Paul Wellstone

Mr. WELLSTONE

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I ask the Senator from Iowa to yield for a question.

Mr. WELLSTONE. My question is really vis-a-vis the Senator from Iowa to my colleague from Utah. The amendment I have been trying to get on the floor is the Wellstone-Kennedy amendment dealing with disproportionate minority confinement. I assume when we listed the amendments that already has a 2-hour limit set.

Mr. WELLSTONE. That is fine. We already have a 2-hour time limit on that. We agreed on that.

Mr. WELLSTONE. It is on disproportionate minority confinement. It is the amendment I have with Senator Kennedy.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I have another one.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I have been waiting on the floor forever. I am pleased at what the Senator from Iowa is doing. The one laid aside is going into the managers' package. I have been waiting patiently. When you put it in order, please put in the Wellstone-Kennedy amendment, which deals with a very important question that we have been trying to debate for days.

Mr. WELLSTONE. This has been agreed to for days. That is right. The amendment, I am assuming, in the sequence that we are talking about is the Wellstone-Kennedy amendment dealing with disproportionate minority confinement. Two hours to be equally divided is the agreement on that. No. 356 has been allegedly put in the managers' amendment. If we can please put this one on the list.

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

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, let me talk in a general way about this. This legislation deals with juvenile justice. This amendment focuses on the justice part. We speak to what is called disproportionate minority confinement. What that really means, in concrete terms, to use one example, is African American kids ages 10 to 17 make up 15 percent of the population, but 26 percent of all juvenile arrests, 32 percent of delinquency referrals to juvenile court, 46 percent of juveniles in public long-term institutions, and 52 percent of cases judicially waived to criminal court; that is, adult court. In the current legislation, what we have done is we turn the clock back a long ways. In the past, since the late 1980s, we have always tried to deal with this question of disproportionate minority confinement. What this legislation does is to essentially reverse this progress. I think, roughly speaking, about 33 percent of the population, ages 10 to 17, are minority youth. They represent about 66 percent, or thereabouts, of kids who are now incarcerated. The question is, Why? There are lots of different reasons. Let me just list some that come from Department of Justice reports, some lessons that have been learned from some five different States. Some of the factors that can contribute to minority overrepresentation can be: racial ethnic bias, insufficient diversion options, system labeling, barriers to parental advocacy, poor juvenile justice/community integration, low-income jobs, few job opportunities, few community support services, inadequate health and welfare resources, inadequate early childhood education, inadequate education quality, lack of cultural education, single-parent homes, economic stress, limited time for supervision. The factors go on. But the key to an effective juvenile justice system is to treat every offender as an individual, to treat every offender fairly, and to provide the needed services to all. All youth who come into contact with the juvenile justice system should receive fair treatment. Surely every Senator agrees with that proposition. The disproportionate minority confinement requirement in the current law is bringing about change and focusing attention on the problem. The current law says we call upon States to try to come to terms with this question. We call upon States to collect the data. We call upon States to think about whether or not there are steps that can be taken, and to put into effect some of these programs and some of the steps that could be taken to deal with this problem, to bring about more fairness, to end some of the discrimination. As you look at this graph here, when you have 15 percent of young people ages 10 to 17, African American, but 46 percent of the juveniles in public, long-term institutions are African American kids, this ought to bother all of us. We ought to come to terms with this. William Raspberry wrote in the Washington Post last week: These numbers strongly imply not disproportionate lawlessness, but dissimilar treatment throughout the juvenile justice system. At the very least, they are the type of numbers that ought to prompt criminal justice authorities across America to take a closer look at what they are doing. That is what is so incredible about this legislation right now. It is as if starting in the late 1980s and then going to 1993 we recognized this problem, and in our juvenile justice legislation, up to this bill, we have said to States: You need to collect the data; you need to look at this problem; you need to try to address this problem. This piece of legislation essentially guts this effort, and the amendment that we have offered is essentially the same House language that is now in their juvenile justice bill. It addresses juvenile delinquency prevention efforts and system improvement efforts designed to reduce, without establishing or requiring numerical standards or quotas--that is very important--efforts designed to reduce, without establishing or requiring numerical standards or quotas, the disproportionate number of juvenile members of minority groups who come into contact with the juvenile justice system. There were close to 400 votes--I want my colleagues to listen to this--400 votes in the House of Representatives for this amendment that we now bring to the Senate floor. The current law talked about the need to address this problem, to reduce the proportion of juveniles detained or confined in secure detention facilities, jails and lockups, who are members of minority groups if such proportion exceeds the proportion such group represents in the general population. S. 254 guts the current law and talks about segments of the juvenile population. What does that mean? Boys? Girls? It does not deal with the issue of race and the severe overrepresentation of young kids of color who are locked up. That is the issue. This amendment that I bring to the floor with Senator Kennedy, Senator Feingold, and Senator Feinstein essentially says that we call upon the States to address the juvenile delinquency prevention efforts and system improvement efforts designed to reduce, without establishing or