Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, on behalf of the leader, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate immediately proceed to executive session to consider en bloc all of the military nominations reported by the Armed Services Committee today. I further ask unanimous consent that the nominations be confirmed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, any statements relating to the nominations appear in the Record, the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate then return to legislative session.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. If it is not disrupting Senator Warner's time, I want about 40 minutes, give or take 5 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. I will be. I want to talk some time tonight if it is not counted against other people's time.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I have enjoyed hearing two great Senators tonight, Senator John Warner, who chairs our Armed Services Committee, and Senator Carl Levin, who is the ranking member on that committee. They are able patriots who are skilled advocates and who do a great job of presenting their viewpoints. I have always said about Senator Levin that if I were in trouble, I would want him to defend me. I think we have a foreign policy situation that is in trouble, and he does a good job of defending it. It is more than a legal question, however. It is a question of policy. It is a question of the commitment of American troops. It is a question of the wealth of the United States being committed to this area of the world. I do believe our troops are doing a great job. Last year, I had the privilege, within 10 days of the end of the bombing in Kosovo, to travel there with Senator Levin and two other Senators. We toured that area. I returned there, not too many weeks ago, for my second visit at Easter time. We had the privilege of meeting with troops and touring the area and celebrating Easter Sunrise Services with our troops there. Our soldiers--men and women--are extraordinarily skilled. They are doing a great job for our country. They do what we ask of them. They have good morale. I will assure you that the morale of our soldiers is not going to be undermined if the Congress of the United States says: We are going to review this matter come next August or September or October--which is probably when we would do it because I think that is Senator Warner's and Senator Byrd's commitment; it would actually be next October, 17 months from now. They are not going to have their morale hurt because we have not forgotten them. They are not going to have their morale hurt if the Members of the Senate are discussing what is going on there and evaluating the situation. That is a matter that strikes me as really not good to be said. I would dispute that. The intervention and the whole commencement of this exercise in Kosovo has been a colossal failure of diplomacy and a colossal failure of foreign policy. That is my view of it. I do not claim to be a thorough foreign policy expert, but I have watched this matter from the beginning. A lot of people have not done so. We have gotten confused about what has happened. Senator John Warner, time and time and time again, since this involvement in Kosovo began, has done his best to support the President, even when he had doubts about it. He supported the Secretary of Defense; he supported the Chief of Staff; he supported General Clark because he felt it was his duty to do so. I know he was uneasy about that. But how long do we go? It has been a year now. We are talking about having a vote a year from now again to see whether or not we want to continue there. What is so dangerous about that? Why are people so afraid to have a debate and a vote? I do not understand that. I think it is our duty, as Members of Congress, who represent the taxpayers of this country--who pay our salaries and pay the cost of that war effort that has come out of our defense budget--to confront this question and make some decisions about it. If anything, I believe we have been too lax. We have been too unwilling to confront the challenges that have occurred and too unwise about how to go about that. So this Warner-Byrd amendment is a bipartisan amendment. It came out of the committee 23-3. That is the kind of vote we got in the committee. It has powerful support, broad bipartisan support. It is not extreme. It is not irrational. It is not going to cause NATO to collapse. We have done our bit in Kosovo. Make no mistake about that. We have done our bit there. So the Congress has been patient. We have supported the President. He consistently misled the people of the United States and this Congress. I remember upstairs, in the secret room, we had our briefings. And they started talking about this bombing. They said it might be over in 3 days; it might be over in 10 days. I remember one of our Senators asked: What if it is not? What if the bombing does not work? What do we do then? And they said: We believe it is going to work. I decided then if we did not have a plan better than that, we did not need to go into this operation. But let me share what really happened. Basically, what happened in this area, as I see it, is Milosevic started a nationalist campaign in Serbia and Yugoslavia that was very dangerous, horrible, unwise, that destabilized this whole area and helped lead to the tragedies that we have today. There is no mistaking that. Remember now, though, before this bombing started we had 1,000-plus peacekeepers in Kosovo. We had some violence, periodic violence. This was with KLA guerrillas fighting, ostensibly, the Serb Government. So we had a situation there which was definitely deteriorating in some ways. The Serb and KLA forces were sparring, but it was not out of control. We had 1,000 peacekeepers there. We made a number of efforts to negotiate a peace agreement that could have provided for an orderly transition in that area to a more just society. That was our goal and responsibility. I think it was a challenge that was difficult but could be met. Not long ago, in the Old Senate Chamber, right off the Rotunda of this Capitol, we had Senator George Mitchell, who did the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland, as our speaker at the Majority Leader's Lecture Series. He told us how he accomplished it in the face of the intractable forces that seemed to be at work. He said: There we kept talking. He said: I learned from the Senate that people can talk and talk and talk. And I would let them talk. They would talk and talk and talk. They would completely get everything out of their system. We would stay there into the night, day after day after day. Tensions began to go down. People began to think more clearly about the possibility they could work out their differences. But that is not what happened here. I have often thought if we had had George Mitchell in Yugoslavia instead of the ``masters of the universe'' that we did have, who thought they could dictate a peace agreement and make it happen, we might have avoided this war. The fact is, as the Economist Magazine said a few weeks ago, maybe it could not have been avoided, but it did not have to be started as soon as it did, and there was a chance it could have been avoided if we kept the negotiations going. I have no doubt about that. Remember what happened. Our leadership demanded that the Serbs and the KLA--the Kosovars--come to Rambouillet, France, where we would begin to have a peace conference. We were just going to settle this thing, like a mama bringing two children together. We were just going to bring them together, and we were going to get together and settle this once and for all. And as time went along, the President said: You are going to reach a peace agreement, or the United States is going to bomb you. NATO is going to bomb you. They would not agree. They kept on fussing, and they could not reach the agreement. Things were really tense. Henry Kissinger referred to that as a reckless event; it is a dangerous, high-risk operation to risk everything on a Rambouillet peace conference under those circumstances. I asked Secretary of Defense Cohen--and I serve on the Armed Services Committee--in the history of the United States, had he ever known of a circumstance in which the United States got two contesting, contending parties together and said, if you don't agree to the peace agreement I write up, we are going to bomb you? Of course he said no. This is unprecedented, in my observation, in the history of the world. So we did that, and we undertook this reckless gamble, and we were just going to force these people to do it. You remember, even the Kosovars would not agree. They left the agreement, and then the Serbs were going to leave the agreement. Apparently the Americans told the Kosovars: You come back and sign this thing because we really will bomb these guys. If you will sign it, we will make them sign it. So they came back and the Kosovars signed, but the Serbs would not. By the way, the agreement we were asking them to sign basically said we can send troops throughout Yugoslavia, anywhere we want to--NATO can send troops anywhere. It is very difficult for any nation that had any respect for its sovereignty to agree to some of the things that were in that agreement. Regardless, they would not sign it. Days went by, time went by, and people were saying: You promised, Mr. President, you were going to bomb. You are not going to bomb. You can't be trusted. Your word was not good. He was under investigation and had his credibility questioned severely right in this body by the American people. So it was a question of would he follow through on his worldwide public commitment to start a war. Of course, eventually, he did. He started to bomb. I want to mention how that was conducted, but I will just say this about it. The Air Force general who conducted that war testified in a postwar congressional hearing in the Armed Services Committee, and I was there. I remember asking him--he was unhappy with the fact that he was not allowed to start the bombing aggressively, that he was dictated to targets he could go after. There were only certain limited targets, and it was a slow start. He opposed that privately. He was very aggressive, and he warned that that was not the way to do a war. If you are going to get involved, you have to go with full force, aggressively at the beginning. We have learned that over the years in this country. But, oh, no, we had to get all 17 NATO nations to sign off on every target. And somebody would object, and they would object, and you could not do this target or that target, and only these limited targets so nobody would be injured, and we started off with this slow bombing campaign. Now, 3 days after that, the big event happened. Remember, we have been told repeatedly that the reason this war commenced--and we have almost forgotten the true facts of the situation, but we were told we were commencing and carrying out this war to stop ethnic cleansing. There had not been ethnic cleansing until the bombing started. It was 3 days after the bombing started that Milosevic sent his troops south into one of the most vicious displays of violence that I suppose anyone has ever seen against a basically defenseless people. They burned houses, ran people out, moved families and children. You saw them on TV. They were on wagons; they were walking; they were on mules and on horses, trying to survive in those camps. They ran them out. I say to you, do not let anybody make the case that we had to bomb to stop that kind of ethnic cleansing. The ethnic cleansing started after we started the bombing--3 days. This effort with the NATO air campaign--what a blunder that was. By the way, we also announced that in the conduct of this war we would never use ground troops. That gave Milosevic a serious basis for confidence that certain things would not happen. He would not be threatened by events by which he could otherwise have been threatened. We were unwilling to use troops. He didn't have to prepare certain defenses because we eliminated the possibility that ground troops would be used. We were told this would be a joint air effort and we would have planes from other countries. Others did participate, but 75 percent of the actual combat missions were flown by U.S. pilots. In fact, it is a true statement to say that NATO meant to deploy the U.S. Air Force. They told our Air Force whom to bomb, when to bomb, and how to do