation. In the pharmaceutical arena, for example, this obligation includes the need to ensure that our laws encourage the development of life- saving and life-enhancing new drugs and technologies. My legislation fulfills this obligation by providing equitable treatment for pharmaceutical innovators, including the appropriate degree of market incentives for new innovation. Unless we have an equitable system of patent protection, including a mechanism for remedying delays by the FDA which deprive patent holders of their full patent terms, we will undermine the very incentives the law intends to give to research and development companies that undertake the enormously expensive and risky process of searching for the wonder cures of tomorrow. There should be no misunderstanding about the source of drug innovation. The vast majority of new drugs are discovered and developed by private for-profit research-based pharmaceutical companies. Incredibly, 90 percent of FDA-approved drugs that consumers use for every type of disease, from cholera to cancer, were first synthesized by private industry. A recent survey by the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturer's Association [PhRMA] shows that research-based pharmaceutical companies are in the process of developing 215 drugs for over 20 different types of cancer. There is also an enormous research and development effort aimed at combating AIDS and AIDS-related conditions, with more than 110 products at various stages of development. Many more medicines for a wide range of diseases and human afflictions are also being developed, including 132 drugs for major diseases of aging, 118 for neurological disorders, 107 for heart disease and strokes, and 64 for mental illness. The list for other major medical ailments is virtually endless. Such innovation does not come cheaply. A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group found that pharmaceutical companies expend approximately $500 million and 15 years bringing a new drug to market. These innovative drug research companies will spend nearly $16 billion in research and development costs this year. That is more than the entire government budget for biomedical research, and represents an increase of 9.6 percent over 1995 levels. These pharmaceutical companies spend an average of almost 20 percent of their income from sales on research. Part of this research and development expense is due to the complexity of the diseases being fought--for every 6,000 new drugs that are researched and developed, only a single drug emerges as an approved new product. A large portion of the expense, however, is also due to the sheer volume and duration of FDA approval requirements for safety and efficacy. New drug applications by pharmaceutical innovators typically require hundreds of thousands of pages of information and years of clinical trials to complete. The time required to complete the clinical trials for new drugs has ballooned from an average of 2.5 years in the 1960's to nearly 6 years in the 1990's. The high cost of drug development and the limited numbers of drugs that receive approval and actually are available to the public combine to create a system where the few successful drugs must pay for all the research and development expended on those drugs that did not succeed. More significant from a consumer standpoint, however, these successful drugs provide profits and incentives which support the research and development of the new cures for the diseases of tomorrow. Apart from the immeasurable benefits people around the world enjoy from improved health and the new cures made possible by pharmaceutical innovation, we must also realize that the pharmaceutical producers themselves provide great economic benefits to communities across the United States. One of these benefits is through high-paying, quality jobs. Recent data indicate that pharmaceutical companies employ over 33,000 people in my State of Pennsylvania. Nationally, these companies provide over 150,000 jobs. A large portion of these jobs are scientific jobs in research and development, exactly the types of jobs we are trying to create to maintain American competitiveness in a global marketplace. Another economic benefit is through expanded exports. In 1994, the U.S. exported $7.565 billion in pharmaceutical products around the world. Use of proper drug treatments can also save consumers and the government millions if not billions of dollars every year. Experts have calculated that pharmaceutical products are often far more cost- effective at treating disease than alternative treatments such as surgery or hospitalization. Several examples illustrate just how much money families can save through drug therapy in particular circumstances. Cancer patients whose immune systems are weakened by chemotherapy have been helped by a drug containing a colony stimulating factor. The treatment saves $30,000 per patient in hospitalization costs for bone marrow transplants. For heart disease, a New England Journal of Medicine study showed that patients on ACE inhibitor drugs for heart failure avoided nearly $9,000 per patient in hospitalization costs over a 3-year period. Nationwide, the potential savings from these drug treatments are up to $2 billion per year. More importantly, however, the drug also reduced patient deaths by over 15 percent. Drug therapy for schizophrenia, according to a 1990 study, has enabled many patients to receive treatment in nonhospital settings. Although annual drug costs for such treatment are approximately $4,500, the savings are tremendous when compared with annual costs of over $73,000 for treatment in state mental hospitals. Post-surgical recuperation is another area where the use of immuno- suppressive drugs has improved the effectiveness of treatment and reduced costs. In organ transplants, for example, success rates were dramatically higher with the use of these drugs. One drug was found to reduce average hospital stays by as much as 10 days, and also reduced re-hospitalizations after surgery. In the case of ulcers, the advent of antacids and other products have led to a decline in surgeries from 97,000 in 1977 to 19,000 in 1987. The annual cost of drug therapy for each patient amounted to $900, versus approximately $28,000 for surgery. In the aggregate, use of these antacids and other products reduced medical costs by approximately $224 million per year. The evidence is irrefutable about the tremendous benefit our society enjoys, from the physiological to the financial, from pharmaceutical innovation. Without a strong and fair patent system which provides the necessary incentives to continue this innovation, we will lose these benefits. The Pharmaceutical Equity Act, with its narrowly-targeted fix of an unanticipated problem, will take an important step toward restoring the equity and incentives to ensure that we enjoy those benefits for many years to come. Mr. President, to reiterate, this legislation would provide fairness to pharmaceutical companies which research and develop lifesaving and health-improving pharmaceutical products. I am offering this legislation, and I do so at the very end of the legislative session. The point of this legislation is to deal with the problem which arises when the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] delays approval on patented pharmaceutical products for sometimes as long as 17 years, 11 years, very lengthy periods of time. As I said earlier, these delays affect not only the companies which produce these drugs, but they also affect the consumers--people suffering from heart ailments, schizophrenia, ulcers, AIDS, Alzheimer's disease--the whole panoply of ailments that are affected when these products are not brought to market. It takes $500 million and 15 years to bring a new drug to market, and out of every 6,000 drugs subjected to research and development, only one new product is produced. In 1996 alone, some $16 billion will be spent in private investments by the pharmaceutical industry. I speak as a U.S. Senator, because it is a national issue. I also speak as a Pennsylvania Senator, where we have so many companies in my State which are involved in developing and producing new pharmaceutical products. Quite a number of Senators have expressed an interest in cosponsoring this legislation, but we have not had a chance to work through all the details. I wanted to put it in the Record at this time so it may be considered on all sides, by consumer groups, by the pharmaceutical industry and by my colleagues. I do so in the wake of a contentious issue which was raised on a product called Lodine, manufactured by my constituent, American Home Products, in a place I visited recently in the Philadelphia suburbs. The extension was added for Lodine in a way that was not known to the managers of the recent health reform bill and was stricken on the floor of the Senate. Some had contended that it was done secretly. I said at that time that I was not a party to that and would not be a party to that and, in fact, had raised this issue in a public way in the Agriculture appropriations conference report. What should be done is this issue should be tackled in a principled way by considering, not simply one product, but by considering the industry as a whole. This legislation seeks to advance and extend the patent time for some 2 years, not 5 years, which is present under other circumstances by Hatch-Waxman, but for a more limited period of only 2 years. This is a matter of enormous importance to consumers. My record of protecting consumer interests is second to none in the U.S. Congress. In looking out for the protection and encouragement of pharmaceutical advances, I have the consumers at the top of the list. That is what the advances are for--for people to extend lives and to save lives. If we are to have these products, we are going to have to have a return on the enormous capital investment. When market approval on a patented drug is delayed for as long as 17 years, 11 years, other protracted periods of time, these products simply cannot be produced. