Jim Talent

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I thank my friend for his comments. I want to talk about several issues, but let me say with regard to the whole question of illegal status of the freedom we are winning, along with the Iraqi people, in Iraq, there are many people in the international community for whom the definition of ``international legality'' is quite flexible, depending upon what it is they happen to want at any particular moment. I was serving in the Congress, albeit on the other side of the Capitol, in the 1990s and remember when, at the urgent request of the Europeans, particularly the western Europeans, the United States assembled a coalition and used its military power to prevent genocide in southeastern Europe, to protect the Kosovars from genocide that was being conducted by Milosevic and the Serbs at the time. The nations that wanted to do that asked the Security Council for a resolution of support and were denied it because, if you will recall, Mr. President, the Russians threatened to veto it, just as the French indicated 2 years ago they would veto any resolution of support for our action in Iraq. Now you would think that to be consistent with the position they are now taking, some of the Western European countries, in particular the French and Germans, would have said at the time, If you can't get a Security Council resolution, then we don't want to intervene in Kosovo and prevent genocide there. But that was not the position they took at all. They insisted, they urgently pleaded with the United States to lead a coalition of nations to intervene for humanitarian reasons at that point, notwithstanding the fact they could not get a Security Council resolution because they recognized then what we have been consistent in recognizing all along: That we always seek the support of international alliances, and we have support of an international coalition in Iraq. We always seek to operate within international bodies and get the support of the U.N. when possible, but we protect our freedom with or without the support of that body in any given circumstance. That is what we did in Kosovo when we prevented genocide, and that is what we are now doing in Iraq. I want to add a few more words along those lines and then talk some about health care. Let me say how moved I was by the eloquence of Prime Minister Allawi and the way in which he represented the aspirations of freedom and free people everywhere. I think of two statements in particular, one in which he quoted Prime Minister Blair in saying that whenever people are given a choice, they choose freedom over tyranny, democracy over dictatorship, and the rule of law over the rule of the secret police. It does not matter whether the people who are being asked to choose are of the Islamic faith or the Christian faith or the Jewish faith or any other faith; it does not matter where they live or the circumstances under which they are raised; there is a universal desire placed in the human heart by our Creator for freedom. We are seeing that desire in Iraq, and we saw it with Prime Minister Allawi today. I was tremendously impressed by his courage. He probably has the biggest target on his back of anybody in the free world, and yet he stood there and said not only do the Iraqi people want freedom--and I made a note of this comment--as you have stood with us, we will stand with you in the ongoing battle against terrorism. I think this is a vindication of the underlying strategy that the United States is following with its allies and the coalition in freeing Iraq. There were two strategic goals in going into Iraq. One of them was to remove a regime and a person who even if there had never been a 9/11 was on his own a serious organic threat to the security of the region and the freedom of the United States. We saw this and lived it in the 1990s. We saw him attack his neighbors twice. We saw him plow missiles into his neighbors. He developed weapons of mass destruction. He had stockpiles of sarin gas and other chemical and biological weapons. He showed he was willing to use them on his own people and on his neighbors. We had tens of thousands of American personnel, American airplanes and warplanes in the region specifically designed to contain him year after year. I could see the Clinton administration building up toward a policy that would end this threat to American interests and American freedom and the stability of the region, and it was necessary to remove him. That was part one. Part two, necessitated by 9/11, was to replace Saddam Hussein, in corroboration with the Iraqi people, with a democracy that respected human dignity, stood for human rights, would fight for human rights and be an ally with us in the war against terrorism. We heard from Prime Minister Allawi today the determination of the Iraqi people to do that and to be an ally. I was greatly encouraged that this man, who represents a nation that is in some turmoil, that is coming out of decades of totalitarian rule and terror and is in a weakened condition, stood defiantly against the terrorists with courage. Many others, who are in stable countries and have much more power, are trying to appease them. The Iraqis know the danger of tyranny and terrorism. They have lived it, and they are going to stand with us in fighting it in the future. The existence of this new democracy in Iraq will be a standing rebuke to the vision of the terrorists of a Pan-Islamic world dominated by terrorism, totalitarianism, and twisted religious extremism. Prime Minister Allawi made that point clearly and made it without apology to anybody, and he made it again and again. And have we not seen several of those from the dais on the other side of the Capitol in this Congress? I thought it was an inspiring and brilliant speech. We owe it to ourselves, to our own freedom, to our allies and our own courageous people to see this through and to win this in Iraq. I was also tremendously encouraged by his statement that we are succeeding there. Anybody who looks at the facts in an unbiased way can see that. Most of the country is stable. We are constantly seeking new ways to stabilize the rest of it, in part through the application of military power on our own or with our allies, in part through negotiations with people who are not yet committed completely to the terrorists on the other side. He made that very clear. They are using a combination of political and military tools to stabilize the country in anticipation of the elections in January. Hearing him, I have full confidence those elections will go forward. I am proud of what we have done there and proud of the resolution of the American people. I want my constituents in Missouri and constituents around the country to take satisfaction in what we have done through their resolution and through the sacrifice of the men and women in the American military.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I will take also a few minutes, putting on a little different hat because I had not intended to talk about health care today, but my friend from Massachusetts spoke with his usual vigor and eloquence on this subject and I thought perhaps a few words in response were warranted. I agree with my friend about one thing--there certainly is a very big difference between the approach of the President to resolving the problem of the uninsured and costs in health care and the approach of my friend and his colleague from Massachusetts, Senator Kerry. There is no question that there is a problem in this country because too many people do not have health insurance. I have been leading a fight on this issue for at least 7 or 8 years. There are about 45 million people who at any given time are uninsured. The interesting thing is that most of those people are working people, and they are working on farms or for small businesses. There is a reason why a disproportionate number of the people who are uninsured are working for small business. It is because health insurance costs more to purchase for small groups. The administrative costs to small businesspeople of buying health insurance for their employees is about three times the administrative costs of buying it for national pools, for the employees of big companies. It is interesting to note that if one looks at the people in the country who have health insurance, everybody, except the employees of small business, gets their health insurance through some kind of national pool, public or private. They are either employees of big national companies, they have it through a big labor union plan, they work for the Federal Government, or they are participants in Medicare or Medicaid. Everybody else is part of a big national pool because of the efficiencies and the lower costs that are available if one does that except the employees of small business and farmers who are relegated to trying to buy health insurance to cover 5-, 6-, 8- or 10- people units. It costs more. They do not get as much health insurance for it. In many cases it becomes unaffordable, so the small business does not provide health insurance at all to their employees. How many more minutes do I have? I do not want my eloquence to consume all of my time.