requiring numerical standards or quotas, the disproportionate number of juvenile members of minority groups who come into contact with the juvenile justice system. This is an eminently reasonable amendment, but it goes to the heart of the debate about racial justice in our country. S. 254 undermines this DMC core requirement of the Juvenile Delinquency and Prevention Act which directs States to identify this disproportionate confinement, to assess the reasons it exits, and to develop strategies to address the disproportionate number of minority children in confinement. This legislation, S. 254, as now written, takes those efforts--some good efforts by our States, some 40 States involved with this--and basically heads these efforts for the scrap heap. This is a huge step backward. This amendment has nothing to do with quotas. It does not require or suggest the use of numerical quotas for arrests or release of any juvenile from custody based on race. No State's funding is based upon quotas or anything else. But this amendment does put the Senate on record supporting the disproportionate minority confinement core requirement which now is in existing law that addresses a very serious and a very real problem. It is well-documented that in every State--nearly every State-- including my State of Minnesota, minority youth are overrepresented at every stage of the juvenile justice system, particularly in secure confinement. For example, a study in California showed that minority youth consistently received more severe punishments and were more likely to receive jail time than white youth who committed the same offenses. Another study in Portland, OR, found minority youth being locked up at a rate several times higher than their arrest rates. We ought to be concerned when, roughly speaking, 7 out of every 10 youths in secure confinement are minority juveniles in our country, a rate more than double their percentage of the youth population. Should we be concerned about that? Isn't this juvenile justice legislation? Let's look at the justice part. We have close to 7 out of 10 kids who are in confinement in our country today who are locked up, incarcerated--juveniles, who are kids of color, minority kids, double their percentage of the population. We have way too many examples of kids having committed the same offense as white kids but receiving stiffer sentences or winding up incarcerated, and it is not right. It is unconscionable. It is unacceptable. I do not think this whole problem of disproportionate minority confinement is the product of bigoted or racist authorities, though there is too much bigotry and there is too much racism. It is far more complex, and it results from all kinds of things, including the likelihood that minority youth are more likely to be poor, they are going to be unable to find work, uneducated, or, as William Raspberry suggests in his column, or they are politically unconnected, which means they will be less likely to have their children released to their custody by police officers and judges. From William Raspberry's piece: It may result in a tendency of white officials to basically look at white kids as troubled youth and black offenders as troublemakers, gangsters or predators. Forty States are doing good work. The Department of Justice issued a report several months ago which talked about some of the lessons learned from five States. I began to talk about some of those lessons earlier on and the kinds of efforts these States--Arizona, Iowa, North Carolina, Florida, and Oregon--are taking. I believe Senator Kennedy will come down and speak shortly on this amendment and then I will follow up his remarks. I am anxious to hear what my colleague from Utah has to say because he has been a Senator who has been extremely sensitive to these issues. This does not make any sense. We have language in our current legislation that deals with this problem of the disproportionate number of kids of color who are locked up so we can find out what is going on and how we can do better. States all across the Nation are collecting the data and trying to find out what is wrong and trying to do better. This current legislation before the Senate really turns the clock back. Why as a nation do we not want to come to terms with this question? Again, let me be clear about this, the current law talks about the need to reduce the proportion of juveniles who are detained or secured, confined in these secure detention facilities, the disproportionate number of minority groups, and then S. 254 comes along and talks about segments of the juvenile population. This basically undermines the efforts that are underway. We are not talking about segments of the population. We are talking about race and, as a matter of fact, it is very important that we continue to identify some of the problems we have to confront as a nation that deal with race. We are not talking about segments of the population; we are talking about the question of race. Our amendment--I want every Senator to focus his or her attention on this--takes the House language, which was passed by 400 votes, and we talk about the importance of addressing the juvenile delinquency prevention efforts and system improvement efforts designed to reduce, without establishing or requiring numerical standards or quotas, the disproportionate number of juvenile members of minority groups who come into contact with the juvenile justice system. The current law, before this piece of legislation, acknowledges race is an issue. Whether we want to talk about it or not, whether we want to recognize it or not, whether we are comfortable with it or not, this isn't an issue that arose overnight. In 1988, over a decade ago, the Coalition for Juvenile Justice released a report to Congress on race in the system called ``The Delicate Balance.'' They made the point, and this became part of the law that we had to do better as a nation, that we should be troubled by this, that we should be troubled that close to 70 percent of the kids who are locked up are kids of color, minority youth. We want to make sure there is no discrimination. We want to make sure kids are treated fairly. We want to make sure that all of our citizens have some confidence in this justice system. Well, this piece of legislation takes us a long ways back, a long ways back. For those who want to talk about the constitutionality of the DMC provision, it is just a scare tactic. It is just a figleaf. I read the language of the amendment which makes it crystal clear that we are not talking about numerical standards or quotas. I would like to read from a letter and ask unanimous consent that this be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