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full text of my bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Madam President, I would like to make some brief comments on the escalating problems in the Mideast, with the Israeli- Palestinian clashes which have been on the front pages, and which have been on the television screens, and my urging of parties on all sides to accelerate negotiations, because I am personally convinced that the bloodshed can be brought to a conclusion and that the peace process can move forward if the parties return to the bargaining table--and return to those pictures which are so meaningful of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestine Chairman Yasser Arafat shaking hands and talking out their problems. I make this recommendation having been in Israel last month and having had a chance to talk with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat. I am convinced that both of those leaders do want peace. And, candidly, it has been a tough time, watching Chairman Arafat honored on the White House lawn back on September 13, 1993. But my view is that now that the Israelis, who have been the chief victims of PLO terrorism, have welcomed Chairman Arafat, I think we in the United States should do what we can to promote the peace process. Prime Minister Netanyahu is new at the job but a man of tremendous abilities--substantial experience generally, but limited experience as Prime Minister. After talking to Prime Minister Netanyahu, I know that he wants to work out the issues--they are complicated. There is Hebron, where there are Jewish settlers, and the issue is, what will the degree of Palestinian control be. There is Jerusalem, which is the Holy City and in which the controversy has arisen over the tunnel. And there are so many corollary problems such as the closure of the borders to Israel, an act Israel took for very strong security reasons but which is causing very substantial economic losses to the Palestinians. I think the administration has done a good job there with the work of Dennis Ross, as a de facto roving ambassador, talking to the parties and trying to work through the issues. That is a matter which I think requires expedited assistance from the U.S. Government and others to try to bring those parties back to the conference table, to try to work out their problems, to try to stop the fighting and the bloodshed, and to move the peace process ahead. While the Palestinian-Israeli problems are taking the front pages, the Syrian-Israeli problems still are very prominent, with the Syrians still undertaking military maneuvers which may threaten Israel. I had an opportunity to discuss those issues when I was in the area last month with Syrian President Assad and also with Prime Minister Netanyahu. In fact, I carried two messages from Prime Minister Netanyahu to President Assad. One was on the subject of Israel's interest in cooling the contentiousness on the southern Lebanon border, where Prime Minister Netanyahu had publicly said that Syria would be held responsible for the Hezbolla attacks on northern Israel. President Assad's response was that those military maneuvers were not with hostile intent but were really of a routine nature. Whether that is exactly so or not, that process has to be moved forward. Prime Minister Netanyahu asked me further to convey the message that he personally would engage in the negotiations, leaving, of course, the option to President Assad as to whether he would or would not so participate. But there again I think the administration has done a good job. I think the roving de facto ambassador, Dennis Ross, has done a good job. Those matters have to be moved forward through the negotiation process. I urge the parties to move ahead there. It is difficult, obviously, for Prime Minister Netanyahu to be handling the Palestinian controversies at the same time, and they are on the front part of the front burner, but the Syrian negotiations have to be addressed as well.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. I thank the Chair. Howell Heflin is leaving, and he is also a centrist. I worked with Senator Heflin on the Judiciary Committee. He has made an extraordinary contribution as we have worked through some of the toughest problems on the nominating process--Judge Bork, Justice Thomas--the whole process. Senator Bradley, perhaps not quite a centrist but not too far from center, has made an extraordinary contribution as he has done so much to awaken America to the problems of racism coming from a State with big cities, an issue that I have worked closely with him on. Senator Brown is a key loss--another centrist. I sat next to him on the Judiciary Committee. He would whisper most of the questions which have gotten me into so much trouble on the Judiciary Committee, also with a great sense of humor. And Senator Bennett Johnston, who has added so much in four terms; Senator Pryor, who has added so much in three terms--both southerners, but having a much broader focus than simply on the South. Senator Exon who has contributed so much on Armed Services and as ranking member of Budget. And Senator Sheila Frahm, who is here for too short of a period of time. Senator Frahm comes from western Kansas, almost on the Nebraska border, on the northern Colorado border in the West. As Senator Burns said a few moments ago, my home was originally in Russell, KS, a hometown I share with Senator Dole. While these outstanding men and women will be departing and many friendships will be lost, or at least not as close, the real meaning for the country is the issue of losing so many of this group which have contributed so much to the center and, I think, to the importance of governance in America.

Mr. SPECTER. I ask unanimous consent that I made proceed for an additional 10 minutes. No Senator has come to the floor in the interim. So I am not depriving any of my colleagues of an opportunity to speak.

Mr. SPECTER. I note no other Senators on the floor, Madam President, on this unusual Saturday session. There are a number of subjects I will address this morning, so I have asked for that period of time. Madam President, at the outset, I want to express my concern, reservations, and perhaps objection to the process which is now underway to have an omnibus appropriations bill to fund the Federal Government into the next fiscal period starting Tuesday, October 1, which is being added to a conference report on the Defense appropriations bill. I am concerned about that because it is an extraordinary procedure, probably never before undertaken in the Senate--at least I have not talked to anyone who knows that it has been undertaken. It totally undercuts the traditional procedures of the U.S. Government under our constitutional mandate on separation of powers. In effect, it drastically alters the rules of the U.S. Senate through what is essentially a procedural device to present to the Senate a conference report where there is a single vote without the opportunity of the Senate to make any amendment. Now, traditionally and under our rules, a Senator may offer an amendment to any bill at any time with unlimited debate unless cloture is invoked. The Constitution and the rules of the Senate have given that extraordinary power to each Senator in order to slow down the legislative process. When the Constitution was adopted, the Senate was supposed to be the saucer which cooled the tea, the hot tea, as it came from the House of Representatives. Senators were really in a sense ambassadors from each of the sovereign States to the Congress of the United States, where we express the views of a sovereign. That really is not true anymore, as the authority of the central Government has pretty much taken over and relatively little is left of the 10th amendment on reserving rights to the States. All that is coming back a little with the Supreme Court decision in Lopez, which gives more rights to the States. That is a complicated subject, but while the Federal Government has taken on more and more power, at least the Senate has been a bastion where we could take some time and debate issues. That will be totally gone as we work through the balance of the appropriations process and have only one vote on the conference report. I think that is a real danger to our system. In a sense, we have only ourselves to blame. As appropriations bills have come to the floor of the U.S. Senate, while Senators have acted within the technical rules, the spirit of the process has, in my judgment, been abused. We have had the Interior appropriations bill, for example, on the floor of the Senate, when we should take up very important matters concerning the national parks and other matters related to forests and the environment. But, instead of dealing with the Interior appropriations bill, Senators have insisted on offering amendments on other subjects, many of them legislative authorizations outside the purview of the appropriations process, with an enormous amount of political gamesmanship and one-upmanship and a real effort to outbid or embarrass the other political party. It is done on both sides. I do not say this in the context of criticizing the other party. The subcommittee which I chair on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education never even had its bill come to the Senate floor because it was anticipated that it would be very contentious and that many diverse amendments would be offered. At least it has been my hope and the hope of Senator Harkin, the ranking Democrat, that we would have a chance