Mr. TALENT. So approximately 15 minutes remaining. I thank the Chair. I have talked literally to hundreds of small businesspeople who are suffering with this problem. They want to provide health insurance to their employees. They would like to because, of course, in almost all cases the owner is an employee of the corporation, like my brother is, for example. He runs a little restaurant in Missouri. He is an employee of the corporation. He would love to get health insurance for the whole company. Then he would be able to get it, too, at better rates than buying it on the individual market. He cannot because it costs too much for small businesspeople. What is the President's solution? It happens to be a solution I have been working for for a number of years, so naturally I think the President is right. His solution is to allow small businesspeople to pool through their national trade associations to buy health insurance. For example, the President wants to pass authorizing legislation which would allow the National Restaurant Association, to take an example, to contract with insurance companies nationally, and then any restaurant that joined the National Restaurant Association would become like the little division of a big company. If we had that in place, my brother could join the National Restaurant Association and his employees would get health insurance on the same terms and same conditions as if they were employees of, let us say, Anheuser-Busch, a fine company headquartered in St. Louis, or Hallmark, a great company headquartered in Kansas City. Why should they not be able to do it? It would reduce the cost of health insurance to small businesses, conservatively speaking, 10 to 20 percent. It would make it available to millions of small businesspeople who currently have no insurance at all, and millions of others would get better health insurance because the costs would go down and the quality would go up. It would create competition in the small group market that currently does not exist. Here is another thing that working people in small businesses or big businesses will be pleased about, and it does not cost anything because it is not a Government program. It is empowering small businesspeople and farmers to do the same as their colleagues who work for big companies already can do. The President has strongly supported this measure. It has passed in the House by a huge bipartisan vote. We pushed it further than ever before in the Senate. I think next year we are going to get it, and we will reduce the number of uninsured by getting more people good quality private health insurance which reflects what they want in health insurance instead of what the Government condescends to give them. It is not going to cost the taxpayers anything. Or we could pursue Senator Kerry's plan, which will cost the taxpayer, by two different estimates, one $1.5 trillion and the other $1.25 trillion. It will not even insure everybody who is uninsured. It is basically a vast expansion of Medicaid. I have supported expanding Medicaid to cover people who are unemployed or people who cannot get insurance any other way. I believe that is our responsibility as a society. But if we can help people get health insurance on their own, why should we not do it? That is the President's approach. Something else the President wants to do is he wants to reduce the costs that are driving health care by passing reasonable liability insurance reform to prevent frivolous or abusive lawsuits. I hear about nothing more often in Missouri than the whole question of liability reform, reforming our liability system so we can prevent the frivolous or abusive lawsuits that are driving up costs all over my State and States across the country. I was in Chillicothe, MO, a couple of weeks ago. The last OB/GYN shut down, moved. You can't get a baby delivered anymore in Chillicothe because of the rising cost of malpractice insurance that we all pay. I was visited the other day by a group that is involved in providing services in building facilities for seniors--assisted living and skilled nursing facilities. They were complaining because the cost-- from the time they decided to build until the time they are building, the cost of their liability insurance went up, I think it was from $200,000 to $1.5 million a year. The people of Missouri know who is paying those costs. It is getting passed on to them. We see it in the cost of health insurance premiums. We see it in the pressure on the Medicare and Medicaid budget. We can have a reasonable reform that prevents that. It doesn't have to be all or nothing at all. It doesn't have to be a system where either we allow abusive and frivolous lawsuits that are driving up costs or we don't allow recovery at all. We can do what we did for hundreds of years, which is have a system that fully allows recovery for people who are injured through negligence to the extent of their injury but doesn't allow actions that drive up costs on behalf of frivolous lawsuits or huge awards or settlements that are out of relation to any damage that is actually done. The President wants reform of that. So do the people of Missouri. They are aware of this issue. It got filibustered. The President supports reform and Senator Kerry supported the filibuster. Let me just say, there are a lot of things we can do on a commonsense, bipartisan basis to reduce the costs of health care in this country. The more you reduce the cost of health care without affecting quality or access, the more people will be able to get health insurance, the more people will be able to get health care. That is what we have to do. It is time to stop treating this as if, depending on which side of the aisle you are on, you either want or do not want people to have health care. I have never met a serious political leader in either party who did not want the people of this country to have health care. The question is how we are going to go about it. One of the things I like about the President's proposal is he has decided to get away from deeply ideological solutions and to do what makes common sense, to take steps each of which will substantially improve the situation and put us in a better position and then open up options for other things we can do. It is what we need to do. I am convinced if we set politics aside, and we can once we get past this election and pursue those measures for reform, we will pass them and not only pass them but pass them with bipartisan majorities. With regard to the bill for national insurance pools for small businesses, small business health plans, that bill has repeatedly passed the House with a bipartisan majority and it can here as well. I am hopeful that it will, after the elections this fall. We live in interesting times. There are a lot of key issues we are confronting. I continue to be optimistic. This war in Iraq is difficult. Wars are always difficult--the sacrifices, the heroism of the people of this country and their resolve, and then the men and women in the America's military who are a model for us all. They are writing another glorious chapter in the story of freedom that really is the story of the American fighting man and woman. The spread of freedom in the 20th century was the story of the American soldier all over the world making a reality, for other people as well as for this country, the ideals on which this Nation is based. We saw another example of the power of those ideals today in the House of Representatives. It was an honor to be there and a pleasure to take a few minutes to recall what we all heard. I thank the Senate for its indulgence, and I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I rise today to mourn the passing of Donald Comlish, who was the vice president for international affairs of the Air Transport Association. Through his years of service, Mr. Comlish helped provide great service to our airline industry as well as the traveling public, and he will be truly missed. Mr. Comlish worked for the ATA for 22 years as the chief representative of the airline industry in the negotiation of the international agreements between the United States and foreign countries that provide the legal and operational basis for international airline flights. He participated in the negotiation of aviation agreements with France, Germany, Japan, Thailand and many other countries during his career, helping to literally open up the world to American travelers. Mr. Comlish helped to negotiate the 1977 Bermuda II agreement, which eased restrictions on air travel between the United States and Britain. He also helped to complete a partnership between the United States and China that provided for post-World War II resumption of direct air service between the two countries. Donald Comlish was born in Stratford, CT and enlisted in the Navy after high school. He attended the Navy School of Music in Washington and played with the Navy Band. He graduated from St. Bonaventure University in 1961, and received a law degree from Catholic University in 1965. He began his career as a law clerk for the firm of Spencer & Whalen and the Civil Aeronautics Board, and then began working for the ATA. Donald was a well-respected and accomplished attorney who was admitted and qualified as an attorney and counselor to the Supreme Court. After leaving the ATA in the mid-1990s, he remained a consultant to the airline industry until his retirement in 1999. Shortly before he retired, he decided to once again pursue his love of music and began playing saxophone and clarinet for the Montgomery Village Community Band and the Virginia Grand Military Band. He was also a member of the International Aviation Club. Mr. Comlish's survivors include his wife of 42 years, Carol Comlish; 6 children: Jeannie, Michael, Gregory, Matthew, Paul, and Chrissy; and 1 grandson. His efforts improved the lives of every American who travels, and he certainly left the world better than he found it.