it. They rejected our air commander's advice about how to conduct the war, and even General Clark's advice on many matters. So I asked our Air Force commander did he oppose this and did he think it was wrong the way they started controlling the targets he thought should have been hit. He said, ``Yes.'' I asked him, ``Did this prolong the war?'' He said, ``Yes.'' I said, ``Did it cost innocent lives because they didn't follow your advice?'' He said, ``Yes, sir.'' Why? Because President Clinton and Schroder and Tony Blair were conducting a political war, not a real war, in many ways. It took 78 days to complete this thing, resulting in the complete ethnic cleansing of Kosovo and extraordinary damage in Yugoslavia and in Kosovo and in areas surrounding there--a colossal disaster. How can anybody suggest otherwise? This was not a great victory, as some have tried to portray it. It was a disaster that, Lord knows, we should have done everything to avoid. As Henry Kissinger and others told us: If we get in there and deploy, it is going to be difficult to get out. We are going to be stuck. You do not want to be committed in the midst of these hostilities to a long-term occupation in Kosovo and those areas. You will find it difficult to get out. That is exactly what happened. In addition to this, our relationship with Russia soured. Russia is a big-time world power. Russia had the opportunity to be our ally. But our relationship with Russia over the last number of years has deteriorated. If you think this war didn't have anything to do with it, you are mistaken. They were very upset about the way this was conducted. It was basically a NATO attack on a non-NATO nation which posed no real military threat to any other NATO nation. They didn't like that. They have an identity with the Serbs. So it made the Russians very unhappy. Another nation that was very unhappy and with whom our relationship suffered was China. We, in the course of this, hit a Chinese embassy. They didn't like this from the beginning. They didn't like the idea of NATO attacking an independent sovereign nation. They opposed that and were paranoid about that. Then we hit their embassy, and that made it worse. We were told we had to end this war to help the economic growth and prosperity in the Balkans. Well, let me ask you, does anybody believe this war has helped the economic condition in Kosovo, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, or Macedonia? It has been a very unfortunate setback for those areas. Investment has slowed down substantially. People are nervous about investing in Yugoslavia and in those other areas. Don't forget, Yugoslavia itself has really been savaged. The whole area has not benefited, in my view, as a result of this war. How can it be argued otherwise? It has been a constant drain on our defense budget. I serve on the Armed Services Committee. I am very concerned about our inability to find necessary funds to take care of our soldiers' salaries and health care, and to keep our retention and recruitment up. Every day I see a need to invest in new weapons that we may need to have on the battlefield 10 or 15 years from now. We don't have the money to do it. I see $2 billion--$1.7 billion in consecutive years--going into Kosovo. That is real money that could do incredible things for our Defense Department. We are also troubled by Operation Tempo, the OPTEMPO, and the requirements placed on our men and women in uniform to be away from home. When you are there you see how dedicated our men and women are. When I was there this past Easter, we arrived at Camp Eagle Saturday night at 7 or 8 o'clock. I was there at 8:30 p.m., and a young officer that I knew asked me if I would be interested in speaking to a class. I said sure, I would be glad to. It was a political science class. ``Come on and go with me.'' I was walking off. This is Easter Sunday, a weekend, on a Saturday night at 8:30. There is a class going on. Sure enough, there were 25 soldiers studying a college class after a full day at work. The hours are basically 12 hours a day, or 10 hours a day, and sometimes 14 or 15 hours a day, counting PD. They give themselves totally to it and are tremendous soldiers. They are doing what they are called upon to do. We also were there when with the Texas National Guard. We visited them. The Texas National Guard has 700 National Guard members who were taken from their communities and sent there to operate the command center. They are doing a great job. But with regard to all of the soldiers, guardsmen, and active duty, they have families. They know that this is not an action that is critical to the national security. They feel as if they are helping. They feel as if they may be keeping people from shooting one another. But they wonder if it is ever going to end. Is it getting any better? Are they in the long term really being successful in what they are doing? When they call their wives and family--they have young children--they wonder whether they need to reenlist because they count up how many months and weeks and days of the last 1, 2, 3, or 4 years they have been away from their home while their children are growing up. They are wondering whether or not they want to reenlist and stay in. We can't ask too much of our soldiers. We have a limited number of troops. Our active duty forces are down 40 percent, really more than 40 percent in personnel since the wall fell. That is a major reduction. But our OPTEMPO is higher than it has been any time in recent memory. We have troops committed all over the world. It drains us financially. It drains our families and servicemen and servicewomen. It causes them to wonder about whether or not they should reenlist. I don't think it is wise. We have to be sure what we do. I suggest that this Congress has been supportive of our troops. We made sure they had sufficient resources to build quarters, if the Army asked for them. If you go over there and look at them, they are permanent quarters. We are talking about having our troops out shortly. We bring a police force in, and when we create a local government, our troops get out. I was in Bosnia and Kosovo a few weeks ago. When we asked how long they would be here, and how long will it be before you can leave, they had no answer. They just would not say. They would not tell you that they saw any prospect that circumstances were such they could easily leave. In Bosnia, after 5 years of commitment, they were just a few weeks ago having city elections. Can you imagine that? The United Nations is supposed to create civil government. We are supposed to be able to get our troops out. It has been 5 years, and they just now are beginning to have a civil government. Many nations committed to sending over 5,000 police to Kosovo. These are retired police officers, and police officers who took a leave from various countries. They were supposed to go into the towns and cities in Kosovo and help create law and order, create a legal system, and create a government. We wanted to have government there. It is not happening. We have committed our police there. But many of the NATO countries have not gotten their police there. They have not been effectively led, in my opinion, by the United Nations. The government building plans of the United Nations are not being effectively carried out. What does that mean? Does that mean we just stay there forever? Both Senator Warner and Senator Byrd are saying we need to talk about this thing. We represent the people of the United States of America who are putting up $2 billion a year for this operation, and we want to know what is going on. I don't often agree with Barney Frank in the House of Representatives, but he said in the debate on this issue that we are just ``enabling'' the Europeans and the U.N. in their bad habits. We are enabling them. We could stay there, stay there, stay there, and they don't have to complete what they promised to complete to create a civil government. Who pays the bill? The American taxpayers pay the bill. We have a responsibility in this Congress. We have not really had a debate in this Congress since we voted on whether or not to allow the President to proceed with the air war when it happened. We have not discussed this issue seriously. The American people have not heard it discussed here, and neither have we debated it on the floor of this Senate. I salute Senator Warner and Senator Byrd for, if nothing else, causing this debate to be joined. People ask me about it. How did this happen? I thought you had to declare war. What is the matter with you Congressmen and Senators? The President just sends troops anywhere, starts dropping bombs anywhere, and you guys are just there like a potted plant? That is basically what has happened. We have been sitting here allowing it to go on and enabling the Europeans and the U.N. to fail to fulfill their responsibilities while the taxpayers pay the bill. I wish it weren't so. I think the people in Kosovo and in Bosnia are wonderful people. I don't know how they got into this kind of hatred and bitterness that leads to this kind of violence. But it is reality. We have the ability to do something about it. I recall that General MacArthur was able to create a government in Japan, and General Marshall and General Eisenhower reestablished Germany after being devastated in World War II. We have a situation in which nobody is really in charge. Nobody is being held accountable. At our hearings, the witnesses and even the military witnesses started talking about the international community. I asked: Who is the international community? Well, it is the groups of NGOs, private organizations, the World Bank, and NATO and all these things. I said: Do they meet somewhere? Do they vote? Do they make commitments? Do they sign agreements that they will do certain things as a group, this international community? No. Who does? NATO, U.N., and individual nations. That is who makes agreements that stick by them or don't stick by them. We have not held the U.N., NATO, and European nations accountable. We have enabled them to continue in their bad activities. We need to stop that. We have a responsibility. I am not saying we need to pull out right now. They say: Just vote to cut off funds; that is all you have to do. Don't vote for this resolution; it is something next year. Just vote to cut off funds. What would happen if we did that? They would say: This is horrible. You can't vote to cut off funds. We haven't made any plans for it. You just up and cut off funds; that is an unwise and risky thing. I agree. I don't think it would be wise to vote to cut off all funds and bring troops home tomorrow. I am not sure that is a wise process. I like the idea of this amendment that says: NATO and all the European nations, if you don't fulfill your commitments, we are getting out of there. NATO, other European nations, we expect some progress made in establishing a civil government and we will vote a year from now and debate this issue. We hope things are improving and we can continue to be phasing down our troops and getting ourselves out of there. But you need to know that we are not a rubber stamp or a potted plant. This Congress does not have to keep funding this operation. You can be sure next July we will have that vote and some progress needs to be made. We need to see something working. The truth is, we are stuck. The question is, How do we get unstuck? Just vote to get out all at once? I think this kind of legislation is far better. I believe it is the right approach. I salute Chairman Warner. Somebody said a majority of the House of Representatives didn't vote to support this effort. They didn't vote to support it. They didn't support it. They didn't think it was a good idea. They allowed the President to do it, and they provided the funds to him to do it but they haven't liked it. When called on to vote, they didn't vote for it. Mr. President, 39 out of 100 Senators in this body voted against the bombing. It has never been a universally supported activity. I don't know why we would have been afraid to have a vote. Why would it be that the Senate would be afraid to set a date to have a debate? I think that is what we should do. Let me say one more thing as I begin to close and bring this into context. I do not believe our Nation should be isolationist. I do not believe our Nation should withdraw from the world. I do believe there may be times that we are going to have to intervene all by ourselves, perhaps to preserve humanitarian