to bring the bill to the floor. Instead, the bidding war on education started on the Interior appropriations bill. That is why the Interior appropriations bill was pulled down. Last year's budget, which we should have finished on September 30, 1995, was not finished until late April 1996. On that bill earlier this year, Senator Harkin and I came forward with a bipartisan approach to add $2.7 billion so we could have adequate funding on Education and on Health and Human Services and on Labor, where a big issue was worker safety. We have found within the appropriations process itself, that the subcommittee chair and the ranking members have been able to work on a harmonious basis and really get the job done in the kind of collegiality and a relationship that develops when you work with an individual and move ahead. Just as the distinguished Senator from Nebraska, Senator Bob Kerrey, and I have done on the Intelligence Committee, where I serve as chair and Senator Kerrey serves as vice chair. We have had very contentious issues which have potential partisan overtones, some fierce matters there that we have kept under wraps. We are still working on that, as a matter of fact, in the closing days of the Congress. We have done that because of our concern, shared by the Intelligence Committee members generally and by the distinguished presiding officer, who is a member, because of our view that a bipartisan and nonpartisan approach to intelligence matters and comprehending foreign affairs is very important for the welfare of the country. And as I say, the subcommittee chairs have done that. Senator Hatfield made a report yesterday to the Republican caucus identifying quite a number of chairmen and ranking members who have been able to work it out on a harmonious basis, which is the essence of compromise in a democracy, to get it done. But when the matters come to the floor, and 100 Senators are present, the temptation has been, so far, irresistible to add so many items to the appropriations bills that bills have had to be pulled down. The Appropriations Committee has become even more powerful. There are always comments about the ``powerful Appropriations Committee.'' It has become even more powerful because, at present, its bills are the only bills that have to be passed. And so many of the matters--not all, but so many--on authorization come to the Appropriations Committee. We are wrestling, right now, with many requests from Senators to have authorizations done on the appropriations bill for Labor, Health, Human Services, and Education. Other bills don't have to be passed, but the spending bills have to be passed, or else the Government comes to a halt. So the Appropriations Committee has the bills that are the last vehicle. Now we see a total subversion of the process, when we have so many appropriations matters coming up in this one omnibus measure and it isn't even brought to the floor in the traditional way so that amendments may be offered. It will come over as part of a conference report, which will not allow any Senator to do anything except have one vote, ``yes'' or ``no,'' on that report. That is a subversion of our process. It is my hope, Madam President, that next year we will finally get some rules changes, so that on appropriations matters we have only germane matters related to the bill. We would still leave ample Senators' rights, in a variety of ways, but not, for example to bring to the Interior appropriations bill an education issue. Education is a very popular matter, a very important political matter, and Members of both parties seem to want to gain a political advantage in outspending the other party on education. Well, Senator Harkin and I were able to accomplish that in April with the amendment we offered on a bipartisan basis, which got 86 votes. That is a lot of votes around this place. That is the way we should have handled it this year, instead of the bidding war, which required the Interior bill to be taken down. That is only one illustration as to how extraneous matters have really led us to a position where the conclusion, far and wide, is that we have to go to this single omnibus bill, now tacked on to a conference report. Many people have asked me when the Senate is going to adjourn. My standard answer has always been that the Senate will adjourn when the last Senator stops talking. And that is a very questionable and indecisive matter. That draws a smile from the Presiding Officer. When will the Congress go out of session? Who knows? A couple of the barometers are, when the time is up, or exhaustion totally sets in. The time is up on September 30, Monday, at midnight. So we now have a schedule, with this extraordinary process, to finish up our work in advance of that date. Frequently, exhaustion and time run out at about the same time. The negotiators in the appropriations process worked through until 4 a.m. yesterday morning, and I believe until about 7 a.m. this morning--not exactly conditions to have the optimum deliberative process on what we were accomplishing. But it is illustrative of the fact that the only time when these matters are settled is when exhaustion sets in or the time has run out. This year, there is one other ingredient, and that is leaving Washington to campaign. When the self-interest for reelection appears, it is a pretty substantial motivating factor for Members of Congress. Members are no different than anybody else in the motivation to keep their jobs. When that sets in, there is an additional ingredient--and that is certainly present at this time--when Members up for election want to go home to campaign to keep their seats. Madam President, on another aspect of the same issue, we have seen in this legislation a process which I believe is a perversion of the constitutional mandate of separation of powers which makes the Congress of the United States responsible for legislation. The President of the United States, after Congress acts, is responsible for signing or vetoing a bill. And then if it is vetoed, the Congress of the United States can override, in the legislative process, with a two-thirds vote. But this year, instead, we have had the executive branch as a prime participant in the legislative process. We have had the President's chief adviser, the very distinguished Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta, sitting in on the appropriations negotiations, which I have been a party to when they have affected the subcommittee jurisdiction that I chair. Mr. Panetta is there as the President's representative, to say whether or not what the legislators want will be acceptable to the President. I say that is just wrong, plain wrong, constitutionally. The President, the executive branch, ought not to be involved in the legislative process. We legislators ought to hammer out our ideas and our differences on the floor of this body and on the floor of the House, and we ought to go to conference and resolve the issues, and then we ought to present them to the President. At that point the President should exercise his constitutional responsibilities, instead of exercising our constitutional responsibilities earlier. There is a very, very serious problem of separation of powers at issue here. Here the powers are not separate; the powers are intermixed. That is not the way it is required under the Constitution. It makes me wonder about where the President is. You have a situation where a deal was struck, apparently, in the early morning hours this morning, about 7 a.m. It is obvious, on the timetable, that the President could not have been informed of and given his approval to that deal. The obvious fact is that the President has delegated his authority to the Chief of Staff. You wonder, at least on appearances, if the President ought to be informed, at least on the outlines, as to what has been done, so that the President can exercise his authority under the Constitution to give consent to what the legislature has done. There is not even any respect for appearances here. The deal was done, cut and dry. There is no way the President could have known what was happening. That makes you wonder about delegation of authority. The President really doesn't have the constitutional authority to delegate his responsibility, just as I can't allow staff, or anybody else, to come in here and vote for me. The President has the responsibility to review what Congress has done and decide whether or not that is acceptable to the President of the United States, who is duly elected. But there, again, in the rush to exit, constitutional mandates are blindly ignored. I believe, Madam President, that this is a--it is hard to find the proper word--dastardly, reprehensible, outrageous precedent to set as we finish up our important responsibilities in Washington. Part of the problem arises as so much of the work of the Congress is being dominated by political considerations, or by those at the far ends of the political spectrum, leaving very little of centrism in the work we do. It is very important that the Government of the United States, in my opinion, be governed from the center. You see that in the public reaction to what is going on. You see that in President Clinton, who is trying to establish a centrist position, which has been successful politically, because the people of the United States want to be governed from the center. You see that with Senator Dole, in his campaign for the Presidency, wanting to move to the center. If I may make a personal reference, when I advanced my candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination, I was a centrist, and many people have said to me recently, ``Arlen, Senator Dole is now adopting many of the positions you articulated when you ran for the Republican nomination.'' My immediate response has been that if Senator Dole