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I certainly appreciate the efforts of the Senator from Montana to make certain our farm families do not lose, as the Senator from Kansas said, because of the droughts that have periodically struck the Midwest. Missouri has suffered as well. I am very interested in this issue being worked out in a way that is satisfactory. I do want to take a minute, though, on a different subject to thank the ranking member and the chairman for what I understand is an agreement on a sense-of-the-Senate resolution I have offered in the form of an amendment, and I think it is going to be added later on a voice vote. I believe it has been cleared on both sides. I wanted to make the Senate aware of the importance of this subject. We had a situation in St. Louis last year where our local Jewish community was hosting the Maccabee Games. It is an international event where Jewish youths come and participate in effect in Olympic games. Obviously, it is an event with special security risks in today's day and age. Locally, we needed several hundred thousand dollars in extra funds for security. The State had the Federal homeland defense money but not in the right account, and despite all of our efforts on a Federal, State, and local level, we were unable to free up dollars to provide for the necessary security. It ended up being okay, but it did not have to end up okay. As a result of that, I have become very interested in allowing at least some 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. So the sense-of-the-Senate resolution in effect says that we ought to be able to do that. It is a first step toward what I hope will be a successful change in the law by allowing this kind of discretion in these kinds of cases. I ask Senators to think about the situation because it could come up in anybody's State where an unforeseen new security risk arises and their local authorities have to spend substantial dollars in order to be able to deal with it. That is exactly what we have this homeland defense money for. Under certain circumstances, they will be unable to access it without some kind of discretionary waiver authority being allowed the department. I hope we can follow up on this sense-of- the-Senate resolution with an appropriate change in the underlying authorization. Again, I appreciate the help of the Senator from Mississippi and the distinguished Senator from West Virginia in getting this amendment cleared. I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. TALENT

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

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I believe it is safe to say that later on in the evening the Senate will consider and I am certain approve a resolution of support and solidarity with the Russian people over their recent tragedy and atrocities that have occurred in Beslan. I am privileged to have the opportunity to cosponsor that resolution, and I congratulate the leaders on both sides of the aisle because I believe it will be cleared. I know it is not the desire of the chairman that we have a lengthy debate on it, and I certainly understand that. All of our hearts break at what happened, and although we have seen terrorists at low points before, to hold hundreds of children hostage for days, to deprive them of food and water, to terrorize them, to ignore their pleas for mercy, to shoot them in the back when they are trying to escape when it can achieve no possible end, is a level of depravity I do not believe I ever witnessed in my lifetime. Like all who watched the horrific coverage of the school hostage situation in Russia last week, I was shocked by the images of frightened children and their parents inside the gymnasium of School Number One, surrounded by several hooded hostage-takers and plastic explosives hanging from basketball hoops. On September 1, more than 1,100 parents, students, and teachers who had gathered for the first day of school were taken hostage by approximately 30 terrorists who had rigged the school with explosives. On September 3, Russian troops and the Beslan hostage- takers exchanged gun fire, a bomb exploded collapsing the roof of the school, the terrorists began killing the hostages, and massive loss of life ensured. This horrendous terrorist action left at least 335 people dead, many of them children, as well as hundreds more severely wounded and over 200 unaccounted for, who are most likely dead. I join my colleagues, Senators Daschle, Frist and Santorum, in condemning this despicable terrorist act and in expressing our condolences to the Russian people and in particular to those families who lost their loved ones in the Beslan school tragedy. We commend the continuing efforts of the U.S. Government in providing humanitarian and medical assistance to the people of the Russian Federation. The terror last week at the school in Beslan is the same face of evil we saw in the U.S. on September 11. The terrorists held children, parents and teachers hostage for more than 2 days without food, water or medicine. Without conscience or mercy, the terrorists shot children in their backs as they fled for safety. These killers seek to terrorize the entire civilized world. They have no regard for human life, even the lives of children. Today, America stands together with the Russian people more resolved than ever to win the war against terrorism. I know the Senate will vote unanimously for the resolution. I am confident that because of incidents such as this in Beslan and around the world, Americans and civilized people everywhere will draw increased resolution to lead and win the war against terrorism that has really become a war of civilization against barbarians, like those who committed these atrocities. I thank the Senate for giving me a moment to give my remarks. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Madam President, I was unavoidably detained and unable to participate in rollcall vote No. 164 that took place on September 7, 2004. My flight was diverted from its intended destination of Reagan National Airport to Dulles International Airport and prevented me from being able to cast my vote. Had I been present I would have voted in favor of the nomination of Virginia Maria Hernandez Covington to be U.S. District Judge for the Middle District of Florida.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. I understand we have about 20 minutes until lunch. May I have the 20 minutes?

Mr. TALENT. I appreciate that. I very much appreciate the kind words of my friend from Colorado in introducing me. That is probably more than I deserve, and it is certainly better than I usually get when I stand up to speak on the Senate floor. We are in the midst of another filibuster. I say that because if I didn't say it, given the Senate procedures, it would not be evident to people that that is what is happening. But we are filibustering yet another measure before the Senate. This one has a little twist to it. Those who are filibustering are willing to allow us to go to a vote on the amendment, if we have no amendment to the amendment. In other words, if nobody wants to offer any amendment to change this amendment at all, to try and perfect it, then they will permit an immediate vote. So what we are told is that we must either have an immediate vote without any changes even being considered or no vote at all. I suspect that the filibuster will be sustained when we vote on it. It is a shame because this is an important measure, and the people are entitled to see who in this body is for protecting traditional marriage and who is not, because nothing less than that is at stake. Members of the Senate should not be mistaken or deceived by discussions of other issues or attempts to restate what this amendment is about or assurances that we don't really need to do anything and everything will be OK. The courts of this country are engaged in a process by which they are going to force the people, whether they like it or not, to accept a fundamental change in the basic building block of our society. I kind of think that is important. I think it is worth debating. It is a sign of the regard in which marriage is held by some of those who are filibustering that they don't think it is important enough to be worth debating. Marriage is our oldest social institution. I was thinking about this the other day. It is not older than the impulse to seek God, but it is older than our formal religions. It is older than our system of property. It is older than our system of justice. It certainly predates our political institutions, our Constitution, even our union in this country. And marriage may be the most important of all these institutions because it represents the accumulated wisdom of literally hundreds of generations over thousands of years about how best to lay the foundation of a home in which we can raise and socialize our children. Every society has to be able to do certain things in order to survive. It has to produce wealth, goods, and services so people can live. It has to resolve disputes so that people don't kill each other over problems that they have. It has to be able to raise children who are reasonably content, reasonably well adjusted, and reasonably committed to the norms of that society. It is possible to do that. I put in that word for those in the gallery who may have teenagers as I do. It is possible for children to be reasonably content, well adjusted, and committed to the norms of society. And the way that we do that, the way we have decided over the millennia to do that in this country, and, indeed, throughout the world, is through marriage. It doesn't always work that way, obviously. No human society, no human institution is perfect. A spouse may die. The marriage may break up. The marriage may be so completely dysfunctional that maybe it ought to break up. People sometimes are single when children are born, and very often in those circumstances the person who is raising the child is able to make it work. They act heroically to raise the child on their own. If a child in that circumstance went to his mom or dad or aunt or uncle or grandma or grandpa or guardian, whoever was trying to raise him or her on his own and said, When I grow up, when I want to have children, would you recommend that I try and find somebody who is committed to raising the child--say it is a girl--if I try and find a man who is committed to me and committed to the home and committed to raising our children in that context, would you recommend that I do that or not? How many of those single moms or dads or grandmas or grandpas or aunts or uncles who have raised kids or are raising kids, how many would say, No, do it the other way? They would say: Do it that way, if you can. It is hard under any circumstances. But it is less hard if you have a husband or a wife who is there, who is committed, who wants to help. That is what marriage is about. Americans know that as a matter of commonsense. Americans live in this civilization. Americans of all different backgrounds, all different ethnicities, all different religions, all support traditional marriage. They know that, if possible, kids should be raised by a mom and a dad, committed in the context of marriage to their family. Americans know that and have known it. They have built that society and that culture. The social scientists have figured it out. Here is a representative statement. The Senator from Kansas read a number of similar statements the other day, but this was by Scott M. Stanley who is a Ph.D. at the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver, which my friend from