Jim Talent

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. I appreciate it.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. I was busy making notes. If I could ask the majority leader, would that include a few minutes for me to do morning business?

Mr. TALENT. Yes.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I am very grateful to the majority leader and the Democratic whip for allowing me this time. I am sorry to run in breathless at the end of the evening to ask for it. I thought I would have an opportunity, perhaps in the wee hours of the morning, to make this statement. I think it will be evident when I get into it why I want to do it now. I will explain that also. Let me say I agree completely with the statement of the Senator from Nevada regarding the staff. I have presided, myself, during this weekend, on several occasions. I am grateful to the staff for coming in and sorry to keep them a few minutes later than they would otherwise have to stay. I just want all the staff to know that, in compensation to them as a small token, if they would like to come to my desk after we adjourn, I have plenty of Russell Stover candy, pecan rolls and almond rolls--and low carb candy also, I say to the majority leader. I am more than happy to share it with all the staff who worked so hard this weekend. I want to talk a little bit about overtime. I have not talked about overtime on the floor of the Senate despite the fact that there has been a lot of controversy over it. There are a lot of reasons I have not to this point. I have had other priorities. But the overtime regulations that went into effect about 6 weeks ago are actually, of course, having an impact in the United States. In other words, they are now the law. People are having to comply with them. Employers are having to comply with them. So we have reached a new stage in the controversy over those rules because we don't have to speculate anymore what their impact is going to be. We know what their impact is because they have become law. What we are finding is that these overtime regulations, as many of us thought and as the Secretary of Labor said over and over again, are working the most significant enlargement of overtime pay, the most significant increase of overtime coverage in the history of the overtime law, at least since 1938. I wanted to say this on the floor of the Senate before we left because I think it is owing, in particular, to the Secretary to say it. She has been criticized by many outside of this body and some in this body. They have said these overtime regulations the Department has issued would restrict overtime for people. It is not working that way, and there are a lot of us who knew it wouldn't work that way, which is why we always voted to allow that process to move forward. So I want to say this evening, and I am going to go through the reasons why and then talk about what exactly is happening out there in my 20 minutes, but I want to repeat, these overtime regulations, far from restricting overtime coverage, are working the most significant enlargement in overtime protection since 1938. I want to explain now why those of us who have some familiarity with this field of law always thought that would be the case. I read these proposed regulations when they came out about a year ago. I looked at them and said to myself, as a person who used to practice labor and employment law, my gosh, there are going to be a lot more people getting overtime under these regulations than have gotten it before. Let me explain why. This is a rather arcane field of law, but it is possible to understand it. You have to start from the assumption that unless the law provides otherwise, every employee in the country is entitled to overtime if they work more than 40 hours a week. You are entitled to overtime unless the law exempts you from overtime, so the bigger the exemption, the less the overtime. When we talk about exemptions expanding, we are talking about overtime restricting, and it is important to keep that in mind. We start from the proposition that all employees are covered by overtime. The law exempts management employees. It has always been an aspect of the law that if you are in management, if you are one of the people who run the company, you are not entitled to mandatory overtime. So how does the law define management? First of all, to be a management employee you have to be salaried. If you are paid by the hour, you get overtime. It doesn't matter what else your job may entail, you get overtime. So you have to be salaried. Second, you have to be salaried above a certain level. This is very significant because it has changed. Under the old regulations, before the new regulations were issued and took effect, under the old regulations, if your salary was below about $13,000 a year you automatically got overtime. You could not be considered management unless your salary was at least $13,000 a year. That wasn't much protection because just about everybody in the country who worked full time and got a salary earned more than $13,000 a year. But the new regulations raised that threshold to $23,600. What the law is now, if you get paid a salary of less than $23,600, you get overtime protection. You get mandatory overtime regardless of what the rest of your job may entail. When I saw that, I knew immediately that there were going to be tens and tens of thousands of people who had been exempt, whose overtime had been denied them legally under the old regulations, who would now get it automatically. I am talking about people who work as assistant managers of restaurants or in some cases you might be a line leader in a plant or you might have some other job which looks like it may be management so you got exempted under the old regulations. But where you were not paid $23,600, automatically those people come under protection. It is not enough to be paid a salary above $23,600 or above the threshold, whatever it is, to be considered management, and it never has been. The first step is, are you paid a salary? Is it above that certain level? If it is, you might be exempt. You might not be entitled to overtime if you fell into one of several categories of management. I am not going to go through them all, but let me take two very briefly. One of them is if you were an executive. If you got a salary above the threshold and you were an executive, you were not entitled as management to overtime. How do you define executive? The old rule said--I hope you are sticking with me here, Mr. President, and through you, all the vast numbers of Senators who are here on the floor listening to this--if you got paid a salary above the threshold and under the old regulations you supervised at least two people--and by ``supervising,'' the law meant you did at least one of the things that typically supervisors did. So it might be directing their performance on the job; it might be deciding what their schedules were, when they could come in to work, when they took vacations; it might be training them on the job. If you did any of those things and you supervised two people and you had a salary above $13,000, you were exempt from coverage. You can see that covered a lot of people, a lot of your first-line supervisors. Think about this for a second. A lot of your first-line supervisors, your shift foremen, your line leaders, your assistant