Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Thank you, Madam President. My amendment, cosponsored by Senators Schumer, Bingaman, and Merkley, would authorize a series of new programs designed to encourage energy efficiency in homes. I am offering this amendment--based on S. 1379, the Energy Efficiency in Housing Act--to the job creation bill we are debating today because of the enormous potential of green housing to grow the economy, create jobs, and, of course, save energy. Clean energy is the next big global industry. According to the U.S. Green Building Council, buildings account for 39 percent of all energy consumption and 38 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. Clearly, the housing sector must be a vital part of our energy efficiency efforts. Venture capitalists and companies from Google to General Electric have testified before the Senate that this revolution--the clean energy revolution--could be even bigger than the digital revolution. The countries at the forefront of this clean energy revolution will be the economic powerhouses of the next century. Right now, the United States is at risk of falling behind in the race to lead this new economy. Of the top 10 solar companies in the world, only one is from the United States. Of the top 10 wind power companies in the world, only two are from the United States. When President Obama met with Senate Democrats a few weeks ago, he told us: China is not waiting, it is moving. Already the anticipation is that they will lap us when it comes to clean energy. Well, we can do better than that. We are a country of innovators, a nation that has always sought to be on the cutting edge, always sought the new frontier. All we need is for the Congress to put the right policies in place to promote energy efficiency and encourage the growth of the green economy so our companies can compete head to head with their international competition. My amendment is endorsed by over 35 groups, including Enterprise Community Partners, the Alliance for Healthy Homes, and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. The U.S. Green Building Council has included it in its list of ``Top 10 Pieces of Green Building Legislation in the 111th Congress.'' These groups know that the provisions included in this legislation will boost the green housing sector in a number of different ways. First, it would jump-start the market for green mortgages by directing HUD to develop incentives for buyers--such as reduced rates and greater lending ability--and by boosting the secondary green mortgage market. Second, it would establish a revolving loan fund for States to carry out renewable energy activities, such as retrofits and incentives for green construction. It would also encourage the participation of community development organizations in our most hard-hit neighborhoods in the recession by authorizing a grant program that can be used to help those organizations train, educate, and support the workforce for these green energy, clean energy projects. The final provision I will highlight would provide incentives for public housing entities to achieve substantial improvements in their own energy efficiency. I believe we can maximize energy efficiency savings when we can split the incentives between landlords and tenants. The landlords will take an interest in pursuing the clean energy initiatives because of the savings they can make from the upgrades, and the tenants can participate in the savings through their conservation efforts. It has to be joint to be at its most effective. As we continue to debate ways to put Americans back to work, I encourage my colleagues to take a serious look at the green housing sector and at my amendment. I think it merits our attention. I hope it will have my colleagues' support on an appropriate bill in the near future--I hope--and I speak on it today to put a spotlight on it so I have that opportunity. I thank the Chair and thank my colleagues. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I would like to echo the remarks of my very distinguished colleague from Maryland, who I know feels so passionately about this and whose own State will suffer dire individual consequences as the failure of unemployment insurance and COBRA and other things begin to hit home in the personal lives of the people in Maryland, the people in my home State of Rhode Island, and people across this country. With so many Americans struggling to pay their bills, why--why--did thousands of the worst off, including hundreds of Rhode Islanders, have to wake on Monday morning to find their unemployment benefits and COBRA subsidies had expired? Why are people being kicked out of these essential, humane, lifeline programs before the economic storm that put them in that predicament has passed? The answer is, we have failed to do what is right for the American public, in part, because one Republican has chosen this time of great despair for millions of Americans to make a political point--to make a political point about the deficit--by hurting hard-working Americans who are struggling to get by. It appears it is actually more than just one Republican. Others have come to the floor to support him. But on the home front, the cost is high. Many Rhode Islanders, through no fault of their own, struggle to find work. For many of them, unemployment insurance and COBRA are the lifeline for their ability to support their families, to keep food on the table, and to keep the family covered by health care. This is no abstract issue. It has had a serious impact in Rhode Island. We are a State of just over 1 million. In that State of just over 1 million people, there are 75,000 people, at