Colorado has the honor to represent. He said: As a result of decades of accumulated data, many family scientists, from the fields of sociology, psychology and economics, have concluded-- Here is the news bulletin-- children and adults on average experience the highest level of overall well-being in the context of healthy marital relationships. And what is marriage? We are entitled to ask that about all our social institutions. What is it? It is not complicated. In short form, it is one mom, one dad, one at a time. Everybody has the same right to get married. There is no discrimination involved in a social institution. Everybody has the same right to get married. But nobody has the right to marry anybody they want to. There are certain restrictions. You can't marry a close relative. You can't marry somebody who is already married. Is that discrimination if we tell people, No, you can't marry somebody if they are already married? That is not marriage. And you can't marry somebody of the same sex. And why? Because marriage is the institution--remember, it is many things; yes, it is an expression of love and commitment between two people and that is beautiful--that we in our society rely upon for raising our children. And it is best for kids, if possible and where possible, to have a mom and a dad. And that is one thing that two people of the same sex cannot give children. They cannot give them a mom and a dad. It comes down to this: People in this country are free to live the way they want to live. That is one of our cultural norms that, by the way, marriage supports. Marriage is the building block of a society which believes, among other things, that people should be free. And people are free to live the way they want. The Senator from California talked about two same-sex people who love each other and want to live together. Legally people are free to do that. But that does not mean that they are free to change the basic cultural institutions on the health of which everybody and everybody's rights depend. We have models of this around the world. In Scandinavia they have changed traditional marriage, legalized same-sex marriage. The result there is increasingly nobody gets married. Fewer and fewer kids are raised outside of that context. It is not good. If you think it is good, come down here and say that. Say that is why you want to oppose the amendment. It is worth asking also how we got here. No legislature has acted on this. I haven't heard about hearings in the State legislatures around the country. No referendum has passed. I served in the legislature for 8 years in Missouri and was proud to do so. I served on the committees that considered family law. We debated a lot of issues involving family law. We changed the law a lot. It has not happened in this country. People have not adopted referendum. In fact, all the actions have been the other way. To the extent that they have passed referendum or laws, they have all been in support of traditional marriage. So how did we get here? We got here because a majority of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided people should have the right to same-sex marriage. Because of the way our Federal system works, it is very likely--whether people want to admit this or not--that other courts will force people in other States to recognize same-sex marriage because one State has. That is the way our system works. It may not happen, but it is quite likely to happen. When I heard about that decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, I asked myself: What about everybody else's rights? What is the most basic political right people in this country, and indeed throughout the free world, have? What is the political right that people in this country have fought and died for for hundreds of years? We see people around the world now heroically fighting for this. The first and most basic right is the right of the people to govern themselves. The Framers thought that right was so self-evident, you didn't have to argue for it. Maybe we should restate it for the Massachusetts Supreme Court. It means that the only just government is the one that derives its powers from the consent of the governed. That means that every act of any governmental body has to be the result of a process in which the people have, at some time, consented. In this country, people have to consent to the acts by which they are governed. Typically, they could do that through the process of a representative democracy. They elect people or defeat them, depending on whether they agree with them. We would not tolerate it for a second if a President got up one day and said: I don't like the way our society is functioning; I am going to issue a decree and everybody has to do it differently now. It would not matter whether we agreed, we would say you don't have the authority to do that. It is because of that basic right of self- government that judges are supposed to construe and apply the law, not invent and impose the law. Now, the construction may be strict or liberal. Provisions of the Constitution may be vague. But the construction has to be a faithful construction--whether it is strict or liberal--to the proper exercise within the American constitutional system of the judicial power. Even if a provision of the Constitution is so vague that we are not certain what the right answer, the right interpretation is, it doesn't mean there are no wrong interpretations. It doesn't mean there are no interpretations which clearly are outside of the scope of what the people who wrote the document said or intended. I want to assert this before the Senate now: It is wrong to say the Constitution of the United States, or any of the several States, contains a right to same-sex marriage. It is intellectually dishonest to claim that the Massachusetts decision was one of interpretation and application, rather than invention and imposition. They were not interpreting the Constitution; they were imposing what they wanted on the people of Massachusetts, without their consent. In this country, you don't do that. I have been around legislative bodies a long time. I have won some battles and lost some. Sometimes I think I have lost a lot more than I have won. Certainly, when I served in the minority in the Congress and in the legislature, I lost more battles than I won. That is the way the system works. I can live with that. But I don't like being told I have no right to participate. I don't like being told my views are such that I cannot petition the representative process to get what I want out of it. Unless we pass a constitutional amendment, we will allow the courts of this country to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans on an issue that is of greater importance to them on a day-to-day basis-- because it involves the way in which their children and other people's children are going to be raised--than most of the issues we discuss. If we cannot agree in this body on anything else, we can agree on this: Everybody should have the right to advance their point of view in the legislative process on this issue, and that we can trust the good sense of the American people to produce the right result in the end. I am willing to do that, but the only way we can do that is by passing a constitutional amendment. That is what this country is about. I have just a few minutes. I will deal with some of the arguments that have been raised against this. One is that this is political. Well, I have been in legislative bodies a long time. When people start talking about a bill or an argument being political, they are really saying that we know if we have to vote on this, we are going to vote in a way that people probably don't like back home, and we would really rather not vote on it. Let me say this. This is not a battle that my friend from Colorado sought when he introduced this amendment. This battle is being forced upon us by the courts of the country. If you don't want to vote on this, get the Massachusetts Supreme Court to reverse itself. We will go back to what we had before, and gladly so. Another argument is that we are holding up other business. I say to the people who are making that argument, as I said at great length on the floor of the Senate the other day, you are filibustering the other business. If you want to go to other business, stop filibustering it. You filibustered the class action bill last week, the welfare bill, the Energy bill, medical malpractice, and judicial nominations. You can filibuster if you want. Unfortunately, here we allowed very broad filibustering. But one thing you cannot do is filibuster and then accuse everybody else of being obstructionists. That isn't right. Let the other measures go and we will go with them. Another argument is that we should show more respect for the Constitution and that we should not amend the Constitution. You know, that is kind of a selective argument. That says basically you can amend it through the courts. The courts can amend it any way they want, without regard to the right of the people to govern themselves; but we cannot amend it through the process that the people have provided to amend it. The argument is kind of cheeky. It says we can get court decisions that exclude you from participating in the normal process, so you cannot pass a law to do anything about it. But then, if you go to the constitutional amendment process, which is the only process we have left open to you, you are not showing any respect for the Constitution. Look, my time is running out. I see a colleague who may want to add a word or two at the end. You are either for protecting traditional marriage or you are not. There is no way around this debate. The courts are forcing it on us. They have changed the law in Massachusetts. People are getting married there and filing lawsuits in other States to challenge those State laws. This is here. We are either going to do something about it or we are not. You are either for protecting traditional marriage or you are not. It is not about homeland security. It is about whether you really think that marriage, as we have understood it for thousands of years, is important in some sense, even if you cannot explain it, to the kind of society we live in. I think so. I know most of the people think so. My tone has been one of frustration. I am sorry about that. This frustrates me. It is something that, clearly, we ought to do. I don't know anybody who has come down here and argued against traditional marriage. Let's pass this constitutional amendment, work on it for a reasonable amount of time, get it in as good a shape as we can, and do the business the people expect us to do. Let them make their own decisions about their own culture. I yield the floor. I thank the Senate, and I yield the floor.