managers, they get paid above $13,000, they have two people underneath them, and they decide, for example, when you come in to work or which clothesrack you should be working on, if it is an assistant manager in a clothing store, right? So those people were exempt from overtime. Now under the new regulations you have to be paid at least $23,600, you have to supervise two people, and then here is the thing: You have to hire or fire or effectively recommend the hiring or firing of employees. If you don't do that, you are not exempt, under that exemption anyway. Look at the difference. Under the old law you weren't exempt, you were exempt if you got above $13,000 in salary; you supervised two people, and you did anything in terms of the direction of their work. But now you have to get above $23,600, you have to supervise two people, and you have to effectively recommend hiring or firing on a day-to-day basis. That very substantially restricts the exemption, which very substantially increases the number of people who are covered by the overtime laws. You may be exempt if you supervise people. I just went through that. You also may be exempt if you supervise functions. Under the old law, typically the classic example is somebody who is the lab director in a laboratory. They may not have people under them, but they supervise the lab. But that exemption has been restricted, too, under the new regulations because it always required that you exercise what is called independent judgment or discretion with respect to whatever function you are supervising. But now the independent judgment and discretion must be with respect to something, to an operation that has a significant impact on the workplace. It is no longer enough to supervise a piece of a function; you have to supervise the whole thing. This, too, increases the number of people who are covered by overtime by reducing the breadth of the exemption. The same thing could be said with regard to the professional exemption. There are many aspects of these regulations which were designed to and do work an enlargement of overtime coverage. How do we know they do that? Because the regulations have been in effect for 6 weeks and all the general counsels of all the big companies are looking at them. Do you know what they are recommending? They are telling their employers we have to reclassify these job duties. These job classifications, they are no longer exempt from overtime. We have to start paying people overtime. A survey was recently done among Fortune 500 companies by the HR Policy Association, and the return was this: Half of the Fortune 500 companies said they were going to treat more employees as eligible for overtime. The other half said there would be little or no change. The University of Missouri at Colombia--of course we all know that fine institution in Missouri--they said 400 to 500 workers would be reclassified as eligible for overtime who were not eligible before. Sears Roebuck & Company said 2,000 employees will be reclassified as nonexempt, and nonexempt means you are covered. Overtime has to be paid to you. Burdines-Macy's, 3M, McDonald's, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, the University of Kansas, they are all reporting that they are going to reclassify employees so they are covered by overtime, where under the old regulations that Members of this body have been fighting for a year to preserve, these people did not get overtime. Senator Bond and I were contacted by police sergeants of the St. Louis City Police Department. These sergeants had earlier, under the old regulations, been found exempt, not entitled on a mandatory basis to overtime. They believed, reading the new regulations, that they would be entitled. I believe they have a good case. I don't want to prejudge it. Senator Bond and I asked the Department of Labor to investigate. They are investigating. My prediction is--I can't be certain because this gets down to the details of the job on a day-to- day basis, but my belief is that they will be entitled to overtime unless the police department changes their duties or arranges for them to work under 40 hours a week. The new regulations contain specific references to police sergeants and firefighters and say they are entitled to overtime as examples of people who would be entitled under the new rule who were not necessarily entitled under the old--this with respect to a regulation that again I say for the last year Members of this body have been saying over and over again will restrict overtime. Yet I tell you and the Senate that it will work out to be the most significant enlargement of overtime since 1938. Not a single company reported that they were going to reclassify people downward to make them exempt. We are aware of thousands and thousands of cases already, in 6 weeks, where we know people are going to be reclassified as covered by overtime when they were not covered before. We don't yet know--I asked the Department of Labor this today. I asked them if they knew of a single case that had gotten up to their level where a person who had been receiving overtime under the old regulations had lost it under the new. They don't know of a single case where that happened. It could happen. There is one aspect of the regulation that applies to people who are getting salaries of $100,000 a year or more. I talked with a lady today who worked in Wage and Hour and was responsible for this. She said: As I read it, I don't really think it is going to restrict overtime. It could. I could probably construct a law school hypothetical where somebody in that position lost overtime. It is possible. We may see a handful. I don't believe we will see more than that. I am not going to go through all these remarks because I know the staff has worked all weekend and I don't want to keep them any later. I thought it was important to say this. It is owing to Secretary Chao and for the hard work she has put in to make this statement and to make clear to the Senate how significant these new regulations are in that they are going to enlarge overtime. I do think it is important to say also that if the efforts of Members of this Senate who have fought these regulations had succeeded, then these thousands and thousands of people who are now getting overtime would not be getting it. If the bill that has been sponsored-- I understand we are going to vote on it through a voice vote--were to pass, it would mean the withdrawal of overtime protection for all the people in the last 6 weeks who have been reclassified as entitled to it. That would be a great shame. But it will happen because, as I read these regulations and as they are working in practice, they are working a significant expansion of protection for employees around the United States. I congratulate the Department. They have taken care of inequities that have existed in this system for decades and decades. When you look at the struggle they have gone through, you understand why it was not remedied before now. This is an arcane and a difficult area. Misinterpretations are possible. I do think many outside this Senate and some inside the Senate have been subject to a misinterpretation of these regulations. I hope I have cleared it up, and I wanted to have the opportunity to do that before we adjourned, until the election. Mr. President, how much time do I have left?