rights, to protect the lives of innocent human beings when we have no strategic interest at all. But we have to be careful about that. We provided the military force, the air force to win this war. This is a European area. It is the backdoor of Europe. Kosovo has only 2 million people. We will debate in a few days giving aid to Colombia; Colombia is a nation of 38 million. No other country will help Colombia. On a scale of 1 to 10, they are far, far more important to this country than Kosovo, an agrarian area in the backdoor of Europe where European nations have a much more important interest in it than we do. We helped them. We did our role for NATO. We won the war. We did the bombing. We got the Kosovars home. I would never have proposed stopping that bombing after those Kosovar people had been run out of their homes. We had to see it through to the end once it started. I believe it could have been avoided. It strikes me odd that many Members on the other side of the aisle, the Democratic side of the aisle, tenaciously fought President Bush in his effort to deal with the problem in Iraq and Kuwait. That effort was clearly in the national interests of the United States. Saddam Hussein was an expansionist. He moved, using the wealth he had and the large population and army he had--unlike little Kosovo--south into an independent nation that had even more oil and took that nation of Kuwait. Everybody knew he would be turning his attention next to the other gulf states, to Saudi Arabia, and his plan was to take over all of the Middle East and all of its oil and use that wealth to create an army that could threaten the peace of the whole region. That was a threat. It was opposed almost unanimously by the Democrats in this body. By only a few votes was President Bush able to convince us of that war, a critical act for the United States. It would have been an absolute disaster had we allowed that to happen. We had to act. That is what the role of the United States is. This didn't meet any of those criteria. It does surprise me where we don't have a national interest, people want to involve themselves. Our resources are limited. I have been on the budget. We need the best soldiers, the best planes, and the best weapons in the world. We never want to see our soldiers be subjected to the kind of attacks of the Iraqi Army, being slaughtered by superior force. We never want to see that happen. How do we keep it from happening? We maintain a technological edge. How do we do it? We spend money on it. But if we are spending $2 billion a year in Kosovo, spending money in Haiti, Somalia, or East Timor, time and time again, it affects our ability to modernize our military. Actually, it was that technology that allowed us to win. There are going to be other challenges. We will have other challenges. I believe we can meet them if we are not overdrawn. Recently, the Armed Services Committee heard from Ashton Carter, now a professor at Harvard. He served for several years as a high official in the Clinton Department of Defense. He talked about what the United States ought to be doing there. He said we keep talking about being in a post-cold-war era. He said that has been 10 years. All that means is we haven't developed a foreign policy for the future. That means we don't know what we are doing. We are in a post-cold-war era. We need a new vision for America. He suggested what we ought to do. He gave three lists of threats to this country: the A list, B list, and C list. The A list were threats from Russia, China, terrorism, and chemical warfare. This war in Kosovo has damaged our relationship with Russia and China. He listed a B list. He said a B list threat would be serious, perhaps a war in the theater of Northeast Asia or Southeast Asia, a major war in one of those areas. That could happen. That could threaten the United States. He listed a third list, the C list, and this is what he put on the C list: Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, Somalia, Haiti. His comments were that we are spending our time and our money reacting to events on the C list and not focusing our time and resources in confronting those threats that jeopardize the freedom and peace of this world. That is what the role of the United States is to be. We have to be ready for the big threat. There is a limit to how many of these wars in which we can be involving ourselves. Mr. President, I have great affection for the people I have gotten to know in Kosovo and Bosnia and Croatia. I am impressed with the struggles they are undergoing, and we want to help them, but we have done our bit. We have conducted this war. We have gotten the Kosovar people back home. We have done everything we could. I wish we had done it smarter, but we committed and we stayed through and we have gotten them there. Now the question is, Do we stay forever? Are we going to have an ability in this Congress to confront the future? Do we have a right to demand the President of the United States submit to us a plan for continuation there so we and the American people can evaluate it and vote yes or no? Is that unreasonable? Is that going to destroy NATO? Is that going to destroy the morale of our troops? I say no. As a matter of fact, it will be healthy for NATO to realize we are not going to continue to enable bad policies to continue. It will be good for our troops to know we are debating and caring about them, trying to make the right decision about them. I believe the Byrd-Warner bill is a reasonable and fair bill practically. I believe it validates the historic constitutional responsibilities of the great U.S. Senate. We are not potted plants. We do have a responsibility, and we ought to perform it. I salute Chairman Warner. I have never seen a person I admire more. I have never seen a person with greater commitment to the good of this country. He believes it is time for us to make some decisions, enter into some debate, and involve the American people. So I say it is the right thing to do. I have enjoyed being there, enjoyed meeting our troops. I do not want to do anything that would hurt them. But I am not one who believes we have to sit here and get a letter from General Wesley Clark and hide under the table. He did not get elected. He does not have the responsibility to make choices among health insurance, defense, and criminal justice, as we do. He does not have to go back to his voters and explain why it is in our critical national interest that their young men and women are committed around the globe, as we do. I believe we can improve this commitment. I believe we can improve our effort in the world if we talk about these issues more openly. I believe this bill will lead us in that direction and I support it. I am proud to do so.

Mr. SESSIONS. I will do my best.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation to help preserve the heritage of historic women's colleges and universities. The United States is presently at mid-point in observing the centennial of the creation of seven unique educational institutions. There were seven historic women's public colleges or universities founded in the United States between 1884 and 1908 to provide industrial education for women. They include: the University of Montevallo in Montevallo, Alabama; the Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, Mississippi; the Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, Georgia; the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina; the Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas; and the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, in Chickasha, Oklahoma. These seven public universities all were originally created to provide industrial and vocational education for women who at the time could not attend other public academic institutions. Following the industrial revolution, the United States found it desirable to promote agricultural, mechanical, and industrial education. Unfortunately, in seven States, the public agricultural and mechanical institutions created during this period were closed to women. A number of educational advocates for women, notably Miss Julia Tutwiler, a native of Alabama, had learned extensively about European industrial and vocational education and tirelessly advocated the creation of industrial and technical educational opportunities for women. In these States, through major and extended efforts by women like Miss Tutwiler and by agrarian organizations, separate public educational institutions were created by the respective State legislatures to provide industrial and technical education for women. These schools subsequently became coeducational but retain significant historical and academic features of those pioneering efforts to educate women. Currently these public institutions have critical capital needs related to their historic educational structures. Under this legislation, each school would receive $2 million in federal matching funding each year of the fiscal years 2001-2005. These funds, along with school funds, would be used for the preservation and restoration of historic buildings at these colleges and universities. These historically women's public colleges and universities have contributed significantly to the effort to attain equal opportunity through postsecondary education for women, low-income individuals, and educationally disadvantaged Americans. I believe it is our duty to do all we can to preserve these historic institutions and I ask my colleagues for their support. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I ask unanimous consent that the remaining time for debate prior to the vote be as follows: Senator Warner in control of 1 hour and 45 minutes, Senator Byrd in control of 1 hour, Senator Levin in control of 2 hours and 45 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until the hour of 9 a.m. on Thursday, May 18. I further ask unanimous consent that on Thursday, immediately following the prayer, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate then resume consideration of the military construction appropriations bill under the previous order, with Senators Lautenberg and Roberts to be recognized for up to 20 minutes and 15 minutes, respectively, in the order just stated.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. For the information of all Senators, the majority leader would like them to know that the Senate will resume consideration of the military construction appropriations legislation at 9 a.m. tomorrow. Under the order, there is approximately 5\1/2\ hours of debate remaining on the Levin amendment regarding Kosovo, with a vote scheduled to occur at 2:30 p.m. Following that vote, it is hoped the Senate can proceed to a vote on final passage of the bill. It is the intention of the leader to begin consideration of the foreign operations appropriations bill by tomorrow afternoon. Further votes are possible during tomorrow's session of the Senate.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I understand that H.R. 3709 is at the desk. I ask for its first reading.