Mr. WELLSTONE. This is from 23 law professors endorsing the constitutionality of the disproportionate minority confinement amendment. I just read: There can be no serious constitutional objection to the DMC requirement in existing law. First, it does not single out members of racial minorities for any sort of distinctive treatment, nor does it impose any burdens on anyone else. The Supreme Court's decisions made it clear that constitutional questions arise, not merely from the use of racial terms in a law--for otherwise compiling census information about race would be unconstitutional--but only if there is some burden or benefit allocated on the basis of race. . . . The DMC requirements do nothing that crosses this minimum threshold. This letter goes on and makes really a very strong case, signed by 23 law professors in our country. I want to just make it real clear that the disproportionate minority confinement amendment that I bring to the floor with Senator Kennedy is about race. Can I say this one more time to colleagues? Because when you vote on this, please understand this amendment is about race. Please understand that this amendment has the support of probably every single civil rights organization in our country. Please understand that this amendment has the support of just about every single children's organization you can think of, starting with the Children's Defense Fund. Please understand that this amendment and your vote is all about race, because please understand that we are doing better, but to have a really better America we have to do even better when it comes to questions of race and discrimination. Please understand that many citizens in our country do not have complete confidence in the system. When the minority community sees that close to 70 percent of their kids are locked up, when their kids make up not even 35, 33 percent of the population, and when they see that kids of color wind up incarcerated, when white kids do not, having committed the same offense, or given longer sentences, and when they see all the ways in which there is discrimination--and we have not come to terms with what is really going on with so many kids in these communities--it makes members of minority communities in our country very suspicious of a piece of legislation which focuses on juvenile justice but takes out the language we had in our legislation dealing with kids that assures that States will collect the data and will look at this question and try and do better. I am telling you, this is a huge vote. This is all about race. It is about the disproportionate share of minority youth in our Nation's juvenile justice system. It is about helping States come up with plans to enhance prevention, to work with communities. It is not about releasing individuals from confinement because of their racial makeup or about instituting some kind of quota system. It is about fairness. It is about ending discrimination. It is about justice. It is about doing better as a nation. It is about doing better for all of our children, including children of color, and that is why this amendment has such intense, broad support. And it is why 400 Members in the House of Representatives voted for this amendment.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I will yield to the Senator or yield the floor, if you like.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, how much time do I have left?