Mr. TALENT. I think I will give that 4 minutes as a gift to the staff and to you. I appreciate your staying afterwards to preside, Mr. President, and I yield my time.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. I thank the Senator for yielding. Mr. President, how much of the 20 minutes remains?

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, if the Senator from New Jersey would agree, I ask unanimous consent for an additional 5 minutes, and I would, of course, agree that he could have an additional 5 minutes, if we could modify that previous unanimous consent request.

Mr. TALENT. No, 5 minutes in addition to my 11 minutes, and then my request would be that you would have an additional 5 minutes, for a total of 25.

Mr. TALENT. Under the same parameters as the unanimous consent request of the Senator from Illinois, I ask to extend the 20 minutes to 25 minutes on each side. I think I can do what I need to do if I have about 15 minutes.

Mr. TALENT. If the Senator from Nevada will yield, it is only a minute, but a minute is a minute. I think I had 11, so an additional 5 would be 16 minutes.

Mr. TALENT. I thank the Senator from Nevada. I don't mean to quibble over a minute. On the other hand, the Rams would probably have won the Super Bowl a couple of years ago if they had had another minute, so one never knows.

Mr. TALENT. And the Senator knows, I also served in the House and came from there more recently than he did. I do guard my minutes jealously.

Mr. TALENT. The Senator has had a similar experience as I have. Having prepared a nice set of remarks on issues about which he feels passionately and gone to the floor manager in the House and asked how much time he could have and being told: Well, a couple of other people have expressed a desire for time; how about 90 seconds.

Mr. TALENT. I thank the Senator from New Jersey and the Senator from Nevada for their flexibility. I will proceed with my 16 minutes as best I can. Mr. President, I share the observation of the Senator from Texas that our friend from Illinois is certainly very angry and seems to be rather negative about the prospects for America. He would probably say he is negative about the administration, but he seems to describe an economic and foreign policy picture that is very bleak. I don't think it reflects reality or what most Americans believe is reality. I am certain it does not reflect the views or the policies of the administration. I do think it is important to get some of these charges correct. I don't have time to go through everything. I want to talk about a couple of things that have interested me. I don't generally get up here to participate in these debates that are clearly part of the Presidential campaign. I am here to try and do things. I have an agenda I am trying to accomplish, and others share it. I was distressed when the Senator from California referred to some of the remarks of the Senator from Utah and said: Talk about flimflam, talk about misleading the seniors. That was with reference to the Senator's comments regarding the Medicare prescription drug bill, which I happened to rather like and I supported. It is already helping thousands of Missouri seniors, and I don't think that is flimflam. I will get to that in a minute. The Senator from Texas correctly pointed out that when the whole issue of jobs lost over the last few years comes up, it is important to keep in mind, before blaming President Bush, that President Bush was not in office when the recession began. Americans all across the country understand there is something called a business cycle, an economic cycle in the country. I don't tend to blame Presidents for recessions. I blame them if they have long-term policies that depress the economy over the long term. I agree with the Senator from Texas, if you want economic growth--and we should all want that because we cannot do anything we want to without growth; we cannot fund education, we cannot have good health care, or a strong defense, and we cannot have retirement security without growth. How do you get growth? Our Democrat friends believe you get it by raising taxes on people. What the Senator from Illinois said--they didn't used to think that. There was a time not so long ago when there was a bipartisan agreement that, if you wanted growth, one of the things you did was cut taxes. That is not some kind of modern conservative philosophy. That is what John Maynard Keynes thought; that is what FDR thought; that is what LBJ and JFK thought. But they don't believe that today. They are entitled to their beliefs, but they are not entitled to blame President Bush for a recession that was in effect and had started before he assumed office and was magnified by events over which he had no control--the attack on 9/11 and corporate fraud. I don't blame any President for that either, but it didn't happen on President Bush's watch. He took steps to get the economy moving. He proposed a tax cut, which we passed despite the opposition of many-- although not all--Members of the other side of the aisle. He proposed tort reform, restrictions on abusive lawsuits, which I think is the most important thing we can do to get the economy going. That was filibustered by the other side. You can filibuster if you want to, but you cannot filibuster and then blame somebody else for not getting things done. You heard from the Senator from Illinois that energy prices are too high. I am on the Energy Committee. It is one of my priorities to get energy prices down. We put together a really good Energy bill. We got it all the way through the process, with one vote left. We could not take that vote. Do you know why? It was filibustered. Is it President Bush's fault that the Energy bill was filibustered--a pro-production, pro-jobs, pro-growth Energy bill? Many Members on the other side joined us in trying to defeat the filibuster, but there were not enough. We lost three-quarters of the other party. Senator Kerry voted for the filibuster. Iraq. We hear over and over again that there was no reason, no plan, no coalition. There was a reason and it goes back to 1991. I remember during the 1990s, when people criticized the first President Bush because he didn't get rid of Hussein. He was trying to appeal to the U.N., and he left Saddam Hussein in power. I was in the House all through the 1990s on the Armed Services Committee. This man and his regime was an organic threat to the interests and security of the United States of America. Everybody saw it. He had attacked his neighbors twice, lobbed missiles all over the country. He used weapons of mass destruction on his own people. We cannot permit an anti-American tyrant to take control of that part of the world. I believe very strongly that President Clinton was moving toward a resolution of that when he left office. Look at the statements he made then and the statements he has made since then. Even if there had not been a 9/11, we would have had to do something about Saddam Hussein and, no, we could not wait longer. How long are you supposed to wait? At what point do arguments in favor of waiting really become just a disguise for doing nothing and not wanting to admit it? No plan. The plan was to remove Saddam Hussein and replace him, with the help of the Iraqi people, with a liberal democracy that would be an ally against terrorism. Saddam Hussein is gone. We have had the provisional convention. We have a provisional government in place. We are going to have elections in January. Prime Minister Allawi stood on the dais in the House and said that. He also said: We are going to stand with you. He said--I remarked on this--``as you have stood with us, we will stand with you in the battle against terrorism.'' No coalition. Look, this kind of a military effort, no matter where it occurs, and whether the U.N. supports it or not, is going to be 95- percent led and executed by forces of the United States of America. In the air war in Bosnia, which everybody supported, even though there was no U.N. resolution in support of it, 95 to 97 percent of the airpower was American. There is one very important coalition partner--the Iraqis. It is incorrect to say that 90 percent of the casualties have been American. We have taken casualties, but they are taking them too, and they will take more and more as they assume responsibility for this war. The Medicare prescription drug bill. The Senator from Illinois says it is a terrible political conspiracy on the part of the President to delay the full implementation of the bill until after November 2004. Nobody's proposal would have been implemented before November 2004. I didn't like that. I complained about that. I thought, well, in 1965 they did the whole Medicare bill in 8 months. Why does it take so long to set up one new feature? Everybody believed that. There were not any of their proposals that would have taken effect before November of 2004. I don't like that, but that is not a political conspiracy. I don't know if the Senator from Texas heard that. I had not. You cannot bargain. Look, this is the reason for the Medicare prescription drug bill--and I have 200,000 senior citizens in Missouri who have no insurance for their prescription drugs. They are paying not only out of pocket, which is the first thing that is wrong, but they are paying the highest price because when they walk into the pharmacy, it is them against the big insurance companies. The whole idea is to get them into a pool because if you are part of a big pool, you have economies of scale and prices will be lower. That is what this bill does. I don't have time to go into length on this issue. The bargaining with the prescription drug companies is going to be done by the organizations that put the pool together--like we have discount cards, one, for example, that AARP puts out, and AARP bargains with the prescription drug companies and you buy the AARP discount card and you get the discount. People are getting that discount today. If I go to the car dealer and buy an automobile, I may bargain with the dealer about the price of the car. I am not going to bargain about the price of the tires on the automobile. That doesn't mean there was no bargaining over the price of the tires; it means the automobile manufacturer did it. The difference between us and them on this--and it is a legitimate difference--is they want a one-size-fits-all, Government-dominated program where the Government would directly do the bargaining with the drug company. There are worse things than that. We thought ours was better. We wanted a number of different options for seniors, where the people who organized the options would bargain with the prescription drug companies. It is a difference of philosophy because they are more trusting of the Government than we are. It is not some kind of conspiracy with the drug companies. How much time do I have left?