had articulated my position in his quest for the Republican nomination, he wouldn't have been the Republican nominee. It is very much illustrative of the campaign of Senator McGovern, whose candidacy was supported by people at one end of the political spectrum. In short, we have seen the primary process dominated by people from each end of the political spectrum. I do not say that in a critical way, notwithstanding the fact that my efforts for the nomination met with so little success. I compliment the people who participate in the primary process because it is a very tough job to go out there in the winter snows of New Hampshire, to go through the farmlands of Iowa, or to travel this country from one end to the other. Former President Nixon wrote to Senator Dole that you have to attract the people at one end of the political spectrum to win the nomination, and then you have to rush back to the center for the general election. We are now going to see if that is possible in a political contest. But just as we have seen the primary process dominated by people at each end of the political spectrum, we have seen the work of the U.S. Senate also not benefited from the center. When I came to this body after the 1980 election, I frequently said that out of 100 Senators, there were 40 on each side who took ideological positions--maybe 35--leaving 20 or 30 of us in the center to be the decisive voices. Now we find that number has been reduced drastically. That is part of the reason we have had such contentious debates in the Senate and why we have not been able to do our work in the traditional legislative way. We could have produced a budget differently than through this continuing resolution as part of a conference report. I think we are all going to have to try harder to do better next year. We find with those who are departing from the Senate that we are losing a tremendous number of centrists. That is going to mean a heavier responsibility on those of us who are here next year to perhaps put aside some of our ideological predilections or preferences, and try to move to the center. It is hard to calculate why we are having Senators leaving this institution in unprecedented numbers, and maybe it is the contentiousness in this body which has caused this to happen. We are losing an extraordinary group of Senators. First, in priority, is Senator Mark Hatfield, who has done such an extraordinary job since being elected in 1966; with an extraordinary conscience; taking stands which have pitted him really against the entire body of his own political party and voting as he did on the constitutional amendment for a balanced budget. I think he was the only one out of 54 Republican Senators to vote against the amendment, and although I didn't agree with him on the vote, I admired his courage. He has been up all night working through as the chief negotiator, as the center, on this continuing resolution. We are losing Sam Nunn, who is without peer when it comes to matters of military affairs. Like Mark Hatfield, Bill Cohen, Nancy Kassebaum, and Alan Simpson, when Sam Nunn speaks--like E. F. Hutton--``everybody listens.'' We do not have anybody who is irreplaceable, but we are going to see what is going to happen on the Armed Services Committee, Madam President, where you serve, as to what is going to be done without Sam Nunn's voice--a big, big loss--and he is very much a centrist. We are losing an extraordinary Senator--really, a great Senator in every sense of the word--in Bill Cohen. For those of you who really want to get to know Bill Cohen, you ought to get a volume of his poetry. I have had a chance to hear his poetry publicly and quasi- privately in our Intelligence Committee deliberations and hearings which are not public--but with extraordinary depth, and he has also made an extraordinary contribution as a centrist. Senator Nancy Kassebaum is leaving. She had the extraordinary skill to bring forward reform on health care that so many of us talked about for so long with the Kassebaum bill, where finally we made some key structural changes without the massive proposals advocated by the administration depicted on the chart which my staff and I prepared, and which Senator Dole used last week in an attempt to depict the complicated bureaucracy the administration wanted to create. But when the chips were down, with one of her last two legislative acts, Senator Kassebaum led the way with health care reform. We are losing another key centrist in Alan Simpson, who has been able to bring so many people together with his wisdom and his sense of balance, illustrated by a sense of humor, in the work that he has done on the immigration bill, which is not yet completed. But he has been just extraordinary. He held the fort on the Gallegly amendment, which would have deprived education to children born of parents who are illegal immigrants. While we ought to protect our borders and not have illegal immigrants in the United States, we certainly ought not to deprive children of their educational opportunities, which will just haunt American society, where they will not be able to support themselves in adulthood and where they will be delinquents and perhaps criminals on the streets. Madam President, may I inquire as to how much of the 20 minutes I have left?

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent I may speak for up to 20 minutes in morning business.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I am pleased that the Senate is taking final action to enact the False Statements Accountability Act of 1996, legislation to overturn the Supreme Court's 1995 decision in Hubbard versus United States and restore the prohibition on making false statements to Congress. The bill before us is in substance identical to the bill that passed the Senate on July 25, 1996, except in one respect. I do not want to reiterate all that I said at that time, so I will address at this time only the one substantive difference between the bill passed by the Senate and the current compromise we will vote on today. As passed, the Senate bill provided blanket application to prohibit any false statement made to Congress or any component of Congress, including individual members and their offices. The coverage provided by the House bill was much narrower in scope. The trick was to reconcile the two approaches. Through detailed negotiations and the good faith of all concerned, we have been able to produce this compromise legislation, which restores the applicability of section 1001 of title 18 of the United States Code to the areas in which Congress most needs it. First, the compromise covers false statements made in all administrative matters. This includes claims for payment, vouchers, and contracting proposals. The provision also covers all employment related matters, such as submitting a phony resume or making false claims before the Office of Compliance or Office of Fair Employment Practices. Also covered are all documents required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to Congress. This crucial provision will cover all filings under the Ethics in Government Act and the Lobbying Disclosure Act and provides a real deterrent to false filings under these two laws, among others. For this reason alone, this bill is one of the most important congressional reforms we will have taken during this Congress. The compromise also applies the prohibition on false statements to an investigation or review conducted by any committee, subcommittee, commission, or office of the Congress. This provision will prohibit knowing and willful material false statements to entities like the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office. False statements to the Capitol Police will also be covered. The greatest difficulty was in formulating the scope of the applicability of the false statement prohibition to committees and subcommittees of each House of Congress. Only committee or subcommittee investigations or reviews conducted pursuant to the authority of the particular committee or subcommittee, meaning within its jurisdiction, will receive the protection of section 1001, and then only so long as the investigation or review is conducted in a manner consistent with the rules of the House or Senate, as relevant. This provision will allow each House to determine for itself whether to limit the circumstances in which committee or subcommittee investigations or reviews will be covered by section 1001. We do not intend, however, for the Senate to need to change its rules before false statements made to a committee or subcommittee conducting a review of a policy within its jurisdiction be punishable under this act. In having the bill cover any investigation, we intend to cover formal investigations conducted pursuant to the rules of particular committees of the Senate, many of which have specific rules covering investigations. Thus, an investigation will be a more formal inquiry into a particular matter within the jurisdiction of a committee or subcommittee. Included in the definition of investigation are ancillary proceedings, such as depositions, and formal steps employed by certain committees that are a necessary prelude to an investigation, such as a preliminary inquiry and initial review employed by the Select Committee on Ethics. The application of the bill to any review by a committee or subcommittee is broader. Under Rule XXVI (8) of the Standing Rules of the Senate, each committee ``shall review * * * on a continuing basis the application, administration, and execution of those laws, or parts of laws, the subject matter of which is within the legislative jurisdiction of that committee.'' By using review in this law, we intend to cover all such review conducted by committees and subcommittees of the Senate. Often, we refer to such reviews as