Mr. TALENT

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

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I thank my friend from Utah for being willing to assume the chair for a few minutes so I could make a brief statement about the bill pending before us. I want to say, as I listened when I was in the chair, I appreciated his eloquence on behalf of the bill. The Senate will realize pretty soon that I have a bit of a cold. If I pause to take a sip of water now and then, it is not for the dramatic effect but so I can finish the statement. I had originally not intended to say anything about the legislation, although I support it. Anybody who has gotten around their States and heard about the destructive impact of abusive lawsuits on jobs and economic growth has to support doing something. I was not planning to speak on it, but the other night I was presiding when this debate began, and I was fortunate to hear Senator Carper from Delaware give one of his initial remarks. I don't think he realized I was listening as I was presiding because I was doing a little paperwork, but I did listen. I heard him give examples of abuses of class actions that have occurred around the country, items such as a class action lawsuit in Illinois against a bottled water giant named Poland Spring which claimed that the company's water wasn't pure and wasn't from a spring. Under the settlement the consumers received coupons for discounts on the water. The company didn't agree they had done anything wrong, didn't agree to change the water, and all the plaintiffs got were coupons to buy more of the water they were complaining about. But their attorneys got $1.35 million. In a Texas class action settlement with Blockbuster over late fees on movie rentals, class members received coupons for more movie rentals. The attorneys received $9.25 million. I don't know how my family missed out on those coupons--I guess because we didn't live in Texas. I could go on, but Senator Carper made the point that there was obviously a need to remedy these abuses and a need to do that without undermining the efficacy of the class action lawsuit in principle. In other words, we need to be able to have class action lawsuits because sometimes a whole lot of people will be done a small wrong. Each of them will experience some wrong that is so small it is not worthwhile for any one individual to sue, so if they can get together in a class we can remedy that wrong and the attorneys can get reasonable attorney's fees. But when there is, in fact, no remedy for the plaintiffs, when there may have been no wrong, and when there are these outside attorneys' fees, it is obviously something unjust because it is unjust to make people pay when they have not done anything wrong and it is not very good for the rest of us. We all know how it works. Those awards are paid and then it is passed along in the form of higher prices or fewer jobs. Senator Carper's point was it should not be all or nothing at all. We should not have to have a system where either we have no class action remedies or we allow these abuses to continue year after year. There is no reason in principle why we should not be able to fix the abuses while keeping the remedy. He is right. There is no reason in principle we should not be able to do that. There are people of good will on both sides of the aisle who want to do that. There is obviously a solid majority of the Senate who wants to do that. Yet year after year, we do not do that. Why? It was his speech and my thinking about it that led me to decide to come down here and make a statement because I think I know the reason why. It is because of the filibuster, or more precisely it is because of the way the Senate allows the filibuster to be conducted. This principle of filibusters is actually a pretty good thing. I think if a determined minority in any legislative body believes something is really bad, it makes sense to give them some remedy to stop that legislation from passing. In fact, I submit to you that the filibuster has been consistently abused in the Senate. Why has that happened? Because the discipline on the filibuster is public accountability. The public doesn't like obstructionism for its own sake. If they see that happening, they will not like it; and if the American people do not like something happening here and focus on it, it tends to stop. I have been around here long enough to see that. But because of the way the filibuster is conducted in this body, it is almost invisible. Therefore, the people do not know it is happening, and therefore there is no accountability. That is why we have the abuses of it. Why is it invisible? In the Senate, in the first place, as you know, the passage of a bill requires many different steps: the introduction of the bill, assignment to a committee, first and second readings, and all of that. In most legislative bodies, those steps are pro forma. In the Senate, many of those steps are debatable. And anything that can be debated can be filibustered. The classic idea of a filibuster, as in ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,'' with final passage of some bill, people speaking all night to prevent it from being voted on doesn't have to happen in the Senate. You can filibuster a bill on any number of points. You can filibuster it after it has passed to keep it from going to conference. The public doesn't know what is happening. The second and bigger reason is that in the Senate, as all of us here know--and I think the public may be beginning to realize--you don't have to talk to filibuster. I have served now in my third legislative body. It is a tremendous honor to serve here. The pinnacle of the legislative career is to serve in the Senate. In most legislative bodies, when people are finished talking about the proposition that is pending, you vote on the proposition. Many times I have sat in the Chair where the distinguished Senator from Utah is now sitting. When the last speaker has finished some eloquent set of remarks, I have asked, Who seeks recognition? And nobody seeks recognition. It doesn't mean we vote. It means we go to a quorum call, as we did a little while ago. You don't have to speak to filibuster. You don't have to debate. You just have to decline to agree that debate will end. Unless everybody here either agrees to a unanimous consent agreement, or vote by a 60-vote majority to end debate on a cloture motion, which itself is a rather clumsy way to end debate, the debate goes on and on. To allow a filibuster in that way, and make it so invisible, tends to empower the extremes in a legislative body in any given proposition. In most legislative bodies the power in any given proposition, once it reaches the floor of that body, belongs in the middle. It makes sense, doesn't it? Because to pass it you have to have the middle with you, typically. But here the filibuster empowers those folks who like confrontation most. I am not running them down. Every legislative body has to have people whose instinct is to say: I am not going to give in. I am going to stand up for this. I believe in this, or I think it is wrong, or I think it is right, and I am not going to give in much. It is important to have those folks in a legislative body. But you can't have them running the whole show all the time. It empowers those people. It tends to educate people to the temper of partisanship. It is so tempting when you are in the minority to stop everything through the invisible filibuster and then blame the majority for not being able to pass something. That happens in this whole Congress. I don't blame my friends on the other side of the aisle. It is so tempting it would require almost a heroic effort, particularly given how divided the country is on a partisan and philosophical standpoint, for them not to have done that. The way the Senate does it makes interest groups more militant. This bill is a classic example of that. Everybody who looks at this issue knows that we have problems with litigation, at least in certain areas. We have problems in State class action abuses. We have problems with the whole asbestosis system which is driving dozens of big companies into bankruptcy and reducing the number of deep pockets that are available to pay for people who really are sick and have asbestosis. We clearly need reform in these areas. What would happen if the process was healthier is that our friends in the personal injury bar would know that something was going to happen and would sit down and negotiate, and we would come up with a moderate bill, I think, probably pretty similar to what we have before us today. We would pass it more or less by consensus. But what do you do when you have this filibuster? You can just say no. You can say it doesn't matter how bad it gets, we are going to pressure and lean on those in the Senate who are generally with us philosophically, and we will stop everything from happening. We are empowering the tactically more extreme in this body. We are educating people to the temper of partisanship. We are driving interest groups, which are pretty militant anyway, to be even more extreme. Then we are gumming up the few bills that do pass because now, if you are sitting here and you have some constructive measure you are trying to pass, and you know the only legislation that is going to get through this body this year is the defense authorization, let us say, or the tax relief bill for manufacturers that we have to pass--because if we don't pass it we are going to get increasing trade sanctions all over the world--if these are the two or three bills you know you are going to pass, what do you do? You take your constructive measure which you have wanted to pass for months but can't because nothing else is going through the Senate, and you say: Well, that train is leaving the station and maybe none of the others are, so I am going to put my bill on that. You use the opportunity to offer nongermane amendments, which personally I like and support. So you offer all kinds of amendments that are completely unrelated to the bill before you just because you know it is the only opportunity you are going to have to pass anything. Then the public wonders how we get immigration bills on class action reform bills, or how I did this: I put a bill that I believe in very strongly to help fight sickle cell disease on a tax relief bill for manufacturing, and I would do it again. But that is because of the way we are running this place. What is the effect? It affects everything that gets filibustered. We have seen filibusterss so far in this Senate and in this Congress on the Energy bill, medical malpractice reform, the welfare bill, a number of judges, the asbestosis bill, the class action bill, and a number of other bills which are slow-walked through--the highway bill, the JOBS bill, the faith-based bill. And that doesn't even count all the bills that aren't even brought up because the leadership knows they are going to be filibustered. Nobody is ever held accountable. The public wonders why the Senate