Mr. TALENT. I think I can do it in 6 minutes. This is the reason I got up. President Bush actually has a plan to lower health insurance premiums. It is a pretty good plan. It is my plan. He kind of got it from me and Senator Snowe and Senator Bond and a couple of us over here, those of us who have worked on this since 1997 when I was in the House. I don't like people saying my plan is not a plan. President Bush wants two things. He wants medical liability reform-- reform of frivolous lawsuits in medicine. In Missouri, they know about this because we are losing doctors because malpractice insurance premiums are going up due to a problem with frivolous lawsuits. The Senator from Texas told me they just passed a bill to reform that and their health insurance premiums are going down substantially, and I know this is happening all over the country. If you cut that risk of the frivolous lawsuits, where people are recovering many more times the value of actual injuries, insurance premiums will go down. President Bush wants that. We didn't get that here because it was filibustered. His opponent in the election supported the filibuster. How can you say he doesn't have a plan? You can say you disagree with the plan if you want--you filibustered it. The plan I have that the President supports is called the association health plan. Most of the people who do not have health insurance in the country are working people. They work for small businesses or are farmers. They cannot get health insurance because it is more expensive to buy health insurance as part of a small group than it is as a big national pool. There is a reason everybody else who has health insurance, except people who work for small businesses, get in as part of a national pool. Think about that for a minute. You work for a big company, you are part of a big labor union plan, Medicare, a national pool, Medicaid, a national pool. You are a Federal employee, retired Federal employee, retired military, you get it as part of a national pool because there are economies of scale to insuring a large group. Administrative costs are less, and the bargaining power is more. You get more for less. You get better quality health insurance at less cost and no sacrifice of access or quality. What I would like to do and the President would like to do is allow small businesses to do the same, to get health insurance through their trade association, so that my brother--and I have mentioned him on the floor before--who has a little restaurant in St. Louis--and I encourage anybody within the sound of my voice to patronize it; great hamburgers, Mr. President--he would like to get health insurance for his people as part of a big group. He would get it then. He is an employee of his corporation, his little business. He has to buy it on the small group market. But what if he could join the National Restaurant Association and become part of a 10-, 20-, 30-person pool and get health insurance on the same terms as if he worked for Anheuser-Busch headquartered in St. Louis or Hallmark headquartered in Kansas City. The health insurance premiums would go down 30 percent, at no cost to the taxpayers because it is not a Government program. It empowers small businesses to do what big businesses can do. We hear over there how they do not like big business. They are not supporting this. It has passed in the House year after year with bipartisan support. The President supports it; his opponent does not. Mr. President, look, there are differences between President Bush and Senator Kerry. The nature of our elections, unfortunately, is our candidates--and I can assure voters of this--are never as bad as they make each other out to be. They are both better people than you would believe from the commercials, but there are big differences of opinion. And I am proud of the fact that with the support of many people on the other side of the aisle, my party in leading this Congress and my party's leader at the White House has proposed a series of measures that empower small businesses and farmers that create jobs, that lower health insurance costs in innovative ways that will not cost the taxpayers a lot of money, that has built up our defenses, has taken the fight to the terrorists and has stood with respect but clearly for the commonsense cultural values of this country. I would say in each of those areas, there is a big difference between my party's nominee for President and the other party's nominee, as much as I respect him and as often as I have worked with him on various issues in the past. With the greatest respect to the Senator from California and the Senator from Illinois, that ``ain't'' flimflam. That is not misleading anybody. That is the way it is. If we are going to debate out here on the floor regarding the Presidential election, we ought to at least get it right. I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I rise today in honor of William S. Rupp of St. Peters, MO. I join his wife June, the rest of his family and his many friends in honoring and recognizing him on his 80th birthday, October 10, 2004. A devoted husband, father of five and grandfather of 16, Bill's first 80 years have been rich and full. He has achieved a great deal and has contributed tremendously to his State and his country. As a United States Marine in the Pacific Theater during World War II, Bill saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war. He served bravely for 3 years until he was honorably discharged in 1945. Bill chose not to end his devotion to the military when he left the Pacific, and he has been a very active and highly effective veteran. He has served as chairman of the St. Peters Veterans Memorial Commission and helped design and coordinated the city's Veterans' Memorial site. He was also instrumental in the construction of St. Peters' Korean War Memorial. Bill is a member of Congressman Todd Akin's Veteran Memorial Commission and Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 10838, where he has served as Commander, All-State Quartermaster, Safety Chair, Hospital Chair, Military Assistance Chair and Deputy Inspector. In addition to veterans' affairs, Mr. Rupp has been involved in other important civic matters. While his children were in school, he served with distinction as president of the McBride High School Father's Club, president of the Rosary High School Parent Teacher Association and as a judge for the Amateur Athletic Union's 75th track meet. In addition, he is a past president of the Summerhill Association. After his military service, Bill attended Washington University before becoming a marketing representative for Gateway Seed Company and a department manager for Famous-Barr Company. He attended St. Louis University High School and St. Roch's Catholic Grade School. I am honored to congratulate Mr. Rupp on this special occasion. He has many accomplishments in his long life thus far, and I wish him many more years of happiness and success.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be dispensed with.