oversight. The sponsors of the bill, who include the chairman and former chairman of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, and the chairman and former chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, among others, intend that the term ``review'' be read broadly to cover all committee oversight and inquiries into the current operation of federal law and policy, compliance with Federal law, or proposals to improve Federal law, policy, or administration. In addition, we intend to capture within the meaning of review matters within committee jurisdiction that are not directly legislative, such as confirmation proceedings. We chose to limit the act to committees and subcommittees, and their staff, because these are the entities through which Congress conducts its inquiries and oversight; these are the entities that hold hearings; these are the entities that can issue and enforce legal process; these are the entities charged with developing legislation for consideration by each House of Congress. Thus, section 1001 will not apply to statements made to individual members not acting as part of a committee or subcommittee investigation or review. This restriction should alleviate any concern that constituents exercising their right to petition Congress would fear prosecution for inadvertent or minor misstatements. No first amendment rights will be chilled by this bill. Nor will the bill apply to the statement of opinion or argument, as only knowing and willful false statements of fact are meant to be covered. This is an important bill. I am pleased that enough Members of both Houses saw the need to act quickly on this legislation, which I believe to be absolutely necessary to protect the constitutional interests of the Congress. I want to thank my colleagues and cosponsors, in particular Senator Levin, the lead cosponsor, for their efforts. I also want to thank Representative Bill Martini, sponsor of the House companion, for pushing so hard to get this done, and Chairman Bill McCollum of the House Subcommittee on Crime, and his staff, Paul McNulty and Dan Bryant, for working so hard to reach agreement on this bill.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I have sought recognition to speak in support of the Water Resources and Development Act of 1996. This legislation authorizes funding for a number of critical flood control projects in Pennsylvania, whose need was once again demonstrated by the devastating flooding that occurred in January 1996. It will provide essential protection to existing commercial and residential developments, reducing losses attributable to floods, lowering flood insurance, and creating opportunities for economic growth. I have worked closely with Senator Santorum, as well as Chairman Chafee, Chairman Warner, and Senator Baucus, to ensure that this legislation reauthorizes the Saw Mill Run project in Pittsburgh, authorizes Army Corps of Engineers funding for upgrades to the storm water pumping station at the Wyoming Valley levee raising project in Luzerne County, and authorizes a flood control project for the Plot and Green Ridge neighborhoods in Scranton. The flood protection project at Saw Mill Run will alleviate flood damage in the West End section of Pittsburgh, bringing relief to residents who have been hard hit by overbank flooding and creating opportunities for economic development in the Saw Mill Run corridor. During my visit to the project site with the mayor of Pittsburgh, Tom Murphy, on November 21, 1995, he and I discussed the city's commitment to protecting its vulnerable riverside communities and to providing the city's share of the development funds. I am pleased that this project can go forward and that we were able to secure $500,000 for construction-related costs in the fiscal year 1997 energy and water appropriations legislation. The Wyoming Valley levee raising project is necessary to the completion of the flood control project of 1986, so that the families and businesses of Wyoming Valley will not have to withstand the devastation of flooding as they did in 1972 from Tropical Storm Agnes. This January's flooding forced more than 100,000 people to evacuate their homes and businesses and resulted in President Clinton's declaring it a disaster area. Such a flood control project is vitally important to the affected communities along the Lackawanna River and is deserving of significant attention from the Congress. This February, the corps approved the General Design Memorandum and has begun to develop the mitigation measures for the downstream communities. This legislation incorporates an amendment offered on my behalf in the Senate managers' amendments which directs the corps to take responsibility for funding the upgrades to the storm water pumping stations. Finally, I have worked closely with Senator Santorum, Congressman Joseph McDade, Chairman Chafee, and Scranton Mayor Jim Connors on legislation authorizing the modification of the ongoing project for flood control along the Lackawanna River in Scranton to include the Diamond Plot and Green Ridge neighborhoods. These neighborhoods have been consistently damaged by flooding, including in 1985, 1986, 1993, and 1996. On March 11, 1996, I convened a meeting in the city council chambers so Federal, State, and local officials, the Army Corps, and residents could discuss the potential for a Federal flood control project. I came away from that meeting even more impressed with the need for the Federal Government to respond with a substantial flood control effort to protect the lives and property of the residents. The conference report authorizes the flood control project in the Plot and Green Ridge areas, with the cost-sharing element to be worked out between the Army Corps of Engineers and the city of Scranton. This is a creative solution to a difficult problem and I am hopeful that the city and the Commonwealth will work together to develop a strategy for providing the non-Federal share of the project costs. It is worth noting that the fiscal year 1997 energy and water appropriations bill contains $600,000 for initial planning and design work of the Plot/ Green Ridge projects, which means that additional time will not be lost on protecting the residents of those areas. Mr. President, thousands of families and businesses in Pennsylvania were adversely affected by in this January's floods, and one of my priorities has been that Congress respond with sufficient funding for justified Army Corps projects. I remain concerned with the time it takes to make progress on various corps projects in Pennsylvania and will continue to explore ways to streamline the construction process. In the meantime, this legislation allows much-needed flood control projects to go forward and thus deserves our support.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, this is among the most difficult of the 6,003 votes I have cast in the Senate because it involves a decision of life and death on the line between when a woman may choose abortion and what constitutes infanticide. In my legal judgment, the issue is not over a woman's right to chose within the constitutional context of Roe versus Wade or Planned Parenthood versus Casey. If it were, Congress could not legislate. Congress is neither competent to micromanage doctors' decisions nor constitutionally permitted to legislate where the life or health of the mother is involved in an abortion. In my legal judgment, the medical act or acts of commission or omission in interfering with, or not facilitating the completion of a live birth after a child is partially out of the mother's womb constitute infanticide. The line of the law is drawn, in my legal judgment, when the child is partially out of the womb of the mother. It is no longer abortion; it is infanticide. This vote does not affect my basic views on the pro-choice/pro-life issue. While I am personally opposed to abortion, I do not believe it can be controlled by the Government. It is a matter for women and families with guidance from ministers, priests, and rabbis. Having stated my core rationale, I think it appropriate to make a few related observations: Regrettably, the issue has been badly politicized. It was first placed on the calendar for a vote without any hearing and now the vote on overriding the President's veto has been delayed until the final stages of the Presidential campaign. We had only one hearing which was insufficient for consideration of the complex issues. After considerable study and reflection on many factors including the status of the child partly out of the womb, I have decided to vote for the bill and to override the President's veto. As I view it, it would have been vastly preferable to have scheduled the vote in the regular course of the Senate's business without delaying it as close to the election as possible. From mail, town meetings and personal contacts, I have found widespread revulsion on the procedure on partial-birth abortions. This has been voiced by those who are pro-choice as well as pro-life. Whatever the specifics of the procedure, if it is permitted to continue, it may be sufficiently repugnant to create sufficient public pressure to pass a constitutional amendment to reverse Roe. It has been hard to make a factual determination because of the conflicting medical claims on both sides of the issue. Solomon would be hard pressed to decide between two beautiful children: First one whose mother had a prior partial-birth abortion and says that otherwise she would have been rendered sterile without the capability to have her later child; second, one born with a correctable birth defect where the mother had been counseled to abort because of indications of major abnormalities. Human judgment is incapable of saying which is right. We do see many children with significant birth defects surviving with a lesser quality and length of life, but with much love and affection between parents and children and much meaning and value to that life. No one can say how many children are on each side of that equation. If partial-birth abortions are banned, women will retain the right to choose during most of pregnancy and doctors will retain the right to act to save the life of the mother. After being deeply involved in the pro-life/pro-choice controversy for three decades as a district attorney and Senator, I believe we should find a better way to resolve these issues than through this legislative process.