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, in all due respect to my colleague from Utah, I don't think anybody in the civil rights community all across this land will be reassured. I will work with you on the language. With all due respect, some of these arguments about surely you are not for letting blacks out of jail --of course not. The Senator knows what the amendment says. The Senator knows it is not about quotas; it is not about letting anybody out of jail. The Senator knows this is all about calling on States to study the problem. The Senator knows that. We have had this core protection since 1993. Why do you think it is the case? There has been a history for this. It started in 1988. Then we passed this amendment in 1993. It is based upon all kinds of studies, all kinds of work, which has provided the empirical evidence, which should be of no surprise to any Senator here, that we have a problem in our country of disproportionate minority confinement. We want to try to understand why minority kids who represent about 33 percent of the population represent about 66 percent of the kids who are locked up. We want to come to terms with that. Could it have anything to do with their race, in terms of who gets swept up in the streets? Could it have anything to do with who actually ends up getting a good evaluation or not by a probation officer? Could it have anything to do with who is released or detained by a judge? Could it have anything to do with who is sentenced and for how long a period of time? My colleague doesn't think race has anything to do with this. If you don't think race has anything to do with this, that we don't have any problem with discrimination in our country, or that States right now are collecting data and trying to come to terms with this problem, which is exactly what our amendment says--continue with this good work--then you should not vote for this amendment. But if you think this is an issue that deals with race in America, that this is a civil rights question, and you think it was a good thing that we had this core protection, this core requirement in our juvenile justice legislation and it would be a tragic mistake for us to take this protection out that just calls for States to study the problem and try to redress the problem, then you should vote for this amendment. This is the language of the amendment: Address juvenile delinquency prevention efforts and system improvement efforts designed to reduce, without establishing or requiring numerical standards or quotas, the disproportionate number of juvenile members of minority groups who come into contact with the juvenile justice system. Senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, that is what you are voting on. This is a civil rights vote. The more I hear my colleagues speak on the floor of the Senate--I think what has been said is heartfelt, but it is historic. Some Senators don't think there is an issue with discrimination. There are some Senators who don't think there is a problem of disproportional sentencing. There are some Senators who think we should remove this protection. There are some Senators who want to turn the clock back. But I am telling you, this is a central issue for the civil rights community in this country and for child advocacy groups. I certainly hope we will be able to pass this amendment. If we don't pass this amendment, this juvenile justice legislation will have taken a step backward when it comes to justice. I don't think it will be a piece of legislation that will be worth supporting. I don't think Senators should support legislation that turns the clock back on the progress we have made dealing with racial justice. I don't think Senators should support that, and I think Senators should support this amendment. This is the civil rights question, the civil rights issue, and the civil rights vote on this bill. My good friend from Utah doesn't want to say that. He doesn't want to face up to that reality, but that is what this vote is all about.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I just wanted to know. I prefer to have 1 minute to summarize.

Mr. WELLSTONE. This amendment simply maintains the current core protections in current law. It requires States to study and assess the problem of disproportionate minority confinement. It does not require quotas. It is not unconstitutional. It does not require States and localities to release those in confinement. This amendment is about fairness. It is about equal justice under the law. This is a civil rights vote.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, let me just start out by saying that one of the real weaknesses in this legislation as it is now written is that there is no specificity about the allowable use of funding for school-based counseling or mental health services to all students through qualified counselors or psychologists or social workers. My colleague, Senator Sessions, has referred to other activities that can be used to prevent juvenile delinquency, but this phrase is vague. It gives no encouragement to schools to use the funding that they need to have the counselors. The only place where we really might see an opportunity for counseling services would be in boot camps and community-based projects and services, but kids already have to be delinquents in order to receive this kind of counseling. Mr. President, what I say here today is that I do not know about other colleagues, but as I travel Minnesota, what I hear more than anything else, above and beyond the need to get tougher on guns, is, Senator, we need more counselors. We need to have an infrastructure of support for our children in our schools. This amendment is the 100,000 school counselors amendment. This amendment would call for funding from the Federal Government, on a one-third, one-third, one-third matching basis. It would be $340 million a year over the next 5 years. Now, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle may stand up and say: This is $340 million a year. To that, I say to my colleagues on the other side: When are we going to get serious? We continue to talk about children. We continue to talk about our concern for children. Now we are talking more and more about our concern for at-risk children. Now we are talking more and more about how to get to kids before they get into trouble. And what we hear all across our land from our educators, from women and men who are working with children every day, is that we don't have the funding for counselors. Mr. President, right now we have an average of about 1 counselor per 500 students across the land. One counselor for 500 students. That counselor can't even begin to reach out and help some of the kids who are in trouble. This is a huge weakness in this legislation. If we want to get to kids before they get into trouble, if we want to respond to the voice in the country about what we need to do better--and I hear this from everyone in Minnesota--then we need to support this 100,000 school counselors amendment. There is nothing we can do that would be more important.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 30 seconds to respond.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I will take just a moment. I certainly pay tribute to the--I have not heard more passionate, more heartfelt, more substantive, more powerful oratory and argument on the floor of the Senate than what Senator Harkin has done. I thank him as a friend. I say to my colleagues, if I can get their attention for a moment-- Senator Leahy and Senator Hatch--if there is agreement to see what can be resolved in discussions while Senators come to agreement with one another, I would be very pleased, on behalf of myself and Senator Kennedy, to have the pending amendment laid aside and we will just go right to this disproportionate issue, which is a complicated and important debate. I am ready to do that right now. If you want to try to work this out, I am ready to ask consent to lay the pending amendments aside and go right to this amendment and the debate and we have time set for it. I want to make that clear.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, there are no second-degrees; is that correct?