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I rise tonight in support of legislation which I have sponsored along with Senator Bond that would authorize the Secretary of the Interior to illuminate the gateway arch with pink lighting in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I want to say how much I appreciate the cooperation from both sides of the aisle on this important measure so that we can get it done and passed in time to honor those who have struggled against this disease during that month which has been set aside to recognize what they have done. It is amazing how many American families have been touched by this disease. Speaking personally, my mother fought and eventually lost the battle against breast cancer. Her struggle certainly had a profound impact on me and on my family. Currently, breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths for women in the United States. Approximately 40,000 women in this country will die from the disease in 2004, and the American Cancer Society estimates that a woman in the United States has a 1 in 7 chance of developing invasive breast cancer during her lifetime, and this risk was 1 in 11 in 1975. For the past 20 years, October has been designated as Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Events around the world are dedicated to spreading the message of early detection so that prevention and the ongoing search for a cure can continue. Throughout the month, women are reminded in many ways that regular screening for breast cancer continues to be the most effective way to detect this disease in its earliest stages and therefore save lives. Recently, I was contacted by a group of Missourians who wanted to highlight the need for breast cancer awareness. They wanted to illuminate the arch, which is, of course, a landmark not only in Missouri but in the country--a landmark with both national and local significance. They wanted to illuminate it with pink lighting in order to commemorate Breast Cancer Awareness Month. People everywhere associate the pink ribbon and the color pink as a symbol of breast cancer awareness and the ongoing search for the cure. Lighting the arch with pink lighting will also recognize the millions of women who are currently battling breast cancer and those who have lost their lives fighting their disease. The bill I introduced will give the Secretary of the Interior the authority to allow for that kind of lighting of the arch one night in October. I am hopeful that women not only in Missouri but all around the country and around the world will see the arch and take the message of that lighting to heart. I am very grateful to the majority leadership and the Democratic leadership as well for clearing this bill. I am grateful to the Senate for passing it by unanimous consent this evening. I yield the floor.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Maine for her comments. I am going to make a couple of comments about an amendment the Senate adopted an hour or two ago that I am strongly supportive of and was pleased to cosponsor. I want a little more on the record about what that amendment does. As I travel around Missouri and talk with first responders about homeland security, there is a consistent theme I hear. This goes back several years ago when I was not even in the Senate and was just campaigning. Over and over again, what I heard from fire chiefs, local public health authorities, police chiefs, and sheriffs was this: Look, we thank the Federal Government for sending money to help be prepared, but do not tell us in a detailed way what to do with the money. I had one fire chief from Missouri say his big fear is: They will send the money and I will need the dollars to buy a better communication system so that in the event there is a terrorist-related disaster, I can find out where my guys and gals are and tell them where to go. My big fear is they will tell me I have to buy HAZMAT suits when I don't need HAZMAT suits, because we already have in Missouri a tremendous HAZMAT regional team that I would call if we ever had that problem. This concern resonated with me. I said to myself, that is what the Federal Government will do. It will send them the money but then tell them what to do with it. Accountability is fine. It is fine maybe to have certain standards in certain areas that are off limits--maybe you do not want them to spend the money on routine personnel costs. But I am a big believer that our first responders are best prepared to handle disaster-related emergencies when they prepare themselves better just to handle emergencies. The kind of problems or threats associated with terrorist disasters are 80 percent the same as with any other disaster--fire, people being crushed or trapped in buildings. The better they are prepared to do their job on a day-to-day basis, the better they will be prepared to protect, help, cure, or get us loose from some terrorist-related disaster. After I came to the Senate, I found out in large part we have, unfortunately, done exactly what they were afraid we were going to do, which is send them the money with so many strings attached that they do not have the flexibility to use it the way they want. We had an example of this in Missouri last year when Senator Bond and I were contacted by the local Jewish community in St. Louis which was hosting the Maccabi Games--like the international youth Olympics for Jewish youth from around the world. Those games drew over 5,000 young Jewish people from around the world. The Maccabi Games were an obvious target for a terrorist threat--that is just a matter of common sense-- and there were a lot of extra costs associated with protecting the games. The local hosts wanted some of those costs reimbursed. We certainly understand that. We tried to get money that had already been assigned to the State of Missouri reprogrammed or changed so they could use it for this obviously necessary purpose, and we could not. The statute was too closed to let the money be reprogrammed, despite the best efforts of Senator Bond and I. It turned out that the Maccabi Games went on without incident, and we are all very grateful. But the problems remain for the discretion on the part of the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Director of the Office of State and Local Government Coordination to at least have the authority to entertain a waiver application by States to reprogram dollars where, at least, some unexpected need arises. I joined with Senator Collins in cosponsoring legislation to that effect. I offered a sense-of-the-Senate resolution on the Homeland Security appropriation which did get adopted by the Senate and had a colloquy with Senator Cochran at the time about the need to follow up on this issue. I was very pleased to cosponsor with Senator Collins, an amendment that, among other things, does create that kind of waiver authority for the Secretary of Homeland Security and for the Director to help out in instances such as that. I congratulate the Senator from Maine for her interest. She has heard the same things I have heard. She knows the need to do something about it. I am very pleased that with the adoption of that amendment, we have taken a step in that direction. It is not as far as we need to go, in my judgment. We can trust our