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I am pleased to be able to submit for my colleagues' consideration the conference report on H.R. 3259, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997. As you know, the Senate passed its authorization bill only last week and this may be an unprecedented turnaround time from passage of our bill to consideration of the conference report. For this, I want to thank House Chairman Larry Combest for his outstanding management of what could have been a difficult effort at reconciling our two bills. Ranking Member Norman Dicks and Vice Chairman Robert Kerrey played equally valuable roles in finding the right balance between ardently advocating their positions and ensuring eventual passage of this important legislation. The rapid progress of this conference report is all the more noteworthy in that, in addition to the usual annual authorization of expenditures for intelligence and intelligence-related activities, this year's authorization bill adds important new provisions to the National Security Act of 1947 designed to help the Director of Central Intelligence [DCI] exert stronger direction and control over the intelligence community. Let me remind my colleagues that under the National Security Act the DCI wears three hats: principal intelligence adviser to the President and the National Security Council; Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and head of the intelligence community, which is composed of 13 different intelligence agencies. For a variety of reasons, a long succession of DCI's have devoted almost all of their time and energy to their first two jobs--advising the President and running the CIA--and have given short shrift to the third--managing the intelligence community. The result has been an unfortunate lack of coordination and focused effort by our various intelligence agencies. This is not to say that our intelligence agencies have not been successful. The opposite is true: the United States has the premier intelligence apparatus in the world. But because they are scattered among so many different departments and agencies they have not been able to operate as efficiently and effectively as they could. Title VIII of the conference report--the Intelligence Renewal and Reform Act of 1996--contains provisions intended to strengthen the overall management of the intelligence community. In particular, to help the DCI perform his community responsibilities, title VIII establishes a new Senate-confirmed Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management and three new Senate-confirmed Assistant Directors of Central Intelligence. Since the National Security Act was enacted in 1947, there have been only two statutory positions to manage the intelligence community: a Director of Central Intelligence and a Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. The time has come to give the DCI a better community management structure. The conference report provides that the DDCI for Community Management will manage an intelligence community staff and will direct communitywide functions, including personnel, resources, requirements, collection, research and development, and analysis and production. Each of the three Assistant DCI's will oversee communitywide efforts in a particular functional area: collection, analysis and production, and administration. I should mention that the DCI has expressed some concern about whether the three Assistant DCI's should all be Presidential appointments subject to Senate confirmation. While noting the DCI's concerns, a majority of the conferees concluded that the advantages of Senate-confirmation outweigh any potential disadvantages. In light of the fact that the three Assistant DCI's will be responsible for coordinating functions that cut across a number of different departments and agencies, the conferees determined that Senate confirmation is necessary to ensure that each of these individuals has sufficient stature and focus to impose a more cohesive and coherent process for allocating resources in each of these key functional areas. The DCI has also questioned whether Senate confirmation of the Assistant Directors is warranted given the limited authority vested in these positions. In fact, the statutory authority vested in these positions is the full authority of the DCI for each respective area. Thus, the actual authority exercised by the Assistant Directors will depend in large measure on the authority the DCI chooses to delegate and support. In addition to creating a better intelligence community management team, the bill gives the DCI significant new management authorities. For example, the Secretary of Defense will be required to obtain the DCI's concurrence--or note the DCI's lack of concurrence--before recommending an individual to the President to be Director of the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the new National Imagery and Mapping Agency. The DCI will also have to be consulted regarding the appointments of the heads of the smaller intelligence community elements, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the FBI's National Security Division. In addition, separate provisions added to this year's DOD authorization bill require the DCI to submit an annual performance evaluation of the heads of the major defense intelligence agencies to the Secretary of Defense. These provisions are very significant. Previously, the DCI had little or no say in the appointments or evaluation of the heads of the major operating elements of the intelligence community. I should note that the Director of the FBI objected strenuously to requiring the DCI to be consulted before the Attorney General appoints the head of the FBI's National Security Division. Director Freeh appeared to be concerned that requiring consultation might somehow make the FBI Director appear to be subservient to the DCI. In response to these concerns, the conferees agreed to modify the original Senate provision to require the FBI Director to give the DCI timely notice of his recommendation of an individual to fill the position, and to give the DCI an opportunity to consult. While agreeing to these changes, the conferees noted that the Director of the National Security Division manages a significant portion of the national intelligence budget and concluded that it is wholly appropriate to give the DCI some voice in his or her appointment. In addition to having a stronger voice in appointments, the DCI is given new statutory authority to participate in the preparation of defense intelligence budgets and to be consulted with respect to reprogrammings of funds among defensewide intelligence activities. For the first time, the DCI is also given the statutory right to establish intelligence collection requirements and priorities, and to resolve conflicts in collection priorities. I also want to take a moment to address the press reports that opposition from the Department of Defense killed intelligence reform this year. It is true that bureaucratic resistance to change threatened reform efforts and that both the Senate and House Intelligence Committees agreed to scale back some of their proposals in the interest of ensuring passage of the bill. However, many very significant provisions remain. The conference report gives the DCI important new authorities to manage the intelligence community and, for the first time in 50 years, establishes a new intelligence community management structure. We expect these provisions will go far to make the intelligence community operate more effectively and more efficiently. In short, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of intelligence reform are greatly exaggerated. With the end of the 104th Congress, we mark a significant milestone in the history of this Senate, the executive branch, and most of all, the intelligence community. Twenty years ago, on May 19, 1976, the Senate adopted Senate Resolution 400, establishing the Select Committee on Intelligence. The following day, May 20, 15 Senators were appointed to this committee, with Senator Inouye as its Chairman and Senator Howard Baker its Vice Chairman. Thus, from the very beginning, the nonpartisan nature of the committee was reinforced with the seating of a Vice Chairman rather than a ranking member. This nonpartisan attitude has continued for 20 years, with the Chairmen and Vice Chairmen working together overseeing U.S. intelligence, and at the same time ensuring that this important instrument of national security is maintained. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a brief statement outlining the impressive history of this committee be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my statement.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I may speak up to 10 minutes in morning business.