least, unemployed and looking for work. These are hard-working people, many of whom have worked all their lives, but because of the recession they struggle to find work. Margaret from North Providence is 61 years old, and she is 6 months away from being eligible for Social Security. She is years from Medicare eligibility. She has now been unemployed for 18 months and her unemployment benefits are expiring. COBRA, for her, has run out as well, so her health care is at risk. She has never been in this situation before in her life and she is, quite understandably, scared of where our irresponsible action leaves her. Gretchen from Cranston is a laid-off teacher who was receiving COBRA benefits. That helps her pay for her health care. Because of a single Republican obstruction--apparently supported by others--her premiums have increased from roughly $500 a month to over $2,000 a month. She wrote to me saying: How horrifying that I should work hard all my life, paying for my entire education, dedicate my career to helping children in poverty and find that my own may be among them. Gretchen did not expect to be in poverty. She expected that her COBRA benefits would continue. But no, we have cut those off. Richard in Warren wrote to me asking for us to move quickly on COBRA. Richard's wife has cancer, so they have no choice but to pay for health care coverage. Since he lost his job, Richard has been paying $400 a month for their health insurance, but the cost has tripled--tripled--with the expiration of COBRA subsidies. Richard should be able to worry about his family, to be able to help his wife through her cancer treatment. He should not have to worry about the political games being played in Washington and the skyrocketing cost he is looking at. He and his wife should be focusing on her care and her treatment. But no, sadly, obstruction and political point-scoring now come first for some of our colleagues. Margaret, Gretchen, and Richard--and all those across the country who are facing similar situations--are wondering why they have to pay the price for Republicans to make this point about the deficit. Why them? When it was Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq, for which money was borrowed to fund them, where was the concern about the deficit then? For Halliburton's no-bid contracts, the deficit is no problem, evidently. When it was Part D's colossal handout to the pharmaceutical industry--borrowed money--where was the concern then about the deficit? Not when it is the big interests. When it was the tax cuts for CEOs--big tax cuts for CEOs, for big bankers, for derivatives traders, for hedge fund managers--where then was the concern about the deficit when those tax cuts were passed unfunded? When the Bush administration inherited from the last Democratic President a balanced budget predicted to yield a zero national debt during the course of the Bush administration--a zero national debt during the course of the Bush administration--and instead the Republicans left us with $12 trillion in national debt, where then was the concern about the deficit? As one of my colleagues has said, this has been described as a point of principle. The way a principle is defined is that you always stand by it. If it is a sometime thing, it may be a lot of things; it may be an opinion, it may be a maneuver, it may even be an honestly held opinion, but it is not a principle if you only follow it selectively. If the only time you follow it is when struggling, working people are in the crosshairs. But when it is Haliburton's no-bid contracts, when it is tax cuts for CEOs and big bankers and fancy derivatives traders, and when it is the pharmaceutical industry, then it is all fine? That is not a principle. It may be a lot of things but it is no principle. I urge my colleagues to put politics aside, to do what is right, and to help the millions of Americans who are so badly in need of a little help through this economic downturn that was no fault of their own-- hard-working people, trapped in this recession through no fault of their own. I implore my Republican colleagues to start working constructively with us to end this unemployment crisis, to put people back to work, and to help those who are in such dire circumstances now through no fault of their own. That is what we are sent here to do and that is what I will keep fighting for. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I was presiding during the time that my friend, Senator Corker, was speaking. I did not have the chance to respond. But I want to assure him, through the Chair and through this question, that as the distinguished Senator from Missouri has just said, this was not planned on our side, at least not by me. I came for the votes. The only surprise tonight was my surprise that a Senator was going to stop our unemployment insurance program. It never crossed my mind, until it just happened tonight, that was within the realm of possibility. I have 75,000 people unemployed in my small State of Rhode Island. We are at 13 percent unemployment. So when I discovered, as a surprise tonight at these votes, that this was going to happen, like Senator Durbin, I could not just walk away from this Chamber. No way. No way. But it was not as part of a planned surprise. The person in my life who was surprised as to what happened tonight was me. Frankly, I am still surprised, and I am surprised this has not resolved itself during the course of this discussion. I am surprised that the 75,000 people in Rhode Island and over 1 million people in this country, who are going to wake up to the worry and concern and extra anxiety that Senator Sanders spoke about, are going to have to face that. I think it is unfortunate. But it is not because of a surprise attack by me. It is because I am responding to a surprise to something that I think is very unfortunate and extraordinarily painful for tens of thousands of regular working people who did nothing wrong but cannot find work in this economy in my home State. I thank the Chair.