first responders more than we will trust them even with this amendment becoming law--and I hope it does become law--but it is a step in the right direction. I will keep working in that direction. The people of Missouri and the people of the country will be better off as we make progress toward that end. To reiterate, as I have traveled across the State of Missouri discussing homeland security, nearly every police chief and every first responder has told me the same thing: Don't tie our hands on how we are going to use money you give us. Leave us some discretion on how to use those funds. At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security asserts it must tightly control how every dollar is spent. I appreciate the need for accountability given the department's mission. I also appreciate that in many instances our first responders know best how to allocate these funds and that sometimes very legitimate concerns fall outside the narrow spending guidelines of the department. For example, in St. Louis last year, our local Jewish community hosted the Maccabi Games, an international Jewish Youth Olympics, which drew over 5,000 Jewish youth from around the world. Given the security environment, Missouri's Homeland Security Office threat assessment team stressed the need for greater security but lacked the latitude to reallocate even a modest sum from the monies awarded to the State. Despite all of our efforts here, they were unable to free up dollars to provide for the necessary security. Thankfully, the event ended without incident, but it still illustrates the need for discretion on the part of the Secretary and the director of the Office for State and Local government Coordination to approve waiver applications on the part of the State to reprogram some of their Federal grant homeland money when some new kind of security issue arises that was unforeseen when they originally applied for those grants. Last year, I engaged in a colloquy on this floor with Chairman Cochran on this issue and have been working since arriving in the Senate with Chairman Collins to craft language that would provide State and local governments with flexibility in the reallocate a portion of homeland security grant funds based upon the changing threat environment. Last week I successfully offered an amendment to the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations bill that addressed this issue. I am pleased that Senator Collins has included in her amendment language that we worked on together over the past year to provide the discretionary authority needed by the State homeland security officials.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I will make a comment or two on the bill as a whole. I will not hold the Senate up a long time. We are trying to get this bill done, and I fully support that. There is an area of the bill I would like to register, for the record, concern on the part of this Senator. Probably the bill's managers will recognize the legitimacy of that concern. First, I want to say how much I have appreciated the work by the Senator from Maine and the Senator from Connecticut on this bill. I have enjoyed this debate and enjoyed the part that I played in it--not that it has been significant but just attending the briefings, visiting with the Senators on and off the Senate floor. In my work on the Armed Services Committee, we have had hearings on this subject. This has been handled in the way the American people like to see the Senate handle things. It has been bipartisan in the best sense of that word--not that we have tried to conceal legitimate differences of opinion that sometimes separate the two parties, but because we have understood that the right way to deal with those differences is to reconcile them where we can, to have them out without being personal or political about it, and understand we are all working for the good of the American people and the security of the country. We can all agree, having been here now through almost this entire Congress, that unfortunately, the Senate does not always operate in that ideal fashion. I believe it has operated in that way on this bill, and the leadership of the two Senators is the reason. It is clear from listening to this debate and watching it on TV in my office that both of these Senators have done their due diligence. They know their subject. There has not been a point raised that they were unfamiliar with. That has been very impressive to me and has led me to decide that I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt on amendments that are offered because clearly they have studied this. It is not a case where they are refusing to consider any concern or looking down on a Senator who is raising it. It is important for the public to know that personal factors like that can play a part in legislation. The trust and regard in which these two Senators are held by the rest of the body is making a difference. I also agree with them that it is time to do something; that 3 years is long enough. Some people say 40 years, because there have been a number of recommendations for changing how we do intelligence over the decades. I think it is time to get something done. I agree with that. I also like the creation of a national intelligence director. I do wish we could have come up with a different name than NID. Imagine how often that name is going to be used and what it may come to represent in Washington, but it may be too late to do anything about that. For some reason, I do not think people have aired on the floor--and I want to; it is a practical reason--there are times in our history when foreign policy and national defense are bigger issues than at other times. The American people in the United States of America are a people who are concerned with their day-to-day lives. That is as it should be. We would rather, if we could, avoid having to engage extensively in these tremendous efforts abroad and in all the foreign policy discussions and reconstructions that go with that. In our elections, sometimes we elect Presidents in a context where foreign policy does not seem to be all that important. I think it is another way of saying some Presidents are more interested than other Presidents in intelligence on a day-to-day basis. I do not say that to be critical. I do not think there has been a President who has ever served in that high office who has not cared about the security of the country. But I think people here understand what I mean. Now that we are fighting this terrorist war, we all read stories about intelligence. We know how important it is. We are all following it on a day-to-day basis. Everybody wants to serve on the Intelligence Committee or the Foreign Affairs Committee, and that is fine. But in other times, attention and interest wanes. I think by having a national intelligence director, what we will help ensure is that even in those times when interest is waning on the part of other high-level political actors, maybe even the President, we will have somebody in Washington whose job it is to look at all this in a comprehensive way, and try to make sure the agencies under him or her are working together on