Mr. SESSIONS. I ask for its second reading and object to my own request.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation to help preserve the heritage of historic women's colleges and universities. The United States is presently at mid-point in observing the centennial of the creation of seven unique educational institutions. There were seven historic women's public colleges or universities founded in the United States between 1884 and 1908 to provide industrial education for women. They include: the University of Montevallo in Montevallo, Alabama; the Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, Mississippi; the Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, Georgia; the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina; the Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas; and the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, in Chickasha, Oklahoma. These seven public universities all were originally created to provide industrial and vocational education for women who at the time could not attend other public academic institutions. Following the industrial revolution, the United States found it desirable to promote agricultural, mechanical, and industrial education. Unfortunately, in seven States, the public agricultural and mechanical institutions created during this period were closed to women. A number of educational advocates for women, notably Miss Julia Tutwiler, a native of Alabama, had learned extensively about European industrial and vocational education and tirelessly advocated the creation of industrial and technical educational opportunities for women. In these States, through major and extended efforts by women like Miss Tutwiler and by agrarian organizations, separate public educational institutions were created by the respective State legislatures to provide industrial and technical education for women. These schools subsequently became coeducational but retain significant historical and academic features of those pioneering efforts to educate women. Currently these public institutions have critical capital needs related to their historic educational structures. Under this legislation, each school would receive $2 million in federal matching funding each year of the fiscal years 2001-2005. These funds, along with school funds, would be used for the preservation and restoration of historic buildings at these colleges and universities. These historically women's public colleges and universities have contributed significantly to the effort to attain equal opportunity through postsecondary education for women, low-income individuals, and educationally disadvantaged Americans. I believe it is our duty to do all we can to preserve these historic institutions and I ask my colleagues for their support. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to a period for morning business with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. For the information of all Senators, the Senate will immediately resume consideration of the military construction appropriations bill at 9:30 tomorrow. Under the previous agreement, there will be 4 hours of debate on the pending Lott and Daschle amendments, with those votes occurring at 1:30 p.m. A vote on final passage of the bill is expected to occur on Wednesday. Therefore, additional votes can be expected, and Senators will be notified as those votes are scheduled. Following this bill, the Senate will begin consideration of the foreign operations appropriations bill.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I understand that S. 2567 is at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I now ask for its second reading, and I object to my own request.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. On behalf of the majority leader, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until the hour of 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, May 17. I further ask consent that on Wednesday, immediately following the prayer, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate then resume consideration of S. 2521, the military construction appropriations bill under the previous consent, with Senator Specter to be recognized for up to 30 minutes at 9:30 to speak, with his time being considered as being consumed from the majority leader's time.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I now ask unanimous consent the Senate stand in adjournment under the previous order.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from California. She is a most eloquent spokeswoman for her point of view, and I do share many of her concerns. I do believe this: Too many people are dying and we can do something about it. I want to share tonight some of my ideas about what we can do about it. If we do the things I am talking about tonight, we can literally save thousands of lives. It is fair and accurate to say that as a direct result of the failure--it is shocking, stunning to me--of the Clinton administration to enforce existing firearm laws, thousands of people have died who otherwise would not have died. I say that as a person who spent 15 years as a Federal prosecutor working as an assistant U.S. attorney for 2\1/2\ years and almost 12 years as the U.S. attorney appointed to prosecute Federal criminal cases. In this body, we only deal with laws that apply to Federal criminal cases, not State cases. We can save lives, but ask anybody who is a long-time, good student on the subject of crime in America, ``Do you think a law that would stop the sale of guns at gun shows is going to stop people from getting killed?'' and they will laugh at you. This is not something that is going to have a serious impact on crime in America, but it does have the capacity to seriously undermine a popular institution of gun shows because it delays for so long sales of guns and the gun show activities have closed and people are gone. It just does not work well. People have objected to that. That is where we are today. I am frustrated, as I know the Chair is, because we are now back on this issue. The bill before this body is a military construction bill. We need to address certain matters of construction for our military bases and men and women in the service. We need to focus on that and get serious about it. The majority leader, Trent Lott, knows what we have to do. We have 13 appropriations bills to pass. Are we going to every day have some other controversial, nongermane, irrelevant amendment brought forward disrupting the flow of the Senate and keeping us from doing the job we want to do? Is that what is going to happen? That is why he has stood firm. No, we are going to stay on military construction; we do not need to be on the issue of gun laws today. It is a tactic. I know the Senator is most eloquent, but she also said basically the truth. She said it was a political issue; the Democrats want to use this in the fall. I suggest they are just playing politics and not talking about matters that will make our streets safer and our schools safer. I will talk about those in a minute. Politics is not what we need to be doing now. The gun laws we debated in this body some time ago are, in fact, in conference. They passed this Senate. We passed a gun show law. Virtually everybody here voted for major restrictions on the gun show operations. The Lautenberg amendment was contested. Many believed the Lautenberg amendment went too far and disrupted a favored institution in America--the gun show. We had a vote on it after a great debate, the thing the Democrats want to continue, apparently. We had a 50-50 tie. The Vice President sat in the Presiding Officer's chair and, with great pomp and circumstance, broke the tie in favor of the amendment, walked out here, and immediately had a press conference and accused those of us who did not agree with his view on the details of this gun show law of not caring about children, not caring about crime, being indifferent to murder. I was offended by that. I remain offended by that because I have committed a better part of my professional life to prosecuting criminals and caring about crime and victims. I know them personally. I personally tried approximately 100 gun cases myself, and under my supervision hundreds of gun cases have been prosecuted. I think I know something about this. I want to share some thoughts about that today. I start off by discussing some basic issues. I am delighted the mothers were in town. Most of all, they remind us that children, young people, adults, family members, ourselves, are in danger in America because of violence and that this Nation needs to use the expertise, knowledge, skill, and scientific data to do what we can as a Congress to make this country safer. We can do that. How can we reduce crime? How can we save children's lives? How can we save adult lives? How can we make our communities safer? I have studied this for 17 years as a prosecutor. I have read reports and studies of the Department of Justice. I have observed personally and tried to see what was going on around me, and I want to share some things with you about crime in America. During the sixties and seventies, as the Chair mentioned so eloquently in his remarks, crime in this country more than doubled. It tripled, maybe even quadrupled. We had double-digit increases--15-, 17-, 18-percent crime increases-- a year in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a direct result, in my opinion, of a breakdown of discipline, a breakdown of family, an increase in drug use, and a disconnect and a lack of respect for authority in America. Our leaders in our colleges and universities, they all said it was ``cool,'' it was ``doing your own thing,'' it was ``seeking fulfillment,'' and you should not teach children to just always be automatons and just follow orders; that they ought to be allowed to express themselves. They said people were not responsible for their own acts. They said crime was a product of finances; how much money you had would affect whether you were a criminal or not--all kinds of things like that. People who are listening to me today, who lived during those times, know I am not exaggerating. As a result, even though crime was going up dramatically, we had no increase really in the number of people in jail. We had a belief afoot in the land, by many of our brightest people, that jail did not work. They would say that putting people in jail just made them meaner, that it was no good, we needed to treat the root cause of crime, whatever that was, and we needed to increase welfare spending and just give people more money; that we could just sort of buy them off. Then they would not riot, rob, steal, rape, and kill. I am telling you, that is basically what the deal was in the 1960s and 1970s. The critical point came when Ronald Reagan ran for President, and he promised he was going to promote law and order in this country. He made a serious commitment; he was going to create a war on drugs. He did that. He set about to appoint prosecutors, such as Jeff Sessions, in Mobile, AL, and 94 others in the districts around this country. He told us to get out there and utilize the skills and abilities and laws we had to fight crime. This Senate and this Congress passed some extraordinarily effective and tough laws that had already passed a number of years earlier under President Nixon--a Speedy Trial Act that said cases had to be tried in 70 days. That is so much shorter than what goes on in most State courts today. The Federal Speedy Trial Act of 70 days is a very firm rule, and cases are normally tried within 70 days. In addition to that, in the 1980s, under President Reagan, they passed a law that eliminated parole. It said that whatever sentence you got, you served it, virtually day for day. It eliminated parole, so a criminal who was sentenced would serve the time the judge gave him. We called that ``honesty in sentencing.'' We said it was time to quit joking about giving someone 30 years and having them serve 6 and be right back out on the streets again, robbing and raping and doing other kinds of criminal activities. So we had the honesty in sentencing. Then we had mandatory sentencing. Sentencing guidelines were set up. Minimum mandatory sentences were set forth under President Reagan and into President Bush's term. Those sentences were very effective. We had an expert group of judges, and others, who analyzed the kinds of crimes and helped establish the statutory range of guidelines for judges to sentence within. The mandatory minimums said, for example, regardless of what else may happen, if you carry a gun during any crime, including a drug crime, you have to be sentenced for 5 years, without parole, consecutive to the drug crime or the burglary or any other crime you may have been sentenced for in Federal court. So those are the kinds of things that happened. And the Federal courts improved themselves dramatically. During those 12 years I served as U.S. attorney, a major factor dawned on me. We were making some progress. Crime in America began to drop in a number of the years--maybe a majority of the years under President Reagan's leadership. But it was not always down. In some years it started up, or the crime did not drop enough. I wondered, what could we do? Many questioned whether these sentencing guidelines were working or not. Then it dawned on me why we were not having the impact. It was so simple as to be obvious to anybody who gave any thought to it. Federal court only tries 2, 3, 1 percent of all the crimes in America; 95, 97, 98 percent of all crimes tried in America are tried in State courts, not Federal. Even though the Federal court had set the example for the State courts, it could not itself, in effect, change the climate in America. Over the past number of years, State court systems have gotten fed up. They realized that the revolving-door mentality of just arresting people, releasing them on bail, trying them 2 years later, letting