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, a Wellstone-Kennedy amendment is listed?

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, colleagues, 15 percent, ages 10 to 17, of the kids in this country are black; 26 percent of all juvenile arrests are black; 32 percent of delinquency referrals to juvenile court are black; 46 percent of juveniles in public long-term institutions are black; cases judicially waived to criminal court, for 52 percent they are black. This is a civil rights issue. I cannot believe what I have heard on the floor of the Senate tonight. We have been told there are more black kids who are incarcerated because they commit more crimes. We have been told that these statistics, whether it be for African American or Latino or Native American or Southeast Asian, they are a reflection of the number of kids who commit the crimes and who get the justice they deserve. We have already recited study after study after study that shows for the same crime many of these kids get stiffer sentences or many of these kids wind up incarcerated as opposed to other kids. This is all about race. I cannot believe that I have heard on the floor of the Senate an argument that race is not the critical consideration. When the police are out there in the streets, and we get to which kids are searched on the streets and which kids are not, you don't think that has anything to do with race? When we get to the question of which kids are arrested and which kids are not, you don't think that has anything to do with race today in America? When we get to the question of the evaluation of youth by probation officers, you don't think that has anything to do with race? When we get to the question of the decision whether to release or detain by a judge, based upon who has the money and who does not have the money to put up a bond, you don't think that has anything to do with race, Senators? When we get to the question of sentencing, you don't think that has anything to do with race? You are sleepwalking through history. You are sleepwalking through history. This is all about race. This is a civil rights issue and this is a civil rights vote. Let me just say, when I hear my colleague argue that this amendment is unconstitutional because it makes a racial classification, that claim is outrageous. This amendment does not treat anybody differently on the basis of race, and you know it. It does not treat anybody differently. The Supreme Court cases cited have nothing to do with this question. Adarand was about who gets construction contracts. You know what this amendment is about? This amendment is about preventing the majority party--I hope not too many in the majority party--from repealing the existing protections that we now have in law that have never been challenged as being unconstitutional that make sure there is some core requirement that calls upon States, to do what? To collect the data and to study the problem, and to try and do something about it. You are going to vote against this amendment? You go ahead. You go ahead and vote against this amendment, if that is what you want to do. I think it would be tragic if we didn't have strong support for this amendment. This is all about race. This is a civil rights vote. This is why there is such strong sentiment on behalf of this amendment. This is why every civil rights organization has been involved in this amendment. This is why so many of the children's organizations, like CDF, are involved. We have had the core requirement in our legislation. It has been there since 1992 or 1993. It calls upon States to study the question and to try to do better. And they are doing better. We are making progress. And now you want to discard this? You want to toss this overboard? This is all about race. I cannot believe that any Senator in this Chamber believes that these statistics are a reflection of who commits the crimes and who deserves to be incarcerated. My God, I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it. If you want to turn the clock back on some progress we have made, some racial progress we have made that is so important to kids, so important to communities of color, and so important to the Nation, you will be making a tragic mistake. That is why there were 400 votes for legislation that embodies the very language that we have in our amendment in the House of Representatives. I hope we have bipartisan support for this amendment tonight. I reserve the remainder of my time, because I want to respond to whatever else might be said on the floor of the Senate on this amendment.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk on behalf of myself, Senator Kennedy, Senator Feingold, and Senator Feinstein.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I thank Senator Durbin. He would like to be added as an original cosponsor. I would be very proud for him to do that. I ask unanimous consent that Senator Durbin be added as an original cosponsor.