behalf of the interests of the American people, in a way rather like we have done with the Federal Reserve, where we have created an agency and we have vested a lot of authority in a Chairman of the Federal Reserve. We know that person is watching monetary policy and other policy. Over time, what has happened is Presidents of both parties and under all circumstances realize that appointments to that kind of job are very highly scrutinized, and you put in people who have prestige and gravitas and the regard of people of both parties and the regard of the country. It is my hope that will happen with the national intelligence director. Presidents, whether foreign policy is the No. 1 concern for them or not, will know this is an important appointment and they need to put somebody in this position, from administration to administration, who has the regard of everybody in the country, who watches and knows about foreign policy and about intelligence. That will help create a stability over time and a continuity in our intelligence policy. Now, I am not downgrading the concerns people have expressed. There is always a tension in this kind of thing. You cannot create and set up a higher authority such as this without increasing the risk that if you get a person in there who is very autocratic, it may tend to create a certain kind of group-think among the agencies even more than we now have, that people could be acting in way that is designed to please only this national intelligence director rather than trying to have their own opinions regarding intelligence. But there are safeguards in the bill designed to deal with that. I certainly have had some concerns along those lines, but I am going to exercise the benefit of the doubt in favor of supporting the creation of a national intelligence director. There is an area, though--and the Senators have addressed it; I think perhaps they could again in response to my remarks--I am concerned about the flow of intelligence to the troops in the field. Here is the kind of classic situation I am concerned about. We have, of course, an extensive satellite system in place. We get intelligence all the time from those satellites. Particularly since the first Gulf War, the Department of Defense has become pretty good at getting that intelligence off the set satellites and getting it out to the field in real time. That means virtually instantaneously, so that it can be used by our special operations troops, by commanders in the field to check and select targets. This kind of mapping and satellite intelligence can be used even to move troops around during some kind of an engagement. It works pretty well. I know that for a fact. I think one of the reasons it does work is these agencies--the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency--are in the Department of Defense and the customers they are serving with that intelligence are in the Department of Defense. It is very reasonable to believe that if the provider of the intelligence and the customer of the intelligence are in the same Department, the same bureaucratic structure, they will share intelligence better. If that were not true, then why are we doing this bill? Because the whole point of the bill is to get all these intelligence agencies under some kind of joint authority so they will share better. In most cases, I think it is very clear how the bill is doing that, that the bill is breaking down existing bureaucratic barriers. But I do think we all ought to be honest enough to admit with respect to this particular kind of sharing, we are setting up a bureaucratic barrier that does not exist now, because we are going to pull those agencies out of the control of the Department of Defense and put them under the national intelligence director, at least partially. So there is at least a risk we will put up a stovepipe in the name of taking down stovepipes, that we will put up a stovepipe in an area where the sharing is working. It would be ironic if one of the effects of the bill were to interrupt the sharing of the intelligence in the one area where we have confidence now that it is being shared. Now, I feel a lot better about this concern than I did when I first heard about this bill. I know the Senator from Maine and the Senator from Connecticut have put measures in the bill designed to ensure that flow of intelligence continues. I am glad they have done that. I am glad they recognized the importance of this concern, because it is going to grow as time goes on. Let me give you an example. We are trying, on the Armed Services Committee--and both Senators serve on that Committee, so they know this as well as I--to make all the various what we call weapons platforms for the Army network-centric. What this means is they will all be networked in, so that we hope in the near future intelligence from a satellite will not even have to go through a middleman at the NGA or the NSA, it will go directly from the satellite down to the commander in the field. It is very important that we procure weapons systems and platforms and communications systems and signal intelligence systems that are all linked together. This bill, for example, gives procurement authority to the NID over the satellite end of those systems. So we are going to have the NID procuring the satellites, the platforms that are getting the intelligence. We are going to have the Department of Defense procuring its end of the platform that is going to be receiving the intelligence, and there is a danger we will end up with a stovepipe we do not want. I am not saying this is a reason to oppose the bill. I am not saying it is a reason to change the bill. I am saying it is a concern. I guess what I would say to my friends from Connecticut and Maine is, if they could give us their assurance that not only in the passage of the bill but in the implementation of it, and in the months and years after that, they will remain conscious of these concerns and try to ensure a free flow of intelligence from these various intelligence organizations out to the troops in the field, even though they will no longer be in the same bureaucratic organizations. Maybe the Senator from Maine would yield for a question from me or have a brief colloquy, if I can ask consent to do that. I have been airing the point you and I have talked about privately, and you have addressed on the floor as well, about the importance of making sure that tactical military intelligence continues to flow from the NGA and the NRO and the others out to troops in the field. I was telling the Presiding Officer you all have done a lot to allay my concern in that regard. What I was hopeful of, and I wanted to put on the record, is to get assurance from you and the Senator from Connecticut that in implementing this bill you will continue to oversee this aspect of it and try to make certain the NID understands the importance of acting jointly with the DOD in ensuring that this intelligence continues to flow. Because no matter what protocols you put in the bill, this is a fruitful area for oversight to make certain that this intelligence is not interrupted. Would the Senator from Maine care to comment?