them plead guilty to 6 months, and having them in a halfway house and then back on the streets, selling drugs, conducting crime, was not effective; and they passed all kinds of repeat dangerous offender laws. You heard the ``three strikes and you're out'' laws passed in many States. The third time you are convicted of a felony, you serve life without parole. All kinds of laws such as that were passed in virtually every State in this country. They got tough and serious about crime in America and said: We are not going to take it anymore. We are not going to allow people who threaten the lives of our children to be released on the streets. And from 1990 to today, the prison population in America has doubled--more than doubled. Many people complain about it. They say to me: Jeff, we have too many people in jail. That is just too many. Oh, this is awful. One person told me one time: If we keep this up, everybody is going to be in prison. Of course, that is a joke. Everybody does not commit crimes. Everybody does not rob, rape, shoot, and kill. No, sir. We have gotten serious about it. We focused on the repeat dangerous offender and did something about it. The Rand Corporation, a number of years ago, did a very important study. In this study, they interviewed, in depth, people in prison all over, but I believe it was mainly in California. They interviewed lots of people in prison, in depth, for hours, about what their life was like when they were out involving themselves in crime. They found some amazing facts. They found that a significant number, although less than a majority of those in prison, were very much criminally inclined, that they were committing as many as 300 crimes a year. Three hundred crimes a year they were committing. It gave further impetus to and further basis for these ``three strikes and you're out'' laws and multiple-offender laws. You might say: They would not commit 300 crimes a year, Jeff. They must not be telling the truth. But listen to me. There are 365 days in a year. Some of these criminals go out and knock ladies down, take their purses two or three times a night, break into cars, steal cars, break into houses, break into stores and office places multiple times in one night. Many of them are committing 200, 300 crimes a year; some of them more than that. So we began to focus on that, and, since about 1990, we have had a decline in the crime rate in America every year. This past year, we just had the announcement that the murder rate dropped 7 percent in America. I was proud to see that. They can have all the theories they want, but I tell you, there are not that many people in my hometown of Mobile, AL, who are willing to come out and shoot you. There are just not that many of them. And if you identify them when they go out and start committing crimes, and put them in jail, they are not going to be out there to shoot you, your family, your children, your loved ones. They are not going to be there. I wish there were some way we could do something different. I wish we could have a class for prisoners where they could take this class and in 6 months we could release them where they would not commit crimes. You will hear of people who cite studies and say: Oh, this cures people, and they do not ever commit crime again. Look at them closely. If that were so, we would already be doing it. Trust me. Nobody would oppose that. Nobody would oppose that. But for the most part they do not work. They may help some--and I am not against these kinds of programs--but, fundamentally, many people who are definitely criminally inclined will continue to be so. So we made some big progress. The city of Miami--many of you will remember the commitment President Bush made when he went down there to head the task force in Miami when he was Vice President. They were using automatic weapons, machine guns, MAC-11s, slaughtering people. Colombian gangs were operating almost at will. They said they were going to do something about it. Over a period of years, Miami has been relieved of those kinds of violent shootings. You almost never hear of a shooting with an automatic weapon in Miami anymore. It was brought to a halt. By the way, it has been a crime since the days of Al Capone to have a machine gun. In the midseventies, when I was an assistant U.S. attorney, we prosecuted every one of those cases where people had machine guns, fully automatic weapons. So this idea that somehow we need to pass laws to keep people from carrying AK-47s--and you hear that all the time--it is already against the law to carry those weapons. It has been in the law for some number of years. Boston, MA, a few years ago, was very concerned about the number of murders in their town. They wanted to do something about it. My staff members went up and studied their program because we heard such good comments about what they had done. They took young people seriously. When a young person got in trouble in the juvenile court in Boston, they weren't only given probation and sent home. They had a police officer and a probation officer--and they changed their hours; they worked from 3 o'clock in the afternoon to 10 o'clock at night, and the police officer would go out with the probation officer, and if the curfew was at 7 o'clock for young Billy, they knocked on Billy's door at 7 o'clock or 7:30 to see if he was home at night. If he wasn't home, something was done. Almost all of a sudden, they began to realize that these people meant business. They really cared about them. If you care about these young people, you will make sure they are obeying the rules you give them. They targeted gang members who were leading gangs and getting involved in criminal activities and told them: If you keep this up, you are going to serve big time in jail. They sent criminals away for long periods. They broke up the gangs and they went a year without a single juvenile homicide in Boston. I thought it was a good program. That is why, as chairman of the juvenile crime subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, we put that kind of effort into our juvenile crime bill that is now being held up in conference. That would have been supported financially by the Federal Government, encouraging other cities to do those kinds of things that would reduce crime. But let me ask you, do you think we are going to save lives in Boston, MA, by passing a law to eliminate gun shows in America? It is not going to have anything to do with that crime. So we need to do those kinds of things. Another city that had an extraordinary success rate was Richmond, and I will talk about it in a minute. So what do we do? We have a juvenile crime bill that is being held up in committee. Let me tell you precisely why it is being held up, the way I see it. The Senator from California indicates she sees it a different way. Let me tell you the way I see it. We had this strong--too strong, in my opinion--gun show amendment. It did not have a majority of support in the Senate. The Senate tied 50/ 50. The Vice President came in here and broke the tie. Only 50 Members of this 100-Member body voted for that amendment. They voted for other amendments that would be less strong and less damaging to the gun show activities but at the same time tightening up the gun show situation. It went to the House of Representatives, a coequal body. For a bill to become law, it has to pass the Senate and the House. The House, on a bipartisan basis--John Dingell, Democrat from Michigan, and a number of other Democrats--voted against it, killed the Lautenberg amendment by a substantial vote. Now, Members of this body are saying the conference committee is supposed to work out a bill and has to put in an amendment that was rejected in the House and had a tie vote in the Senate. You don't normally do that. Why would we think the votes in those two Houses would justify that? Surely not. That is not logical. So they are saying, if you don't agree to put in this amendment that was rejected already in the House, we are going to block the bill and keep trying to offer amendments here every day to see if we can't embarrass you Republicans so we can have an election issue in November. That is what it is all about. But it is frustrating our ability to do our work because we have a military construction bill on the floor. That is what we need to deal with, taking care of that, not repeating the same old arguments we have had with gun laws. Let me tell you what I think ought to be done. In the juvenile crime bill, we have, I believe, $80 million for a project CUFF, Criminal Use of Firearms by Felons--just a title we came up with--that would provide special prosecutors in every U.S. attorney's office in America. It would, in effect, step up dramatically the Federal enforcement of criminal laws. By the way, when I became a Member of this Senate 3 years ago, I started looking at the U.S. attorneys' statistics. I knew how to use them. I reviewed them every year when I was a U.S. attorney. I pulled out the book. I was hearing from friends and people in the Department of Justice that this Department had allowed criminal prosecution to decline markedly. I looked at the numbers to see if it were true. I was shocked to find that, under the Clinton-Gore administration, prosecutions of criminal gun cases dropped from 7,000 to around 3,500-- nearly a 40-percent decline in the prosecutions of gun cases. I was shocked because every day the President of the United States and Vice President Gore were out there saying: All you Senators and Congressmen who won't pass more and more restrictions on innocent law- abiding citizens who want to possess guns are for crime, death, slaughter, and shootings. You guys are no good. You are not worthy of respect. You are just trash. You care about crime. You defend crime and you don't believe in children. Those are the kinds of things they were saying. At the same time, they had the power and authority to prosecute criminals who were actually using guns in criminal activities, and the prosecutions had dropped 40 percent. A stunning thing. I didn't ignore it. Nearly 3 years ago--within a year of my being in this office--I challenged the Attorney General herself, Janet Reno, about these numbers. She brushed off the debate. A deputy attorney general came before the committee and had private meetings when he was coming around to meet Senators. In his testimony, I asked him and demanded that they do better with the prosecutions of gun cases. The chief of the criminal division came by, as did two criminal division chiefs. I raised it with them. I had charts. I wrote an op-ed in 1998, or so, on this very subject, expressing my shock at this amazing decline in prosecutions. The reason was that was a big deal for us. Under President George Bush, we were told to do something about these gun cases. We were Federal prosecutors appointed by the President of the United States. All 94 U.S. attorneys were appointed by the President of the United States as part of the executive branch. We had a project called Project Triggerlock. We had task forces with the sheriffs and the chiefs of police in our area. We met and discussed how to use these tough Federal laws for speedy trial actions with mandatory minimum sentences and no parole to crack down on violent criminals. I put together a newsletter. I called it Project Triggerlock News. I sent it to all of the chiefs of police and to all of the sheriffs in my district. I sent it to the detectives and law enforcement officers who I knew were working on these kinds of cases. We showed example after example of criminals who were carrying firearms, and whom we tried in Federal court with joint investigations and prosecutions, and they served a long period of time in jail and were removed from the community. I couldn't believe an administration that came into office talking about guns had abandoned this program. In fact, they had not totally abandoned it. Several years ago, the United States attorney in Richmond, VA, and the chief assistant who had been involved in these cases over the years got together with the chief of police in Richmond and determined to prosecute aggressively all Federal gun violations of existing law in Richmond, VA. They called their project Project Exile. They called it Project Exile because when they convicted them they got 5 or 10 years without parole. They didn't go to the halfway house in Richmond. They were sent off to a Federal prison maybe hundreds of miles away. They were gone, out of Richmond, away