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, in a few moments the House and Senate conference committee on the immigration bill will meet, and I believe we will approve far-reaching reform on immigration by striking out the so-called Gallegly amendment, which allows the States to deny public education to children who are not legally present in the United States. The Gallegly amendment, Mr. President, is fundamentally unfair because it is directed at children. It is my view that the children ought to have an opportunity for education for many reasons. One reason is that if they are to be self-supporting adults, if they are to have an acceptable quality of life and become good citizens or residents of the United States of America, they need an education. Second, if they are not in school, they are going to be on the street, and there will be problems of delinquency, there will be problems of juvenile crime. The answer is not to exclude illegal alien children from having an education, but instead to tighten up the restrictions on illegal immigration and to protect our borders. The immigration bill which is now pending in the House-Senate conference will be a significant step forward in reform, to reform the immigration laws, to protect U.S. borders, to provide for expeditious treatment of immigrants who are illegally in the United States, to deport those immigrants in accordance with our laws. It is said that the education of illegal alien children is a magnet to draw illegal immigrants into the United States. The answer is not to exclude those children from education, but the answer is to protect American borders so that the illegal immigrants do not gain access to the United States, do not enter the United States, and that children are not here, posing a significant problem in terms of their conduct on delinquency and crime and in terms of their conduct when they grow to adults, assuming they stay in the United States. There have been those who say that it ought to be the financial responsibility of the Federal Government to pay the cost of education, and I am in agreement with that principle, Mr. President. It has been a failure of the Federal Government to protect U.S. borders. I think it is fair to respond that it ought to be the obligation of the Federal Government to pay to educate the illegal alien children that it has allowed to enter. However, the answer is not to deny those children education while they are in the United States. Mr. President, I believe it is very important to make sharp distinctions as to how we treat children of illegal immigrants from how we deal with the problem of illegal immigration generally. The way to deal with the problem of illegal immigration is to protect our borders. It is not to deny education to children once they are in the United States. Neither is it sound, sensible, or fair to deny citizenship to children who are born in the United States to immigrants who have illegal status. The hallmark of America, the hallmark of the Statue of Liberty, and the hallmark of the melting pot is to respect the status of American citizenship of any child born in the United States. That is a matter, Mr. President, that I feel particularly strong about since both of my parents were immigrants. They both came to the United States legally; that is, to the best of my knowledge, information, and belief they came legally. My father came from Ukraine in 1911--literally walked across Europe, sailed at the bottom of the boat, in steerage, to come to America to find an opportunity for himself and his children. Harry Specter, my father, didn't know that he had a round-trip ticket when he came here--not back to Ukraine but to France, and not back to Paris and the Follies Bergere, but to the Argonne Forest, where he served in the American expedition forces to make the world safe for democracy, with shrapnel in his legs until the day he died. My mother came with her family as a child of 5 from a small town on the Russian-Polish border, I believe with legal immigrant status, although I would be hard pressed to prove that my parents were legal immigrants if someone were to challenge the status of Arlen Specter as a citizen of the United States. But when we deal with the problem of illegal immigration, or legal immigration, we have to have a very, very sharp focus on what is appropriate public policy. The bill in its final form, in my judgment, is somewhat too harsh in taking away benefits from legal immigrants and denying some benefits to other immigrants. But I think reform is necessary, and the compromise that has been worked out is a reasonably good compromise, and if we find problems, we can correct them at a later date. But I want to repeat that it is obnoxious, unfair, and un-American to deny U.S. citizenship to anyone born in this county, no matter what their status. I am glad that the bill before us does not incorporate this proposal. The conference report has been held up for a very protracted period of time over the Gallegly amendment because there is so much sentiment in the Congress that we ought not to deny education to children regardless of their immigration status. There has been the threat of a veto from the White House. But I think it is highly unlikely that the conference report could pass the Senate with the Gallegly amendment in it. There has been an effort by a variety of amendments to grandfather children so that once they are in school, they can complete the 6th grade and elementary school or complete high school. There was an amendment which I had suggested, which I was not really fond of and didn't really think was the ultimate solution but a stop-gap measure, to have a mandatory, expedited vote in 2\1/2\ years, 30 months after implementation of the Gallegly provision, to see the impact of the Gallegly provision on delinquency, on education, and on family life, and then a second vote at the end of 5 years, 60 months. I felt that the Gallegly amendment would, if presented in isolation, be rejected by the Congress, and that we would not deny education to children in this country regardless of the status of their parents. But I believe, after a lot of deliberation, the issue has been resolved. I am looking forward to the conference which will start in just a few minutes in which we will delete the Gallegly amendment so that the States will not have the option to deny education to children regardless of their parents' status. We can bring this immigration reform bill to the floor, and we can pass it and, I think, have it signed into law. I thank the Chair. In the absence of any other Senator, Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I have sought recognition to comment on legislation which the Senate is considering today, the Federal Law Enforcement Dependents Assistance Act of 1996. This bipartisan legislation is a revised version of S. 1243, which I introduced with four cosponsors on September 14, 1995. This legislation will provide educational assistance to spouses and children of Federal law enforcement officers who are killed or totally and permanently disabled in the line of duty. Similar educational benefits are provided to the spouses and children of Armed Forces personnel killed in the line of duty, but not to dependents of the brave men and women in Federal law enforcement. I am advised that many State and local governments provide educational and job training assistance to dependents of law enforcement personnel. It is time to level the playing field for Federal law enforcement. I first became aware of this discrepancy when I met with Mrs. Karen Degan, the widow of U.S. Marshal Bill Degan of Quincy, MA, who died during the tragic shooting incident at Ruby Ridge in August, 1992. Bill Degan left behind a loving wife and two sons, William and Brian, whom I have also had the pleasure of meeting. Bill Degan had been in the Marshals Service for 17 years at the time of his death. Karen Degan began in 1993 to work with Congress to develop a program for higher education assistance for dependents of slain Justice Department officers. At her suggestion, I introduced S. 1243 on September 14, 1995, during the Ruby Ridge hearings, with bipartisan cosponsors from the Judiciary Committee. I would prefer that we did not have to worry about death and disabling injuries for Federal law enforcement officers, but it is a fact of life that we have lost a number of Federal law enforcement officers in the line of duty in recent years. In my own State of Pennsylvania, on March 22, 1996, FBI Special Agent Charles Reed was killed in Philadelphia in a shootout with a suspect drug dealer during an undercover drug investigation. Agent Reed lived in Lower Salford Township, PA and is survived by his wife, Susan and children, Joshua, age 21, Todd 18, and Kelley, 17. Similarly, two Washington, DC FBI agents, Martha Martinez and Michael Miller, were slain in November 1995, in the Washington, DC police headquarters, leaving behind loved ones of their own. Since the introduction of S. 1243 last year, I have been working with my colleagues and the administration to fashion legislation acceptable to all parties. This revised bill makes the educational assistance available to all Federal law enforcement officers, not just those within the Justice Department. I would note that the program is subject to appropriations and does not constitute an entitlement. Financial assistance can last for up to 45 months of education or a proportional period of time for a part-time program. Financial assistance will be based on the amounts provided under the Veterans program, which is currently $404 a month for fulltime students. Significantly, the Attorney General may provide retroactive assistance to dependents eligible under this program where a law enforcement officer was killed in the line of duty on or after May 1, 1992. This legislation is supported by the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, and I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter to me from Victor Oboyski, dated September 18, 1996, which reflects their views.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. I have listened to your exchange with Senator Leahy and I fully agree that section 1343 already encompasses computer fraud and that amending it is not necessary.