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the Senator. I very much appreciate the Senator from Illinois yielding for a question. If the Senator would not mind a series of questions, the first question has to do with, I guess I would say the sense with which we on this side of the aisle should receive the protestations of intense concern about the deficit that come from the other side of the aisle, and it relates back to when the previous Republican administration first took office. As the Senator from Illinois mentioned, the last Democratic administration left an annual budget in surplus and a nation that had a $5 trillion debt. But my recollection is that in addition to a nation in annual budget surplus, what President Clinton also left the Republican administration that followed was a budget trajectory projected by the nonpartisan professional Congressional Budget Office to eliminate the national debt of the United States of America. We would be a debt-free nation if the Democratic policies of President Clinton had been followed according to the nonpartisan, professional Congressional Budget Office. If I additionally recall, there were actually economic debates that were provoked by that, wondering whether it was actually a good idea for the Nation to be, for the first time since President Andrew Jackson, debt free. So my question is, Is it not true that more than just an annual budget surplus was left to the Republicans by the Democrats last time, but what was left to them also was a budget trajectory that would have made this Nation debt free during President Bush's term had he extended those Democratic policies?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, with the indulgence of the Senator from Kentucky, if I may ask my final question. If we have established that it was the Bush administration and Republican policies that created virtually all the national debt we now carry, and if we have established that when the mechanism that many believe would be the best vehicle to address the deficit was abandoned by our friends on the other side in significant measure, even those who had cosponsored it, thus preventing it from passing, what am I supposed to tell Carol Thomasian from North Providence? She is unemployed. She is a Rhode Islander. She has worked hard all her life. She went to work first as a teenager. She eventually got married. She started a family. She got a college degree to increase her earning potential. She bought a home. Her family lived in the home. She did everything right, pursuing the American dream. Two years ago, when the Rhode Island economy collapsed--and it collapsed in Rhode Island sooner than in other States; we have been in a recession for a long time now--she was laid off from her job as a construction project manager, and she hasn't been able to find work since. She is struggling to keep her family together. She is a single mom now. She is raising a 12-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter. She has all those responsibilities of teenager parenting. She is also trying to care for her disabled mother. She has a bachelor's degree in business administration. She has an associate's degree in architecture. She is a capable, trained, hard-working woman. Because she is out of work, her car has been repossessed, making it so much more difficult to try to find work, and it is unemployment insurance that is keeping her family together. This will cut 309 Rhode Islanders in our small State right off, in another few months it will cut up to 1,500 people right off. How am I supposed to explain to them this principle that they need to suffer because of our budget deficit, with a party that is forcing that suffering on them and that did more to run up our national deficit than ever and that has obstructed the vehicle that would have started the work to fix the deficit and is absolutely silent about the deficit when millionaires and multimillionaires and billionaires are given tax breaks? How can I explain that? What do I tell her?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. In evaluating this concern about the deficit, we have just determined that the policies of the other side of the aisle contributed to virtually all the national debt we have inherited. Then let's look to the situation now because I think we understand we have to fix this deficit problem. The distinguished Senator from Illinois earlier mentioned a vehicle for trying to do this, which was the establishment of a statutory deficit commission. My recollection is, the votes were inadequate for that, in significant part because on the Republican side of the aisle, seven of our colleagues whose names were on that plan as cosponsors of it voted against the bill that they had cosponsored for a mechanism that would potentially, at least, have provided a vehicle for resolving some of our deficit concerns. My question is, Is that also the recollection of the Senator from Illinois? And how, in the light of this debate about the budget deficit and the fact that the budget deficit is so important, it is worth forcing honest, hard-working--when they can find work--Americans into their cars to sleep, as the Senator from Illinois has said, out of their homes, into penury. Why is it not important enough for our friends on the other side to support legislation of which they were cosponsors, and what was the motivation for that?