for long periods of time without parole. They did this consistently and aggressively. President Clinton's own U.S. attorney, his own appointee, testified that they had achieved a 40-percent reduction in murder rate--a 40- percent reduction. They did one thing that we didn't do. They put ads out about it. They put up posters: Carry a gun, mandatory Federal jail time. They were out to convince people that they better obey the law, and they had better not be misusing guns. They were successful at it. They reduced murder rates 40 percent. I asked Attorney General Reno if she was going to do something about that. Well, we are just going to let each district do what they want to, she said. Curiously, I had a hearing set. It was really remarkable to me. We had a hearing on this matter. It was set for Monday morning. The administration did not want us to have this hearing. They kept wanting to put it off. I had the U.S. attorney from Richmond, the chief of police, and some experienced prosecutors testify about this kind of thing. I was amazed to turn on my radio on Saturday. What do you think the President's radio address to the Nation was on? It was on Project Triggerlock, and Project Exile. He had the U.S. attorney from Richmond and the chief of police from Richmond in the White House with him while he was doing the address. And he bragged on it, and said how good it was. About 6 weeks later, the Attorney General came up. I had heard that they had not taken any action on it. They appointed some commission to talk about it, and no directives had gone out. I asked her about it. I remember asking her how the President sent her directives. Did he send them to her by writing or did she have to turn on the radio and listen to him? Because his exact words were, ``I am directing the Attorney General and the Secretary of Treasury to crack down on these kinds of criminals.'' To my knowledge, they still have not made the kind of progress that they should. Do you see the hypocrisy here? We have a plan in Richmond, VA, that I know as an experienced Federal prosecutor will save hundreds of lives and thousands of lives. In the time this administration has been in office, I believe I can say with confidence that thousands of people are dead today because Project Triggerlock was abandoned and this administration allowed crime prosecutions to plummet. That is a tragedy, and it is wrong. But, at the same time, when they come up to me, and they want to register handguns, or they want to close down gun shows, and if I don't vote for that, then I don't care about children, I don't care about people getting shot and killed in America. It burns me up. I do not like that. And why the media has not understood this fully is beyond my comprehension. They just continue to suggest that the only thing that counts in this country is whether or not you vote for further and further restrictions that implicate and sometimes really go beyond implicating but, in fact, violate the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States which guarantees the right to keep and bear arms. Somebody will say, well, they don't like that. Well, that is our Constitution. Put it up in an amendment, big boy, if you want to change it. Let's see them bring forward an amendment to eliminate the second amendment. There is no consensus for that in this country. It is part of the heritage of this country that people maintain firearms. We didn't have these kinds of murder rates in the 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s when a higher percentage of Americans had guns than they have today. I don't know of anybody where I grew up who didn't have a firearm. I say to you first and foremost, how do you reduce crime and murder and make our streets safer? Implement President Clinton's own Project Exile. Mr. President, direct that it be done. See that the Attorney General carries it out. Pass our juvenile crime bill which provides you even more money than you really need to carry out that project. I say you don't need any more money because we didn't need it when I was U.S. attorney. Why can't you prosecute these gun cases? They are not hard to prosecute. Really most of them are quite simple, and 80 or 90 percent plead guilty. It is a good way to crack down on violence in America. There is one more thing that I want to mention. We implemented the National Crime Information Center--the NCIC--background check. That is a computer-operated system. So if you go down to a gun store and attempt to buy a firearm, they can plug in your Social Security number, date of birth, whatever, and they can run an NCIC check on your criminal history to see if you are a convicted felon. Most of you may not know it, but if you are a convicted felon, you can't possess a firearm, period. You can't possess a shotgun, a rifle, or a pistol. Any convicted felon in America, even if it is a fraud case with no violence in it, cannot possess a firearm. We used to prosecute a lot of those cases of a ``felon in possession.'' That is what we called them. We found that in 13 months of this new NCIC system, 89,000 individuals were rejected. They could not buy a firearm because they had some problem. Many of them were felons. I submit to you they have already filled out a form. I used to remember the number. I think it was 4477. On that form they filled out they had to swear under oath they were not a convicted felon. That is a crime. That is a false statement. Also, many of these people turned out to be fugitives from other criminal activities. The BATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms--I have great friends in BATF, and they do a good job--is not following up on these cases. They have prosecuted less than 1 percent of these 89,000 cases. Probably about two-tenths of 1 percent were actually prosecuted. There are some serious criminals in that group. When those cases come in and are kicked out and people are rejected because of violence, they ought to be investigated, and they ought to be prosecuted. I think that would be a great way to identify criminals who are out to get guns and are up to no good and are out on the street. There are straw men who use false identities to buy guns. There are illegal sellers of guns. There are gun thieves who sell guns and pass them around the neighborhoods. Those kinds of people can be prosecuted, too. If you do that, I have no doubt that crime will be reduced. There will be less murders in this country and we could save lives by the thousands. That is what we need to do. That is where our focus needs to be. I hope those who came to the moms' march will cause us to focus on the real causes of crime and how to really stop it. If we do, we can make this country safer, we can save lives, and we can do what we are paid to do. We need to quit playing politics. We need to get that juvenile crime bill up, voted on, and we need some compromise and support from the Members of the other side. Once we do that, we will begin to save lives in America.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, it is my pleasure to present to the Senate today Alfredo Phillips, who is a member of the Congress of the Nation of Mexico. I have gotten to know him in 3 years now at the interparliamentary conference between the United States and Mexico. We have had 39 years of interparliamentary conferences between our two nations. He has an extraordinary history in banking. He was Director of the North American Development Bank, which is part of the NAFTA agreement. He has been Executive Director of the International Money Fund for 4 years. He is General Coordinator of International Affairs of the PRI. That is his title now. He was Mexico's Ambassador to Canada, Ambassador to Japan, and chairs the Foreign Relations Commission for the Congress of Mexico. He got his degree in humanities from the University of Mexico and his degree in economics from the University of London. He studied at George Washington University. His wife Maureen is a wonderful lady who my wife Mary and I have had the pleasure to meet. His son Alfredo is in an economics section of the Mexican Embassy here in the United States. Mr. President, it is my pleasure to introduce Mr. Alfredo Phillips to this body. He is known to many of our Senators and Congressmen.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in recess for 3 minutes, before Senator Feinstein takes the floor again, in order for the Senate to greet our guest.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I will finish up soon. In Alabama, our general fund budget, where all the funds are appropriated, is $1.2 billion. The education budget in Alabama is almost $4 billion. Do you hear that? In Alabama, we spent almost $4 billion on education and $1 billion on everything else. Do you think the Governor isn't concerned about that? Do you think the State legislature is not concerned about that? The primary function of State government in Alabama, and in every State in America, is education. That is where the responsibility needs to be, and that is where we need to empower them to use creative ideas to improve the system. I have offered an amendment on the subject of special education; IDEA regulations are disrupting our classrooms. We have examples in our State of two people bringing a gun to school and one being put back in the classroom because he is a special student. The other was kicked out for the year as is every other student. We have created a separate rule of law, a separate rule of discipline, by a Federal mandate from Washington, in every schoolroom in America. I have been in 15 schools this year in Alabama. This is one of the top concerns I hear from teachers and principals everywhere. They are concerned about that. I think I will talk about that later. I talked about it previously. I will also talk about this regulation, this Federal mandate, that is clearly not a help to the States but a major detriment. It is bigger and stronger and more burdensome than most people in this country have any idea. I think we need to talk about it more. I yield the floor at this time.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Louisiana for her insightful remarks, and particularly with regard to what is too common, where our schools are not performing and our students are not performing at the level at which they need to perform. We have a responsibility to make sure what we do in this body facilitates improvement in the system we have today--a system that has been in place for 35 years and is producing the kind of results that have been shown. This is certainly a time for review and change, for altering and improving. To suggest we cannot do that is beyond credibility. We absolutely can improve what we are doing. We need to. We have to make sure that what the Federal Government does is a positive event with regard to actual learning in the classroom--which is what this is all about--and not a negative impact on learning in the classroom. In a minute, I am going to share some examples of a Federal law that is absolutely undermining the ability of local school systems to educate, to create a learning environment where kids can reach their maximum potential. Wouldn't it be awful if we passed a law in Washington that actually made it more difficult to create a learning environment in the classrooms of America? The truth is, we have. We need to change that. I appreciate what the Senator from Louisiana said about testing. There are limits to what testing can show, but when you test thousands and thousands of kids all over a State, you can know whether or not those kids are basically performing at the grade level at which they ought to be performing. We can learn that from a test. I do not believe in a Federal test. That would be the Federal Government saying to the 50 States, that provide 94 percent of all the money for education in America: This is what your students must learn. If they don't pass this Federal test, they are not learning adequately, and therefore we have in Washington this school board of 100 Senators who would have to decide what is important and crucial in America. I do not believe in that. I think that would be against our history. It would be against the policy of this Nation since its founding because schools have been a State and local instrumentality. The Federal Government has only been able to assist marginally. In some ways, we have contributed to its downfall in undermining education. The test scores are important. Over a large number of people--not for every