doesn't work. I am going to say something. I get around this town and I get around Missouri. I am afraid that we are being held in increasingly low regard. I am afraid the Senate is being reduced to its constitutional minimum of authority and effectiveness in this town. We are like a big roadblock. Ideas don't come out of here and go places. It is like the commercial about the roach motel. They check in but they don't check out. That is what happens here. The legislative ideas check in and they never check out. I know some people say that is a good thing. We don't want anything to pass. I just sat down this morning preparing these remarks and I made a list of the things which I think we are going to have to address. This is a top 10 list: Keep America strong; a long-term solvency issue involving Social Security and Medicare--I am on the Aging Committee. I will go into that more in a moment. The Senator from Idaho, Mr. Craig, has spoken eloquently on those issues. The rising cost of health care is a problem, shortage of oil and natural gas, need for alternative energy sources to protect our energy independence and security, the failing electricity transmission grid in all parts of the country, the need to renew the distressed and urban neighborhoods, a burgeoning immigration system, a crumbling transportation infrastructure system, shortages of water in parts of the country, contamination of water resources, management of federally owned natural resources, and a policy we are going to take regarding defense both in the war on terror and also the potential rising power of competitors, such as England and China. This is the top 10 list. I am not even counting the more divisive issues or the cultural issues on which it would be nice if we could work them out and be able to act. Some of these problems may go away on their own. I am a believer in that. America is a great country. Maybe if we do not do anything, some of them are going to go away. But they are not all going to go away. Some of them are going to get worse. We cannot solve any of them without some element of participation by the Federal Government. Maybe it is just reform of regulations to allow people in the country to solve the problem. We are going to have to have Federal participation. That will require, at some point, a Senate that works better than the Senate is working now. We have reached the point where the paralysis in this body is threatening the welfare of the people. Some may say--and I heard it said with response to the motion for cloture--respect for the traditions of the Senate means we cannot do anything about this. Everyone who has been here a while, and I have not been here a while, tells me that never before has the filibuster been taken to this degree. If we were to apply a corrective, we would be restoring rather than overturning the traditions of this great body. And it is a great body. It is a privilege to be here. I don't know that I have ever worked with as motivated and passionate and intelligent a group of people. I call on Members on both sides of the aisle to consider carefully whether it is not time to change our practices in a way that permits us to work together, that encourages those who seek compromise solutions to the problems facing the country. Not to do so would be a historic abdication of the responsibilities of this Senate. I yield the floor.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Madam President, I thank my friend from Indiana. I certainly want to associate myself with the remarks made on this floor on behalf of Senator Danforth. I know they have been uniformly, without exception, complimentary to him--not in a typical way we as matter of gesture may compliment public figures, but these were remarks by people who knew and who have known and who have worked with Jack Danforth for years and years and know him to be a tremendous public servant of deep integrity, thoughtfulness, and courage. I am proud to say that he hails from the great State of Missouri. President Bush has simply selected a great man for this post. When he called me and told me about it, I told him I was thrilled. I could not think of a more qualified person to represent the United States at the United Nations. Like most of us who have been around politics and government, I have known Senator Danforth and his wife Sally for many years. He served his country and the people of Missouri with dignity and distinction. It is appropriate to take a moment to place on the Record again his background and his credentials. He served two terms as the attorney general of Missouri; three terms in the U.S. Senate; handled, as Senator Biden said, the difficult task of trying to bring peace to the Sudan, the difficult and delicate task of investigating the tragedy that occurred at Waco and emerged from that job, which could very easily have led to censure and disapproval from this town because it was a very controversial type investigation, with plaudits from everyone who recognized the thoroughness, the effectiveness, and the fairness of that investigation. He knows the importance of bipartisanship. We have seen that from the comments on this floor today. Most recently the Nation appreciated his eloquence and his thoughtfulness as he said goodbye to President Reagan during his memorial service. He is, in short, a considerate man with character, diligence, and whose abilities qualify him to represent our Nation. The Senate will support him unanimously and without opposition. As Senator Biden said, he is going to have a very difficult job. The United Nations is not an easy place. We are engaged in a war on terrorism. I want to say that, in my judgment, the United Nations has never really come to grips with the danger we are fighting. That will certainly be one of Senator Danforth's tasks. One of the reasons this transnational movement of thugs we are now confronting grew to be as powerful as it became is because of the neglect of the international community and the United Nations. Policies of appeasement do not work with this group of people. I am not certain the United Nations realizes that. I harken back to the end 2002 and the speech Prime Minister Blair gave to the Parliament, which I had an opportunity to watch, about negotiations within the United Nations about trying to deal with the threat against representative freedom by Saddam Hussein. Prime Minister Blair made the point then that after years and years and years of negotiations of containment, of watching him violate the obligations he had made after we defeated him in 1991, after a long record of aggression toward his neighbors, the use of weapons of mass destruction, deception, and the United States and Great Britain asked for one more resolution demanding that he show he had disarmed, with a threat of force if he failed to comply. That was blocked in the United Nations to which Jack Danforth is going to be an Ambassador. The United Nations is, in my judgment, important in reconstructing Iraq. But it is important that the United Nations understand the threat we are confronting. After Saddam was removed and the United Nations came to assist with humanitarian reconstruction, their headquarters was attacked by the terrorists. It was a terrible tragedy. While on one level you can understand it, on another level it was unfortunate that they lowered the flag and left. But that is what the United Nations did. The terrorists took that as a sign of weakness. Senator Danforth is going to represent us in an organization which is highly bureaucratic, which is troubled by its own Food-for-Oil scandal, and whose resolve in the face of terrorism has been questionable in the past. I know he will do a great job of representing American interests. I believe he can help us draw close again to our traditional allies. He is the kind of person who knows how to be gracious and courageous at the same time. I wish him well. He certainly has my support. I know the Senate will support him unanimously as well. I yield the floor.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Madam President, I appreciate the chance to offer a word or two on the amendment. My friend from Missouri and my friend from Iowa have covered the ground very well. In part, I rise to compliment them on their dogged tenacity on behalf of these workers who deserve this compensation and now have a chance of receiving it because of their hard work. I also compliment the managers of the bill who, even though in their States they do not have people directly involved in this, have seen the plight of our Missouri workers and Iowa workers and have worked with us to get this amendment adopted. It simply means workers in Iowa and Missouri are going to have the same opportunity to get this compensation under expedited rules and procedures that already exist in other States so they will actually have some recourse and some compensation for the illnesses they have suffered because of this overexposure, and they will get it before they pass away because of the cancers that have resulted. There have been many tragic instances where people have fought for this compensation, have waited for what the law says they are entitled to, and have never gotten it. This amendment holds out hope now that we will be able to do justice in these cases. I compliment my friend from Iowa and my colleague from Missouri for their very hard work, and I join them in offering and supporting the amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, today I rise to make a few remarks about my vote today for Senator Brownback's amendment regarding broadcast indecency. I supported this amendment as modified by the Burns second- degree amendment because it includes protections for small market stations. Combined, the Burns and Brownback amendments would curb the broadcast of indecent material without unjustly penalizing local broadcasters who unknowingly transmit it. I have spoken with Missouri broadcasters who worry that the stand- alone Brownback legislation would subject them to large fines for merely transmitting a program containing indecent material, like that contained in the Superbowl halftime show, without their knowledge of the indecency. Combined, the Burns-Brownback amendments would not place broadcasters in this situation since it requires the Federal Communications Commission to consider several factors including knowledge in determining whether to levy a fine, and how much that fine should be. Under current law, local broadcasters are essentially liable for everything that comes across their airwaves, even a Janet Jackson-type incident that they are downstream from and have had no opportunity to review. This quasi-strick liability standard is simply not fair, and that is one reason why I believe the law should be changed. The Burns amendment in particular corrects this unfairness by requiring the FCC to consider factors in assessing fines including whether the material was scripted or recorded and whether the violator had a reasonable opportunity to review the script or recording, thereby demonstrating that the violator had knowledge that the indecent, obscene or profane material would be aired or, otherwise, had a reasonable basis to believe that live or unscripted programming would contain indecent material. In determining culpability, the FCC would be required to consider mitigating factors including whether the licensee had a reasonable opportunity to review the programming or had reason to believe it may contain obscene, indecent, or profane material. I believe these provisions address local broadcasters' concerns and protect them from arbitrary FCC enforcement. I support the Burns-Brownback amendments because of these provisions, but I am still concerned about the phenomenon of congressional overreaction to current events. Like many other parents, I feel that this year's Superbowl halftime show contained indecent material and that those responsible should be held accountable. After the Superbowl, hundreds of Missourians contacted my to share similar views. There seems to be a tendency among elected officials to respond to such a strong outpouring of support by not only trying to fix the problem, but by trying to fix it in a way that swings the legislative pendulum too far in other directions, to over-regulate. I do not believe that these amendments as combined go too far, but if they do I want to hear from Missouri broadcasters and work with them to address their concerns. I thank Senators Burns and Brownback for their hard work on this legislation, and for addressing my concerns.