Mr. TALENT. I have been much reassured by the debate, by your comments, and by my further thinking on the subject. I do think it is unlikely that any national intelligence director would not be sensitive to this. And given the congressional concern that has been expressed, if he or she were insensitive, we certainly could do something about it. To give an example--and I shared this with the Senate--on procurement, you know the extent to which we are trying to procure network-centric type platforms for the Army. And since now the various satellite agencies would be under the procurement authority of the NID, it would be important early in this process to get some kind of memorandum of understanding or protocol so there would be a joint type procurement process to make certain that what the Army was doing to get network-centric receivers was compatible with whatever the NID was procuring for satellite. I expect there will be a number of instances in practice where it will be useful for all of us to be aware on a continuing basis of this concern and trying to make certain that they work together, as we did with Goldwater-Nichols. There is an example of a congressional enactment and oversight that has increased the joint process. I don't offer these remarks in hostility to the bill but to put on the record again the importance of this, to make clear your intent and the intent of the Senator from Connecticut in this regard. I would be happy to have the Senator comment further.

Mr. TALENT. I am grateful. I don't know if the Senator from Connecticut wanted to say something now or later. I am not inviting you to admit a concern that you don't think is in the language of the bill, that would suggest a weakness in the bill that you don't believe is there. It is just that any change in structure like this has the potential, if we are not careful, to interrupt that flow. I am pleased about your reassurances. I won't make you say it for the 15th time. I will just reclaim my time and close briefly. It has been a pleasure to participate in this debate and to watch how my friends from Connecticut and Maine have handled it. I do think it is time to do something. I had concerns. I had concerns about the speed with which we were acting. I think we can all concede the honesty of those concerns. I do believe, however, for the reasons I have indicated, that we ought to move forward. I think we can, while guarding against the dangers that are present whenever you have a major change like this. There is a lot about our intelligence system that is working. We do want to be careful that in trying to fix the parts that aren't, we don't cause problems for the parts that are working. The Senators from Maine and Connecticut have done a good job in guarding against that. I congratulate them on their work. Again, I am pleased the Senate has adopted an amendment which finally takes a first step toward allowing our first responders, our State and local officials on whom we depend, to have discretion in where they are going to use these homeland security grants the country is giving them. I yield the floor.

Mr. TALENT. I can see how that would happen, and we should not accept something that is working fairly well if we think we can make it better. It may be possible by moving these agencies into the NID for budgetary purposes that they will get a higher priority than they get now with the DOD which does not see itself primarily as an intelligence department. I can see potential pluses to this. I just thought it was very important that the record show the concern about this is not only deep with you two as the managers but also all throughout the Senate and the Congress, that there are many of us who are familiar with this and who know this current system is working, certainly working much better than it used to. I hope whoever is going to be the national intelligence director--I certainly will bring this up in the confirmation process, and I hope you two do as well--knows we want his cooperation and will continue to want this to be a priority. I thank the Senator for his comments. I yield back my time.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. I ask unanimous consent that a fellow from my office, Lore Aguyo, be allowed floor privileges for the remainder of the bill.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I have a brief inquiry. My understanding is that with the unanimous consent agreement, I will now have longer than 10 minutes, if I need it, to speak in morning business.