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Thank you, Mr. President. I have visited some of these facilities and they are pretty troubling. When you visit--I think, again, of the visit to Tallulah, LA--there and there is just a sea of, in this particular case, African American faces, young kids--many of them, by the way, locked up for as long as 7 weeks in solitary confinement, 23 hours a day; that is part of what they do there--it is troubling. I think in the State of Louisiana--I do not know what the overall percentage of the population is, but I think about 80 to 85 percent of the kids that are confined there are African American. Here is what makes this so troubling. It would be easy--I want every Senator listening to this--to simply attribute this large discrepancy to the fact that young people of different racial groups commit different types of crimes. In 1992, though, there were significantly higher rates of admission of African American juveniles for every offense group. Please listen to that, because I do not want some colleague to come out on the floor and say: Well, there is a reason for this. These kids commit the crimes in exactly this percentage or this proportion. Crimes against persons: Black males and females were six times more likely to be admitted to State juvenile facilities than their white counterparts-- same crimes, six times more likely. Property crimes: Black males were almost four times more likely to be admitted to State juvenile facilities than white males, and black females were almost three times more likely to be committed than white females. Drug offenses: Black males were confined at a rate 30 times that of white males. In fact, among all offense categories, black youth were more likely to be detained than white youth during every year between 1985 and 1994. Minority youth were also more likely to be removed from their families than white youth. Black youth are also much more likely to end up in prisons with adult offenders. In 1995, nearly 10,000 juvenile cases were transferred to adult criminal court by judicial waiver. Of those proceedings, cases involving black youth were 50 percent more likely to be waived than those cases involving white youth. Overall, again, black youth were 52 percent of all the children and adolescents waived to adult court, and in most States minority juveniles were overrepresented on average in these adult jails at a rate more than 2\1/2\ times their proportion of the total youth population. These are damning statistics. When he was director of the Massachusetts Department of Services, Commissioner-Member Jerome Miller wrote of the cumulative effect of decisions made throughout the juvenile justice process: I learned very early on that when we got an African American youth, virtually everything from arrest summaries to family history to rap sheets to psychiatric exams to waiver hearings, as to whether he would be tried as an adult to final sentencing, was skewed. If a middle-class white youth was sent to us as dangerous, he was much more likely to be dangerous than the African American teenager with the same label. Usually the white kid had been afforded competent legal counsel, appropriate psychiatric and psychological testing, been tried in a variety of privately funded options and, all in all, had been dealt with more sensitively and more individually at every level of the juvenile justice process. For him to be labeled dangerous, he usually had done something that was very serious indeed. By contrast, the African American teenager was dealt with as a stereotype from the moment the handcuffs were first put on, to be easily and quickly moved along to the more dangerous end of the violent/ nonviolent spectrum, albeit accompanied by an official record meant to validate the biased series of decisions. I say to my colleague, Mr. Durbin, I really appreciate his being here. Sometimes when we are in this Chamber, this is our reality. I want every Senator, including Republican Senators, to know, this is an amendment that deals with a very sensitive issue. This is an amendment that deals with race in America. This is an amendment that deals with all of the biases that go with that. This is an amendment that says we should not be passing a piece of legislation which essentially turns the clock backward, which takes the language that we had in our past juvenile justice legislation which calls on States to study this problem, calls on States to address the problem, and calls on States to do better, as many are doing right now, and essentially remove all that language. It is a charade. I will go on record right now--I cannot see any way that I can support this piece of legislation if this amendment does not pass. I cannot see any way as a Senator I can support this. I will put Senators on notice--I think a good many Senators, many Senators should not be able to support this piece of legislation if this amendment, which is the same language passed by 400 Members of the House of Representatives--that has to include some Republicans; am I correct?

Mr. WELLSTONE. Does not pass in the Senate. What in the world is going on on the floor of the Senate that we are unwilling to pass an amendment that just calls upon States to continue to try to come to terms with this really huge, stark problem in America? Why in the world am I even out here having to debate this? I am going to reserve the remainder of my time.