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. The question I was asking is, Is it not fair to ascribe to that Republican administration and its policies the responsibility for more than just the difference between $5 trillion and $12 trillion? Because if those policies hadn't changed, according to the nonpartisan, neutral, professional Congressional Budget Office, during the term of President Bush, we would have actually been a debt- free nation and, therefore, responsibility for the entire Federal debt that was inherited by President Obama could fairly be said to be the responsibility of the policies from the other side of the aisle.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I wish to speak just briefly about today's vote. Today, this body, in a rare but very welcome moment of at least partial bipartisanship, voted to pass Leader Reid's jobs bill. While that bill does not include every provision I would like to see, it is certainly an important step, and I commend my colleagues from both parties for supporting these provisions to put people back to work. As a Senator from Rhode Island, which currently faces one of the highest unemployment rates in the Nation, at near 13 percent--I know the help contained in this bill, which builds on the programs we passed last year in the Recovery Act, cannot come soon enough. I hope the vote is a watershed. Over the past few months, I have heard from hundreds of Rhode Islanders who are struggling just to find work. I have heard from Carole in North Providence, RI, who had worked all her life but was laid off 2 years ago from her position as a construction project manager. Carole has a bachelor's degree in business administration and an associate's degree in architecture and she has plenty of experience as a construction project manager. But for 2 years, she has been unable to find any work--talented, hard working, and unemployed. I also heard from Nathaniel in Coventry, RI, who recently graduated from law school. That is a wonderful achievement and is ordinarily a benchmark that kids pass through on the way to success--certainly to employment. But Nathaniel is carrying $100,000 in student loans and cannot find a job. I heard from Brian in Saunderstown, an unemployed construction worker who has been unable to find a job for more than a year. He has been receiving unemployment benefits, but he is justifiably concerned that those, too, might soon run out. He loves to work. He doesn't want to be on unemployment. But right now, in this economy, there is no other option for Brian and for his family. Leader Reid's jobs bill--the HIRE Act--will help put Rhode Islanders back to work. The bill provides a payroll tax holiday for businesses to encourage hiring, increased cashflow for small businesses that can be used for investments and payroll expansion, and an expansion of the Build America Bonds program to subsidize and encourage local infrastructure projects. In addition, the HIRE Act extends Federal highway funding through the end of the year, which will make a $225 million difference for Rhode Island alone in 2010. This legislation will be a big help for my home State, but it is only a first step toward restoring economic growth. It is certainly not the last step we need to take in this work session. As I said, I hope the vote yesterday and today is a watershed. Outside in Washington, the heavy snows of February are melting away. Perhaps--just perhaps--the blockade that has stifled the Senate is melting away a little also. We must now act to extend unemployment insurance and COBRA subsidies to make sure unemployed workers, such as Brian, and their families continue to be able to pay their bills and to maintain their family health insurance coverage. I hope we will soon thereafter turn to new investments in our failing transportation, water, and school infrastructure. We had a hearing in the Budget Committee this morning with Transportation Secretary LaHood, and he agreed very strongly that where you have decrepit infrastructure--and everyone knows the United States of America has an enormous deficit of decrepit infrastructure--we are going to need to repair that sooner or later. If we need to repair it sooner or later, why not do it now, while we need the jobs? If we need to repair it sooner or later, repairing it now does not add anything to our Nation's long-term liabilities. Indeed, under the old Yankee principle that a stitch in time saves nine, under the commonsense principle that when you get to maintenance and repair earlier rather than later, it costs less to do the maintenance and repair, there is actually a very strong case to be made that there are net savings from moving the repair of our decrepit infrastructure forward. So it is really a win-win, as Secretary LaHood acknowledged. I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues as we go forward past today's watershed votes and into the following votes to help restore our economy and meet the needs of Carole and Nathaniel and Brian and millions of Americans who are unemployed and need help now. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, bad things can bring out the best in people, and I rise today to speak about our response to the earthquake that devastated Haiti last month and, in particular, about the compassionate efforts that Rhode Islanders have made to help those who suffered through this tragedy. The 7.0 scale magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, is the first great natural disaster of the new decade. Even before the quake struck, the small island nation of Haiti faced significant challenges as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti has been wracked by years of political strife and the constant threat of hurricanes and tropical storms. This most recent catastrophe has led to, for us, almost unimaginable suffering on the part of the people of Haiti. On February 3, Haiti's Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive announced that over 200,000 people had been confirmed dead. The U.N. has estimated that over 3 million people have been directly affected by the disaster. In the capital of Port-au-Prince alone, over 700,000 people have been displaced, with over 480,000 departing the city altogether. Even before the quake, many Rhode Islanders were helping down in Haiti. One constituent, Natalhie Gooding, a CPA from Warwick, was down there volunteering her time at an orphanage for young Haitian girls in Port-au-Prince. She was there when the quake hit. Days went by before her husband Michael and her children were able to communicate with her. As people with families around us--I know the distinguished Presiding Officer and I certainly can share the intense concern that family must have gone through hearing the news coming out of Haiti for hours and for days and knowing that their wife and their mom was down in the middle of that and not hearing from her. As my colleagues can imagine, it was a traumatic experience. Fortunately, as it turned out, Natalhie was safe and she is now back in Rhode Island with her family. But as I acknowledge our relief efforts after the quake, I also wish to acknowledge and commend all of the volunteers from Rhode Island and elsewhere who were so generously helping in Haiti even before the earthquake struck. The response of the United States to this tragedy has been remarkable. In the weeks since the earthquake, the United States has provided over $439 million in emergency humanitarian assistance. The Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Defense, and other government entities have all contributed to this effort. Water distribution, sanitation, and hygiene programs, food assistance, logistical support, provisions for shelter, and essential medical services have all been top priorities. The United States military has sent aircraft and ships to Haiti, including the USNS Comfort hospital ship and the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. These vessels are providing medical treatment facilities and humanitarian assistance. In addition, the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and the Army's 82nd Airborne Division have contributed 5,500 troops to distribute humanitarian aid and provide search, rescue, and security support. We have also seen extraordinary generosity from the American people, from the millions of dollars individuals and businesses have donated to help the victims of the quake to the volunteers who have selflessly traveled to Haiti to lend their valued expertise. Americans, with our spirit of generosity, have tried to help in any way they possibly can. The outpouring of support in my State of Rhode Island for those affected by this catastrophe has been overwhelming. Many Rhode Islanders have generously donated to organizations to give whatever they can to the relief of this devastated country. At the Blessed Sacrament School in Providence, a school some of whose students have family members and loved ones in Haiti, the 270-plus students of this small school, pre-K to 8th grade, raised over $1,680 for the Red Cross in a single day. Students and parents at the Frenchtown Elementary School in East Greenwich raised close to $1,700 for the Save the Children relief organization to help those in Haiti. At the St. Mary Academy Bay View in Riverside, fifth graders have produced handmade yarn dolls which they are selling to raise money for the victims of the earthquake. This month, students of the University of Rhode Island launched a ``URI Helping Haiti Campaign'' with the goal of raising $100,000 for Plan USA, a Rhode Island-headquartered relief organization that provides direct humanitarian assistance to 1.5 million children in 49 countries across the globe, including, of course, Haiti. Ten members of the Rhode Island National Guard's 143rd Airlift Wing flew to Haiti in January to assist in the relief efforts. The 143rd's latest humanitarian mission before this was in New Orleans assisting in the aftermath of one of our own country's greatest natural disasters, Hurricane Katrina. This time they flew to Haiti to provide medical transportation and evacuation assistance. In January, even the Rhode Island Democratic and Republican parties put politics aside and came together to host a joint fundraiser to benefit the humanitarian relief efforts led by the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund. Rhode Island doctors such as Christopher Born, Sachita Shah, Stephen Sullivan, and Helena Taylor, of Rhode Island Hospital, traveled to Haiti in the days after the earthquake to provide critical medical services to those injured. These doctors lacked the medical equipment there that we here take for granted and they were also forced to use rudimentary medical procedures to treat the numerous patients who had lined up for assistance. But they did it, and they made a difference. These stories represent only a small fraction of the generosity that Rhode Islanders and the American people have exhibited in the weeks following the earthquake. It is truly inspiring how Americans have joined together to help the people of Haiti in this time of need. I know that the world is watching this example of America's generosity, good will, and professionalism. I am proud of the many contributions that came from my small State. The thoughts and prayers of Rhode Islanders and indeed all Americans will continue to be with those who have suffered and are still suffering in this catastrophe as the recovery and rebuilding begins to take shape. I know the generosity and the good work will continue. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 11, 2010 at 2:30 p.m.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Indian Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 11, 2010, at 2:15 p.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate, on February 11, 2010, at 2:15 p.m., in S-120 of the Capitol, to conduct an executive business meeting.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for up to 25 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise this morning to join Chairman Leahy's eloquent and inspiring remarks of yesterday and express my strong disagreement with the Supreme Court's decision released last week in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission. In this astonishing decision, the slimmest of 5-to-4 majorities overturned legal principles that have been in place since Theodore Roosevelt's administration. The five Justices who make up the Court's conservative bloc opened floodgates that had for over a century kept unlimited spending by corporations from drowning out the voices of the American people. It would be hard to call this decision anything other than judicial activism. Let me start by reminding my colleagues of the long history of successful and appropriate regulation of corporate influence on elections. Federal laws restricting corporate spending on campaigns have a long pedigree. The 1907 Tillman Act restricted corporate spending on campaigns. Various loopholes have come and gone since, but the principle embodied in that law more than 100 years ago--that inanimate business corporations are not free to spend unlimited dollars to influence our campaigns for office--was an established cornerstone of our political system. Monied interests have long desired to wield special influence, but the integrity of our political system always has had champions--from Teddy Roosevelt a century ago to Senators McCain and Feingold in our time, who won a bruising legislative battle with their 2002 bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act. Last week, that activist element of the Supreme Court struck down key protections of our elections integrity, overturned the will of Congress and the American people, and allowed all corporations to spend without limit in order to elect and defeat candidates and influence policy to meet their political ends. The consequences may well be nightmarish. As our colleague, Senator Schumer said, one thing is clear: The conservative bloc of the Supreme Court has predetermined the outcome of the next election; the winners will be the corporations. As my home State paper, the Providence Journal, explained: The ruling will mean that, more than ever, big-spending economic interests will determine who gets elected. More money will especially pour into relentless attack campaigns. Free speech for most individuals will suffer because their voices will count for even less than they do now. They will simply be drowned out by the big money. The bulk of the cash will come from corporations, which have much more money available to spend than unions. Candidates will be even more unlikely to take on big interests than they are now. What could make a big interest more happy than that? The details of this case were quite simple. Citizens United is an advocacy organization that accepts corporate funding. It sought to broadcast on on-demand cable a lengthy negative documentary attacking our former colleague, now-Secretary of State Clinton, who was then a candidate for President. The law prohibited the broadcast of this kind of corporate- funded electioneering on the eve of an election. Citizens United filed suit, arguing that this prohibition violated the first amendment. The conservative Justices agreed, holding that all corporations have a constitutional right to use their general treasury funds, their shareholder funds, to pay for advertisements for or against candidates in elections. Although the decision was cast as being about the rights of individuals to hear more corporate speech, its effect will be with corporations--big oil, pharmaceutical companies, debt collection agencies, health insurance companies, credit card companies and banks, tobacco companies--now all moving without restriction into the American election process. To highlight the radical nature of this decision, let me put this in the context of true principles of judicial conservatism. Justice Stevens explained in his dissent that the principle of stare decisis-- ``it stands decided''--assures that our Nation's ``bedrock principles are founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.'' It is jarring that the unrestrained activism of the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court led them to pay so little heed to longstanding judicial precedents, brushing them aside with almost no hesitation. Justice Stevens noted that ``the only relevant thing that has changed [since those prior precedents] . . . is the composition of this Court.'' Is it truly just a coincidence that this same bloc of Judges just last year invented a new individual constitutional right to bear arms that no previous Supreme Court had noticed for more than 200 years or is something else going on here where core Republican political goals are involved? Is stare decisis now out the window, at least with the Republican activist judges? Another supposed conservative principle thrown aside by these activists was the approach to constitutional interpretation