child--they give us very accurate indications of whether learning is occurring. I support that. In fact, I have been on the Education Committee a little over 1 year. We have many debates about accountability. Our friends on the other side of the aisle say: We need more accountability. Your plan, Sessions--this idea of turning more of the money over to the schools so they can use it as they see fit within their system--lacks accountability. But I say to you, the present system totally lacks accountability. The system that has been proposed by the Members on this side has absolutely the kind of accountability that should be part of an education bill. For example, we have approximately 700-plus education programs in America. Do you think that is not true? Would you dispute that with me? We have over 700 education programs in America, according to the General Accounting Office. Isn't that stunning? If a school system wants some money out of a program, they have to have a lawyer and a grant-writing expert just to find out where the money is and how it might be available to them. Many of these programs are ineffective and should not be continued. We have all of these programs. What our friends on the other side of the aisle are saying, too often, is--I don't think my friend from Louisiana is saying this, perhaps--if you don't have strict rules about how this money is spent, and you can only spend it for a specific thing, you don't have accountability. What do we have today in America? We have the Federal Government spending billions of dollars on education. We are pouring that money into schools right and left, and many of the school systems have a total inability to create a proper learning environment, and education and learning is not occurring. Is that accountability? They may be following all the paperwork and spending the money just as they said, but the fundamental question of education is learning. If learning is not occurring, then we are not having accountability, are we? What this program says to every school system in America--at least the 15 that choose it, and perhaps others in different ways, but 15 States in this country, if they choose it, would be able to have a substantial increase in their flexibility to use Federal money, with less paperwork, less rules, and less complaints about how they handle it. The only thing they would be asked to do is to create a testing system and an accountability system in their school system that can determine at the beginning of the year where children are academically, and go to the end of the year and see if they have improved. What else are we here about? What is education about if not learning? That is the only thing that counts. That is the product of all of our efforts. It is not how many teachers, how many buildings, how many textbooks, or how many football fields they have. The question is, Is learning occurring? This way we would have that. The school systems would basically say to the Federal Government: Give us a chance. You give us this money and let us run with it. Let us create a learning environment we think is effective. Give us a chance and we will put our necks on the line. We tell you we are going to increase learning in the classroom and we are going to have an objective test to show whether or not we are doing it. If we don't do it, we will go back under all your rules and paperwork. There is a myth here, and some have denigrated the role of Governors. But I don't know a Governor in America who isn't running for office and promising to lead and do better in education. I see the Senator from Georgia. Do we have a time problem?

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I want to share some additional thoughts with the Members of the Senate and those watching what we can do to improve education in America. I believe in public education. I have taught and my wife has taught in public schools. I say that to express how deeply I care about it. We have been active in PTA as our kids have gone forward. We want to improve the system. We want to make learning occur more regularly. We want to help teachers. I believe in American teachers. They are some of the finest in the world. They are well trained. They give their hearts and souls to it, only to be frustrated by regulations, paperwork, and discipline problems resulting from mandated rules passed by this Congress. I am going to share some thoughts today, and those in education in any State of America will know what I am saying is true. They will have heard these kinds of examples time and time again. But the vast majority of Americans will not believe it; they will not believe these things occur. Over 25 years ago, for example, we passed a federal disabilities act. It was designed to mandate to school systems and require that they not shut out disabled kids from the classroom and that they be involved in the classroom. If they have a hearing loss, or a sight loss, or if they have difficulty moving around, in a wheelchair, or whatever, the school system must make accommodations for them. They would be mainstreamed. They would not be treated separately. That was a good goal, a goal from which we should not retreat. I hope no one interprets what I say today as a retreat from that goal. But in the course of that time, we have created a complex system of Federal regulations and laws that have created lawsuit after lawsuit, special treatment for certain children, and that are a big factor in accelerating the decline in civility and discipline in classrooms all over America. I say that very sincerely. Teachers I have been talking to have shared stories with me. I have been in 15 schools around Alabama this year. I have talked to them about a lot of subjects. I ask them about this subject in every school I go to, and I am told in every school that this is a major problem for them. In fact, it may be the single most irritating problem for teachers throughout America today. It was really brought to my attention a little over a year ago when a long-time friend, District Attorney David Whetstone, in Baldwin County, AL, called me about a youngster in the school system classified as having a disability. It is called ``emotional conflict.'' He was emotionally conflicted. He could not, or would not, behave. An aide would meet him in the morning at his home, get on the bus with him, and go to school, sit through the class all day, and ride home on the school bus with him. This student was known to curse principals and teachers openly in the classroom. Because he was a disabled student, he could not be disciplined in the normal way. The maximum 10-day suspension rule--and 45 days is the maximum a child can be disciplined under this Federal law and then they are back in the classroom. One day, he attacked the school bus driver on the way home. The aide tried to restrain him. He then attacked the aide. District Attorney Whetstone told me, ``I was never more stunned when I talked to school officials and they told me this is common in our county.'' We have children we cannot control because of this Federal law. He came to Washington, and we sat up in the gallery and talked about it. I respect David Whetstone and his views. He said this cannot be. I began to ask around, is this true? As a matter of fact, this very incident was focused on in Time magazine. There was a full-page story about it called ``The Meanest Kid in Alabama,'' and ``60 Minutes'' did a story about it because it is, unfortunately, so common around the country. What can we do about it? I began to ask leaders in education around the State. The State superintendent: ``Absolutely, it is one of the biggest problems we have.'' I talked to Paul Hubbard, head of the teachers union in Alabama: ``Absolutely, it is a big problem.'' ``I am tired,'' he said in the newspaper recently, ``of children cursing my teachers in the classroom and nothing being done about it.'' Then we began to talk to teachers, principals, and school board superintendents. They talked about the lawyers and the complicated regulations with which they deal. It is really unacceptable. Teachers who have been trained with masters' degrees in special education to deal with these children have also overwhelmingly told me this is not a healthy thing, that we are telling special children with physical disabilities, or disabilities as defined by the Federal law, that they don't have to adhere to the same standards other children do. Right in the classroom, we create, by Federal law, two separate standards for American citizens. You can say to one child: You can't do this, you are out of school. But we can say to another children: You can do it, and you are only out 10 days, or maybe 45 days, and then you are back in the classroom. That is not defensible. I want to share some of the letters I began to receive from teachers who care about this problem and want me and you and the Members of this Congress to do something about it. I believe we can. I hope it will be part of the debate this year in our political arena. Maybe we can make some progress with it. First, I want to mention that when Congress passed the IDEA-- Individuals with Disabilities Education Act--in 1975, we committed to pay the States, whom we were requiring to do it--we require these States to meet these standards. We agreed to pay 40 percent of the cost. We have never paid more than 15 percent of the cost. It has been below 10 percent in most years. We had testimony in the Health, Education, and Labor Committee, of which I am a member, from a superintendent in Vermont who testified to our committee that 20 percent of the cost of the school system in his county is for special education children. This is a major factor in education today. Let me share some stories with you about this. An experienced educator in Alabama shared these thoughts with me in a letter: We have a student who is classified emotionally conflicted, learning disabled, and who has attention deficit disorder. While this student has been enrolled, students, teachers, and staff have been verbally threatened with physical harm. Fits of anger, fighting, and outbursts of verbal abuse have been commonplace. Parents and students have expressed concern over the safety of their children due to the behavior of this young man. Teachers have also become extremely apprehensive toward the presence of the student due to his explosive behavior. His misbehavior has escalated to the point that the instructional process of the entire school has been jeopardized. Here is another one: I have taught for 25 years. I plan to continue teaching, but the problems with discipline are getting out of hand. We are not allowed to discipline certain students. Any student labeled as ``special needs'' must be accommodated, not disciplined. A student recently brought a gun to my school. He made threats to students and teachers which he claims were jokes. I was one of those teachers. This student has been disruptive and belligerent since I first encountered him in the ninth grade. Now, he is a senior. After bringing a gun to school, he was given another ``second chance.'' He should have been expelled. What is his handicap? He has a problem with mathematics. While this may be an extreme situation, it is not isolated. Still reading from the letter: Teachers are told to handle discipline in the classroom. The Government has taken most of the teachers' rights away; our hands are tied. This is a letter from a young teacher in a small town of about 25,000 in Alabama. This is a story by which I think anybody would be moved: As a special educator of six years, I consider myself ``on the front lines'' of the ongoing battles that take place on a daily basis in our Nation's schools. I strongly believe that part of the ``ammunition'' that fuels these struggles are the ``right'' guaranteed to certain individuals by IDEA '97. The law, though well intentioned, has become one of the single greatest obstacles that educators face in our fight to provide all of our children with a quality education delivered in a safe environment. There are many examples that I can offer first hand. However, let me reiterate that I am a special educator. I have dedicated my life to helping children with special needs. It is my job to study and know the abilities and limitations of such children. I have a bachelor's degree in psychology, a masters degree in special education and a Ph.D. in good old common sense. No where in my educational process have I been taught a certain few ``disabled'' students