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. I would like 5, but I probably will not use them.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I wish to say a few words on our amendment, but before I do that, let me take a minute to compliment again Senator Bond, who laid down the amendment and Senator Harkin for cosponsoring it, to assist former employees in Iowa and Missouri who were affected because they worked in plants that produced the atomic materials from which we made the atom bombs which won the war and then kept us safe. Because of their exposure to the radiation, they have become ill and they deserve compensation. They are not getting it because of the convoluted procedures that are currently in place. We simply want to allow them to be treated separately as already occurs with employees in the four States. I admire the way Senator Bond has fought like a tiger for those employees. I have joined him in doing that. I appreciate the work of the managers of the bill in trying to figure out a way to accept that amendment. I hope we can, indeed, do that. It is just a matter of justice for these employees. I also wish to speak for a moment about the amendment which Senator Clinton and I offered based on the legislation which we sponsored together some weeks ago. I want to return her kind words and say it has been a pleasure to work with her and her staff on a strong bipartisan basis to make these changes which we think are necessary to protect the health of our men and women in the military, and also to make certain they are ready to be deployed when they need to be deployed. Those are the two things we are trying to do. Before employees, service men and women are deployed to combat theaters, we require that a blood sample be drawn from them, and after they return that another blood sample be drawn from them. The point is, it has happened too often in the past where service men and women coming back from active duty show signs and symptoms of illness, and we can't figure out what is wrong. We need baseline blood tests so we can tell the extent to which their blood is deviate and their health symptoms are deviating from what they were before deployment. This will give us a clue as to what is wrong with them so we can avoid another gulf war syndrome episode. I have had vets from Missouri over several years talking to me about this issue. We allow the military to do it today, particularly with regard to reservists and guardsmen because it is often not done because local commanders want to get them deployed and into the theater. This is very important and now it will be the law. I am grateful to the managers of the amendment for accepting that part of the amendment. The other point is to simply improve the health of our Active and Reserve component service men and women. We put in place a joint committee to oversee the medical tracking system that is supposed to be in place but isn't implemented as well as it should be. We require that reservists receive detailed health assessments at least every 2 years. Right now they only get exams every 5 years. We require routine health baselines for all our recruits entering the armed services so we will know the health status of people when they enter the military. There are a number of other good measures as well. I only have 5 minutes. I imagine I have used most of that. Let us say it has been a pleasure to work with the Senator from New York and her staff. We are jointly grateful to the Senator from Virginia and the Senator from Michigan for their openness on this amendment, and we are pleased that it was agreed to and look forward to holding it through the rest of the process. I yield my time.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Madam President, I rise today in support of the Bond- Harkin amendment. I am going to be brief because I think my colleague from Missouri has covered the ground. I imagine the Senator from Iowa will wish to speak further. I want to begin by recognizing the work they have both put into this amendment. My friend from Missouri has been a tiger in support of compensation for these employees. He was moved--as I was moved and as the Senator from Iowa was moved--by the unique claim these individuals have on justice. This is not some kind of giveaway, but it is just compensation that is owed to them for the sacrifices they made on behalf of this country. That is really what this amounts to. I was pleased to cosponsor this amendment. I am grateful to the Senator from Virginia and the Senator from Michigan for their attempts to work this out. I hope we can do that. I know they want to. I know they recognize the justice of the claims. We certainly understand the importance of doing this the right way. I just hope we can do this. At the end of the day, if we have to put it in without all of the t's crossed and the i's dotted and work on it in conference, I hope we can do that because we will have other opportunities further down the road in the Defense bill to tie up any loose ends which may exist. Certainly the Senators from Missouri and Iowa have worked in good faith, as I have, in trying to make this acceptable to the managers of the bill. In Missouri, an estimated 3,500 people worked at sites which handled and processed highly radioactive material. These workers were exposed-- and in most instances unknowingly--to dangerous levels of radiation. It is not necessarily important to blame people for that. Those were in many cases the early years of nuclear work and people just didn't know, and it was necessary to do this work. That is why, without trying to point fingers, Congress created the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act--EEOICPA--of 2000, which was designed to provide these employees with the compensation they deserve. Unfortunately, the process, as any of us know who sit on the Armed Services Committee or on the Energy Committee--both of which I sit on-- is complex, it is disjointed, and in many cases outright mishandled. As a result, in Missouri, hundreds of claims have been filed by surviving individuals who have received not only no compensation but no progress in the processing of their claims. In many cases those individuals faced 200 times the dosage of radiation that would be considered acceptable today. We know that happened because we know the nature of the processes in which they were working, and we can see the illnesses they now have. That doesn't mean they can go back and reconstruct from worksheets that no longer exist--and which they wouldn't have access to anyway-- exactly what happened on a given day 50 or 60 years ago, which is the reason Senator Bond explained so lucidly we need a special exposure cohort, or an SEC, to expedite compensation for these employees. The amendment would simply allow these employees to be included in an SEC. They already exist for employees in other States. An SEC is a group of employees with specific cancers who worked at specific nuclear facilities or who meet other requirements under the act. The designation would provide former employees at the site with expedited compensation for going through the lengthy and oftentimes impossible process of dose reconstruction. I could go on. I know the bill handlers want to get the bill finished. The program so far has one of the most abysmal records of performance which I have witnessed in my now 10 years in the Congress on one side of the Capitol or the other. As the Department of Energy and the Department of Labor create bureaucratic paperwork burdens for sick former employees, this amendment, which would remove the barrier of dose reconstruction for those cases, is a small step forward toward giving them the justice which they so clearly deserve. I believe workers in Missouri and Iowa ought to qualify for inclusion in the SEC. It is a pleasure for me to cosponsor this amendment. I hope we can work out the issues that remain surrounding it and get it included in the bill. I yield the floor.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I have an amendment I wish to offer on behalf of Mr. Bond and myself. It is at the desk. I ask it be called up. It is amendment No. 3251.