that focuses on the original intent of the Founders. Read the opinions. By far, the most convincing discussion of that original intent appears in Justice Stevens' dissent, not in the majority opinion or in Justice Scalia's concurrence. Justice Stevens, in dissent, correctly explains that the Founding Fathers had a dim view of corporations. They were suspicious of them. They considered them prone to abuse and scandal, and that those corporations that did exist at the time of the founding were largely creatures of the State that did not resemble contemporary corporations. Justice Stevens rightly describes it as: . . . implausible that the Framers believed ``the freedom of speech'' would extend equally to all corporate speakers, much less that it would preclude legislatures from taking limited measures to guard against corporate capture of elections. This lack of historical awareness is, as I will explain, not the only flaw of the majority opinion. Only the dissent points out the most basic point: . . . that corporations are different from human beings . . . corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. I would add they have no souls. The dissent explains: Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ``personhood'' often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ``We the People'' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established. The majority just bypasses this elemental point. One bedrock principle in our democracy is that the will of the people should be supreme except in very limited circumstances. In the judicial context this means that courts should hesitate before striking down statutes enacted by Congress. But it seems that is not so when core tenets of the Republican platform are involved. It is not just this one case. There is a pattern that is discernible when these five men get together to strike down laws of Congress they do not like and make new law more to their liking. The pattern is not just discernible, it is unmistakable. It is undeniable. It appears, indeed, to be without exception. Look at the evidence: There is virtually perfect concordance between the major departures by the activist bloc from conservative judicial tenets--such as judicial restraint, original intent, States rights--and the result in those cases of achieving current Republican political goals. One could probably call this practice ``situational judicial restraint.'' A rational person could conclude, based on the evidence of the Court's behavior, the observable results that this and other decisions by the five-man conservative bloc would more properly be characterized as political prize-taking than judicial lawmaking. The only unchecked power in the American political system is that of a majority of a court of final appeal. When a small group can seize majority power in a court of final appeal, they answer to no one and can rule as they please. That danger is why courts are ordinarily so careful to answer to rules of judicial practice, respect for precedent, answering the narrowest question, and engaging in honorable, neutral, and logical analysis to arrive at decisions. That is why this conservative majority's departure from these rules of judicial practice and the association between these departures and outcomes favorable to their political party is so unpleasant. The steady march of the activist rightwing bloc to establish its conservative political priorities as the law of the land should come to observers as no surprise. It represents the fruit of a longstanding and often very public effort to turn the law and the Constitution over to special interest groups and conservative activists. Conservative institutions, such as the Federalist Society, were created to groom and vet the ideological purity of foot soldiers in the conservative movement. Consider legal historian Steven Teles on the role of the Federalist Society in the Reagan administration: Society membership was a valuable signal for an administration eager to hire true-believers for bureaucratic hand-to-hand combat. In addition, by hiring this Society's entire founding cadre, the Reagan administration and its judicial appointees sent a very powerful message that the terms of advancement associated with political ambition were being set on their head: clear ideological positioning, not cautiousness, was now an affirmative qualification for appointed office. The results of this meld of political ambition, ideological positioning, and judicial appointees have been terrible. Fringe conservative ideas, such as hostility to our Nation's civil rights, environmental protection, and consumer protection laws, have been steadily dripped into the legal mainstream by endless repetition in a rightwing echo chamber. The mainstream of American law has been shifted steadily to the right by force of this effort, backed by seemingly endless corporate funds. This ``rights movement'' for corporations, for the rich, the powerful, and the fortunate, has been pursued in a manner--deliberate infiltration of the judicial branch of government-- that should concern anybody who respects the law and, in particular, respects our Supreme Court. The Republican effort to capture that institution for those interests has been a remarkably aggressive and surprisingly explicit effort. Usually, political efforts to capture great public institutions come, as it were, in sheep's clothing. But this wolf came as a wolf. Consider for example the official Republican Party platform of 2000, which ``applauded Governor Bush's pledge to name only judges who have demonstrated that they share his conservative beliefs and respect the Constitution.'' All that was left out was that they