should have a ``right'' to endanger the right to an education of all other disabled and non-disabled children. It's non- sense; it's wrong; it's dangerous; and it must be stopped. There is no telling how many instructional hours are lost by teachers in dealing with behavior problems. In times of an increasingly competitive global society it is no wonder American students fall short. Certain children are allowed to remain in the classroom robbing the other children of hours that can never be replaced. There is no need to extend the school day. There is no need to extend the school year. If politicians would just make it possible for educators to take back the time that is lost on a daily basis to certain individuals there is no doubt we would have a better educated students. It is even more frustrating when it is a special education child who knows and boasts ``they can't do anything to me'' and he is placed back in the classroom to disrupt it day after day, week after week. It is clear that IDEA '97 not only undermines the educational process it also undermines the authority of educators. In a time when our profession is being called upon to protect our children from increasingly dangerous sources our credibility is being stripped from us. I am sure you have heard the saying: The teachers are scared of the principals, the principals are scared of the superintendents, the superintendents are scared of the parents, the parents are scared of the children, and the children are scared of no one. And why should they be? I have experienced the ramifications of the ``new and improved'' law first hand. I had one child attempt to assault me--he had been successful with two other teachers. He was suspended for one day. I had another child make sexual gestures to me in front of the entire class. Despite the fact that every child in my class and a majority of the children in the school knew of it, I was told by my assistant principal that nothing could be done because ``these special ed kids have rights.'' I literally got in my car to leave that day, but my financial obligations to my family and my moral responsibilities to the children I had in my class kept me there. The particular child I spoke about frequently made vulgar comments and threats to my girls in my class on every opportunity he had when there was no adult present. Fortunately, the girls, also special ed, could talk to me about it. Unfortunately, they had to put up with it because ``nothing could be done.'' I know of a learning disabled child who cut a girl in a fight. The learning disabled child and her parents then attempted to sue the school system because the child was burned when she grabbed a coffee pot to break it over the other child's head. I know of another specific incident where three children brought firearms to school. The two ``regular'' children where expelled. The special education student was back to school the following week. I fully expect that you and your colleagues in Washington will do what it takes to take our schools back from this small group of children who feel it is their right to endanger the education of every other child in school. As my grandmother said, ``right is right and wrong is wrong'' and to enable this to continue is just wrong. She does have a right to expect Members of this Congress to confront this issue and not allow it to continue. This is a letter from a town in Alabama with a population of 20,000, or so, from another special education teacher. As a special educator teacher for 27 years, may I applaud your efforts to make special education students as accountable as any other student for any behavior they exhibit while in school. I fully support the idea that just because they are students in need of special education services that it in no way diminishes their ability to tell right from wrong. When teachers and administrators cannot provide some type of appropriate punishment, then the students are taught that their behavior has no consequences. Just the other day, we had a student, who had been offered detention to avoid mission school time, he responded that they could just go ahead and suspend him because he was not going to come to school on Saturday and that it was not going to hurt his grades because ``he'' was allowed to make up all the work. When students find out about this ``loophole'' then they often feel they have free reign to do or say whatever they feel and that there is nothing that anyone can do. He is correct about that. This is a Federal law. We provide 7 percent of the cost of education in America. But we don't hesitate to mandate these kinds of rules in every school system in the country. There federal rules often make teaching very difficult and it penalizes the students who come to school to try and improve themselves. He is teaching a class of special education students, and wants all of them to learn. Many of them are there trying to learn, and they find it more difficult because of these rules. I feel that for the best interest of the students and of the entire education population, changes in this policy must take place. Mr. President. I don't want to disrupt the system. But I have some more comments that I am prepared to make. This is a letter from a small town in Alabama. Due to the federal rules and the situation they create, I cannot spend time in my class discussing a lesson. I do not do something to tantalize the students, they become disruptive. I can no longer simply explain a concept. I now must spend over half my time disciplining the disruptive students. I am no longer a teacher, I am a threatened and battered baby-sitter who is not allowed to do her job. Give us back our classrooms and our schools. Give the teacher the right to have these disruptive students removed. Please help us. This is a letter from an assistant principal. I am an assistant principal in Alabama. I taught middle school before taking this administrative position. As a teacher I saw a ``small picture'' of the problem, as an administrator I see a much ``larger picture''. You have chosen a much needed, but difficult battle. Most of the special education students are wonderful (emphasis added) unfortunately, a few are literally destroying the public education process in our country. We are teaching them that they have excuses not to follow rules or obey laws, then we act shocked when violence occurs. Now, perhaps more than ever in our history, we need to teach our children right from wrong and that there will be consequences for their actions. Instead we develop more and more excuses for unacceptable, sometimes criminal behavior. Thank you for anything you can do to help save our children, as well as our country's future. I have a letter from a student in a good school system in Alabama. I would like to let you know I agree with changing the section on IDEA law. I am in high school and I know how difficult it is for you to learn if there is disruption in the classroom. I think if there is a student who does not want to learn, they should be put in an alternative school or separate class. Amen, young student. I agree. Another student from an average town in Alabama. I'm seeing more and more teachers getting out of education because of the ridiculous lawsuits by special education students. We are losing good teachers today in America. If you check around, one of the biggest reasons is frustration over their inability to maintain discipline in the classroom. Talk to them about it. In most schools, that is a real problem. It is hurting public education. These laws don't apply to private schools. Teachers in private schools don't have these problems and are able to be more effective in creating a learning atmosphere. In a way, it hurts our ability to maintain public education as a competitive enterprise. We need to make sure what we do in Congress does not make it more difficult for our teachers to teach. First, do no harm. The letter continues, We have been told to give the parents whatever they want. They have individual education plans for each student. A lot of times, that is very helpful. But they have become almost contracts with the parents, and schools have to obey them to the letter of the law. There are frequently lawsuits over whether the school is following the IEP, the individual education plan. It is sad. We have been told if they sue us we are going to lose. Because of this, special education students are suffering and so are those students around them. They can disrupt class at will and take away from the education of the majority of the students. Often they do less, and even no work, and we are told to pass them anyway. Then he makes an interesting point: When these students leave school and enter the real world, they will not have things given to them as they do in school. They will not be prepared to function as a regular citizen should be. As a parent, I fear for my son's safety in school. He has already had one confrontation with a special needs child. The disabled student assaulted my child. In self- defense, my son hit the student back. The student was known to get into fights. My son was hauled off to the police station. His grades suffered. The special ed student could go on repeatedly assaulting, with very little consequence. As you can see, this is both an emotional and professional issue for me. I am glad you are aware of the large problem our educational system is having. I hope something can be done before it gets worse. We will see the repercussions for years to come if we don't change this system. Another letter from a teacher: I have over 30 years experience as a teacher, principal, Federal program coordinator, and school superintendent. I am greatly concerned about the future of public education in this country. IDEA has given local superintendents grief beyond description. First, in 1975, the law was first passed, Congress promised to pick up 40 percent of the cost to operate the program, and according to figures I have seen, 10 percent has been the norm since then. Second, this has made every system fair game, with litigation costs consuming more than education dollars. While our system is small, we have had to deal with a number of weapons cases in the last few years. Two of the cases students were caught with weapons they admit they accidentally left in their vehicles coming to school grounds from target shooting. The first boy was expelled 1 year. He never returned to school to graduate. According to him, the situation was just too embarrassing. Although the second boy was in the exact same position as the first, having accidentally left the weapon in his car, instantly we were told he was a special education student and has an IEP. He was then assigned to an alternative school for 45 days and is now back in our school. Both of these young men were not troublemakers at school. Senator, it is impossible to explain to the family of the first student that their son was deserving of more punishment. Think about that. This family is now bitter toward me and toward the American system because they, in grave error, believe that all Americans have the same legal right and they were unaware that Congress now decides what rights we are entitled to hold as American citizens. As said in ``Animal Farm'': All are equal, but some are more equal than others. The second student's handicap does not prevent him from knowing right from wrong. I'm sorry that I'm old fashioned and believe we should be teaching all students to be responsible for their behavior. We should be helping them develop good decisionmaking skills, not telling them that you are not responsible for your behavior and that there will be no consequences, or minimal consequences, regardless of your behavior. I became a teacher in 1965 and I do not remember hearing of gun shootings prior to 1975 when Congress began telling ten percent of our students you are not responsible. I think these teachers make a point. It is a matter we need to give careful consideration to, not overreact, not undermine the great principles of the Disabilities Act Program. But at the same time, we need to say that a child is not allowed to commit crimes, to disrupt classroom, to curse teachers, principals and students, and abuse them and do so with impunity. I thank the Chair for the time and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, as the Senator knows and as I understand, the Government said it desires to fully fund this. It is not meeting the commitment that it made. Is that correct?