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from New Mexico. I would appreciate 10 minutes.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I have come to the floor immediately after attending a meeting with President Clinton, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Members of both Houses from both parties on the subject of Iraq. I would like to comment about an issue which I raised specifically with the President, and that is my urging him to submit to the Congress of the United States the issue as to whether there should be force used against Iraq in the gulf. In time of crisis there is no question, under our Constitution, that the President as Commander in Chief has the authority to take emergency action. Similarly, it is plain that the Congress of the United States has the sole authority to declare a war, and that involves the use of force, as in the gulf operation in 1991, which was really a war, where the President came to the Congress of the United States in January 1991, and on this floor this body debated that issue and, by a relatively narrow vote of 52 to 47, authorized the use of force. It is my strong view that the issue of the use of force in Iraq today ought to be decided by the Congress of the United States and not unilaterally by the President where there is no pending emergency and when there is time for due deliberation in accordance with our constitutional procedures. I note when the first missile attacks were launched 2 weeks ago today, on September 3, the President did not consult in advance with the Congress, which I believe was necessary under the War Powers Act. That is water over the dam. At the meeting this morning there were comments from Members of Congress about the need for more consultation. I believe the session this morning was the first time that there had been a group of Members of the House and Senate assembled to be briefed by the administration, by the President, and by the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. We know from the bitter experience of the Vietnam war that the United States cannot engage in military action of a protracted nature without public support, and the first place to seek the public support is in the Congress of the United States in our representative capacity. It is more than something which is desirable; it is something which is mandated by the constitutional provision that grants exclusive authority to the Congress of the United States to declare war. We have seen a transition as to what constitutes a war--in Korea, where there was no declaration of war by the Congress, in Vietnam, where there was no declaration of war by the Congress. And we have seen the adoption of the War Powers Act as an effort to strike a balance between congressional authority to declare war and the President's authority as Commander in Chief; and, as provided under the War Powers Act, where there are imminent hostilities, the President is required to consult in advance with the Congress and to make prompt reports to the Congress, although the President does have the authority to act in case of emergency. My legal judgment is that the President does have authority as Commander in Chief to act in an emergency, even in the absence of the War Powers Act. But when there is time for action by the Congress of the United States, then that action ought to be taken by the Congress on the use of force, which is tantamount to war, which we saw in the gulf in 1991 where the Congress did act. And we may see--we all hope we do not see it--but we may see that in Iraq at the present time. The Congress is soon to go out of session in advance of the November elections. While we are here, this issue ought to be considered by the Congress of the United States as to whether we are going to have the use of force. In the meeting this morning, attended by many Members of the House and Senate, both Democrats and Republicans, there was considerable question raised on both sides of the aisle as to what our policy is at the present time, whether we have a coherent policy as to what we are going to do there, not only how we get in but how we get out, and what our policy ought to be. Those policy issues are really matters which ought to be debated by the Congress of the United States and acted upon by the Congress of the United States. We know there is a considerable problem that we face today on getting support from our allies, and that is an indispensable prerequisite, it seems to me, for action by the United States military forces. We have seen the deployment of air power all the way from Guam for missile strikes, and yet we wonder why we are not using air power from Saudi Arabia or from Turkey, and the question is raised as to whether the Saudis or the people in command of Turkey are willing to allow us to use their bases for these air strikes. When it comes to the issue of containment, representations were made by key administration officials that there is a full and total support by the Saudis for our efforts to contain Saddam Hussein, but that when it comes to the issue of air strikes, the same cannot be said; there is less than a full measure of support from the Saudis. So that when we deal with the issue of how much force the United States of America ought to use in the gulf against Saddam Hussein, those are the issues which ought to be considered by Congress, and we ought to have a statement of particularity as to just how much support we are going to get from our allies. We know the French, illustratively, will refuse to supply in the expanded zone to the 33d parallel. There have been reports from Kuwait that the Kuwait Government is not prepared, not really willing to have us expand our military forces there. There is some dispute about that, with representations being made by the administration that the media reports have been overblown and that there is really cooperation from Kuwait and from Bahrain and from others. But on the face of what is at least the public record, there is a serious question as to whether we do have real support among our allies. That is something which has to be considered in some detail. In our meeting this morning, reservations were expressed by Members on both sides of the aisle, and there was a question as to what we ought to be doing with Saudi Arabia in terms of long-range policy and long-range planning. When we moved into the gulf war in 1991, it was an emergency situation, but the plan was supposed to enable the Saudis to have time to defend themselves and to take action in their own defense, and that has not happened. Every time Saddam Hussein moves, there is significant expenditure of U.S. resources and U.S. money. In the middle of the discussion, we had the point raised about whether the defense budget is adequate and a very blunt reference to the Chief of Staff, Mr. Panetta, as to agreeing to the figures which have come from the appropriators, and that also was obviously a matter of fundamental importance by the Congress because we are the appropriators and we have had the administration take the position that the administration does not like what the Congress is doing by way of appropriations. But the administration is coming in with a very expensive operation, and it may be justified, it may be warranted, it may be necessary, but that is a matter for the Congress to decide as to what our policy should be and how much money we are prepared to spend. In the meeting today, the question was raised rather bluntly about the credibility of the administration in expanding the no-fly zone to the south when the actions come against the Kurds in the north, and there seems to be a consensus that the action taken thus far by the administration has not weakened Saddam Hussein but has strengthened Saddam Hussein and that he did, in fact, receive cover when certain Kurdish leaders invited him in; and there is a distinction to be made about what the United States will do for a vital U.S. interest contrasted with what we might do for humanitarian purposes, and that while U.S. military personnel may be placed in harm's way where we have an issue of a vital national interest, there may be a difference of opinion if we are dealing with a humanitarian consideration. Mr. President, all of this boils down to the judgment, my judgment, that the American people today are not informed about what the administration is seeking to do in the gulf and what the administration is seeking to do against Saddam Hussein, and the Congress has not been consulted in advance of the initial missile strikes and has been, in my view, inadequately informed as we have proceeded. When you deal with the use of force, which is tantamount to war, that is a matter to be decided by the Congress of the United States, leaving to the President his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief to act in cases of emergency. But at this time we do not have an emergency. We have time for deliberation in the Congress, for debate in this Chamber and the floor of the House of Representatives to decide what our policy should be, what we are prepared to spend, and how we ought to proceed. That is why in the meeting I asked the President to submit to the Congress his request for an authorization for the use of force so that matter could be decided by the Congress in accordance with constitutional provisions. Mr. President, I noted that I made that request to the President, and I commented about a letter which I had sent to the President yesterday on that subject. I ask unanimous consent that the text of that letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. SPECTER

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent I may speak in morning business for a period of up to 10 minutes.