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I rise today in support of an amendment to designate the Liberty Memorial Museum in Kansas City, MO, as America's World War I Museum. All of us in Missouri are privileged to have such an outstanding museum and memorial to honor those who served during this critical period in our Nation's history. World War I is, of course, an important part of America's history, and its history ought to be preserved so the generations of the 21st century can understand the role played by the United States in the preservation and advancement of freedom during that crucial time. The Liberty Memorial Museum is the only public museum in the Nation that exists for the exclusive purpose of interpreting the experiences of the United States and its Allies in the World War I years, both on the battlefield and on the homefront. It deserves this designation as America's National World War I Museum. The museum has a truly amazing history. After the guns were silenced in 1918 and the huge celebrations died down, concerned citizens in the United States reflected on the war and the losses sustained. The Liberty Memorial Museum project began after the 1918 armistice through the efforts of a large-scale, grassroots civic and fundraising effort by the citizens and veterans in the Kansas City metropolitan area. In less than 2 weeks, $2.5 million was raised through donations from local citizens. That was in 1918. That gives the Senate some idea of the enormity of the efforts on behalf of this memorial. After the conclusion of a national architectural design competition, ground was broken in 1921, construction began in 1923, and the Liberty Memorial Museum was open to the public in 1926. At the dedication on November 1, 1921, the main Allied military leaders spoke to a crowd of close to 200,000 people. It was the only time in history the leaders of the United States, Belgium, Italy, France, and Great Britain were together at one place. These were the military leaders during World War I and they convened in Kansas City in 1921 to open this museum. Today, the Liberty Memorial Museum seeks to educate a diverse group of audiences through its comprehensive collection of historical materials, emphasizing eyewitness accounts of the participants on the battlefield and the homefront and the impact of World War I on individuals, then and now. The Liberty Memorial Museum continues to actively acquire and preserve such materials. The designation of the museum as ``America's National World War I Museum'' is a great opportunity to use the invaluable resources of the Liberty Memorial Museum to teach the lessons of liberty to the Nation's schoolchildren through onsite visits, classroom curriculum development, distance learning, and other educational initiatives. I am pleased to offer the amendment on behalf of Mr. Bond and myself. I want to thank the chairman and the ranking member for agreeing to include the measure in the underlying bill. It has been cleared on both sides and I look forward to the Senate adding it to this Defense measure. I yield the floor, and I ask for adoption of the amendment.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Lore Aquayo of my office be allowed the privilege of the floor.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, on behalf of the leader, I ask unanimous consent that following the scheduled vote, the Senate proceed to a second resolution, which is at the desk, and further that the resolution and preamble be agreed to, with the motion to reconsider laid upon the table.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, it is an honor for me to join the Senate in honoring the memory and celebrating the life of Ronald Reagan. I want to say, first of all, how much I have appreciated the eloquence and the personal memories that have been offered on the Senate floor and in public by those who knew and remembered President Reagan. I, of course, remember him. I didn't know him personally. I also want to say how much especially I have appreciated the grace and the charity shown to the former President by those here who were, when he was in office, his political opponents. I think it is a great testimony to their charity of spirit that they have done so and also a comment on how our system operates in times such as this. We can remember and appreciate a person for his good qualities without necessarily having to retreat from any disagreements we may have had with that person over political issues. I am reminded of what Winston Churchill said on a similar occasion when he was offering remembrances of a colleague who had died, with whom he had had many differences. He said: The fierce and bitter controversies which hung around him in recent times were hushed by the news of his illness and are silenced by his death. In paying a tribute of respect and of regard to an eminent man who has been taken from us, no one is obliged to alter the opinions which he has formed or expressed upon issues which have become a part of history; but at the Lychgate, we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It's not given to human beings, happily for them for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour. I stand here for a few minutes to remember a man who always marched in the ranks of honor and whose shield was the sincerity and rectitude of his actions at all times. He was not a mentor, because I did not know him personally, but he was a hero of mine. Much has been said in the last few days about his humor and amiability. I agree that was a very important part of Ronald Reagan, of who he was and of his success. When I think of him, when I visualize him, I visualize him smiling, telling a joke, or offering some witticism or some piece of humor. I think that was a big part of his success. It is important not to take yourself too seriously. That is a quality that often is lacking in this town. I think I can say that without being deemed uncharitable. But it was not a quality that was lacking in Ronald Reagan. He thought deeply about issues. He thought deeply about the country. I think people underestimated, to some extent, how deeply he thought and understood what was going on. He never pretended to know everything. I think that helped him a lot in his Presidency. We should also remember President Reagan, however, not just for his qualities and his personality, but also for what he believed. He thought ideas were important, and he was right. I remember George Will said a few years ago--and I am paraphrasing him; he probably said it more eloquently than this--but the gist of his remarks was, the collapse of the Soviet Union proves that ideas not only have consequences, but that maybe only ideas have consequences. President Reagan's friends and opponents have sometimes characterized his political philosophy as being an anti-Government philosophy or a simplistic belief in making Government smaller whatever the circumstances the country was confronting. I do not think that is correct. I think at best it is oversimplistic. President Reagan understood that the issue of our time during his Presidency and the issue of our time now, I suggest, is not whether Government is going to be big or small, certainly in an absolute sense and often in a relative sense as well, but whether the Government, in doing whatever functions we believe it ought to do, will consistently respect the values and institutions of private life. It is not a question of whether Government is important, because it is; it is a question of whether the Government believes it is more important than the private society and culture and people it is governing. That is where President Reagan drew the consistent line of his philosophy in his public life. His faith was in what the American people had built and have built and are continuing to build on their own, and in the associations and networks of private life that give life meaning, that give people a chance for happiness and opportunity. He believed in what people build in their families, in their small businesses, in their local schools, in their voluntary associations and organizations, in their churches, synagogues, and temples. He believed in the great traditions of American culture. He knew those traditions and the institutions that represent them grow and evolve organically over time and that they represent the wisdom of many generations of people about how we ought to live in our society so that we can have the maximum amount of justice and freedom and opportunity for all of our people. What he wanted was for the Government to be vigorous in the areas it was supposed to operate but to respect those institutions rather than trying to overthrow them. He said once in 1970: It is not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work--work with us, not over us; stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it. I remember a few years ago when we were debating welfare reform in the Congress--and I was in the House at the time--a key point in that debate was when the Congress decided collectively that we were not talking about whether we were going to try in some sense to get rid of the welfare system. We were not going to retreat from the impulse of the 1960s to help people who were in poverty get out of poverty. What we wanted, however, was a system that tried to do that in a way that respected and upheld the values that generations and generations of Americans have relied on to move up the economic ladder. We wanted a system that instead of punishing work, encouraged and required it. We wanted a system that instead of providing incentives against marriage, encouraged marriage and talked about its importance. We wanted a system that did not uproot neighborhoods and neighborhood institutions, that did not sweep them aside in the name of an all powerful and prescriptive government, but rather a system that helped build up again the vital parts of neighborhoods. The reason that bill has been so successful, the reason it was supported by a vast majority in both Houses, and why it has been successful all over the country is not because it represented, I submit, a retreat by the Government from its commitment to helping people achieve the American dream, but rather because it represented a conscious commitment by the Government to work with the values of Americans, to respect those values and not to uproot them. There is no question where President Reagan would have been in that fight, where he was in that fight, because the seeds of welfare reform were planted during his administration. I am not going to go on. There are others who wish to speak. I thank the Senator from Florida for allowing me to go out of order because we try to go back and forth on both sides of the aisle. Let me close with one of my favorite quotes from President Reagan. We are all doing that. It is from his second Inaugural Address in January 1985, and many have commented on President Reagan's optimism about America, how he was optimistic about America because he not only believed in those values and the institutions that represented them, but he had a tremendous faith in their power. I think he knew we were going to triumph over the Soviet Union in the cold war because he knew what we believed in was right, was powerful, and was good, and he was not afraid to state it in those terms. Here is an example of his optimism from his second Inaugural Address: Now we hear again the echoes of our past: a general falls to his knees in the hard snow of Valley Forge; a lonely president paces the darkened halls, and ponders his struggle to preserve the Union; the men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other; a settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. It is the American sound. It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, and fair. That's our heritage; that is our song. We sing it still. For all our problems, our differences, we are together as of old, as we raise our voices to the God who is the Author of this most tender music. And may he continue to hold us close as we fill the world with our sound--sound in unity, affection, and love-- one people, under God, dedicated to the dream of freedom that he has placed in the human heart, called upon now to pass that dream on to a waiting and hopeful world. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. TALENT

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