should be willing to bend the law and overturn precedents to impose those beliefs. The pattern is not complicated. America's big corporate interests fund Republican candidates for office, and those corporate interests want those Republicans to help them. That is as old as politics. Republicans, once elected, make it a priority to appoint judges who want to help them--judges who may give obligatory lip service opposing judicial activism but will actually deliver on core Republican political interests; the conservative bloc of judges overrules precedent and 100 years of practice to open the doors to unlimited corporate political spending; and corporations can now give ever more money into the process of electing more Republicans. Connect the dots: The Republicans are the party of the corporations; the judges are the appointees of the Republicans; and the judges just delivered for the corporations. It is being done in plain view. The Washington Post recently explained: ``The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is now free to spend unlimited amounts of money on advertisements explicitly attacking candidates.'' The Chamber of Commerce already had announced in November ``a massive effort to support pro-business candidates.'' So the response from the Republicans, as reported by the Washington Post, should come as no surprise: Republican leaders cheered the ruling as a victory for free speech and predicted a surge in corporate support for GOP candidates in November's midterm election. Now that the Court has taken the fateful step of forbidding any limits on corporation spending to limit campaigns, we can expect to see corporate polluters under investigation by the Department of Justice running unlimited ads for a more sympathetic Presidential candidate; financial services companies spending their vast wealth to defeat Members of Congress who are tired of the way business is done on Wall Street; and defense contractors overwhelming candidates who might dare question a weapons program that they build. The Court was so eager to give artificial corporations the same rights as natural living human beings that it virtually overlooked foreign corporations. The activist Republican majority leaves wide open the possibility of constitutionally protected rights to influence American elections being held by a Saudi oil company interested in American energy policy, a Third World clothing manufacturer opposed to American labor standards, or a foreign farm conglomerate concerned about America's food safety rules. Is the five-man conservative bloc's fealty to corporate power so absolute that they could not bring themselves to say that the first amendment doesn't protect foreign companies wishing to drown out the voices of American citizens? Our government is of the people, by the people, and for the people. By refusing to distinguish between people and corporations, the Citizens United opinion undermines the integrity of our democracy, allowing unlimited corporate money to drown out ordinary citizens' voices. So look out for government of the CEOs, by the CEOs, and for the CEOs, who now have special privileged status: Not only may CEOs use their personal wealth to influence elections, they now get the added megaphone--not available to regular citizens--of being able to direct unlimited corporate funds to influence elections. CEOs now have twice the voice or more of everyday Americans. I won't belabor the record here, because it is something of a technical matter, but before I conclude I have to say from the point of view of judicial practice, the majority opinion is disturbing in several ways: First, it uses rhetorical devices that are more consistent with polemic than judicial determination--vastly overstating the opponents' arguments, using false analysis, knocking over a straw man, indulging in selective quotation and unsupported fact finding. One example: This is what the conservative bloc found as a fact. And remember, fact finding is not the proper province of an appellate court in the first place, but here is what they found regarding elections: We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. They just decreed that. So a company comes in, drops a couple of a million dollars in a smear campaign against an opponent at the bitter end of a race, when it can't be answered, and the next thing you know the person they defended against the opponent is in their pocket. No appearance of corruption? Well, the Supreme Court has decided it: No appearance of corruption. That is clear to them. Here is another finding of fact by this bloc of judges: The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy. They made that up out of whole cloth. There are hundreds of thousands of pages of findings to the contrary in the record of previous Supreme Court decisions they overruled. But, no, they made these unsupported findings. It is novel, it is naive, and it contrasts with the actual findings of this Senate 100 years ago, which said the following: The evils of the use of [corporate] money in connection with political elections are so generally recognized that the committee deems it unnecessary to make any argument in favor of the general purpose of this measure. It is in the interest of good government and calculated to promote purity in the selection of public officials. The evils of the use of corporate money in connection with political elections was so generally recognized 100 years ago that the Senate committee working on that legislation deemed it unnecessary to make any argument in favor of the measure--it was too obvious. Yet now this appellate tribunal has made fact findings that that is all wrong. Moreover, a small band of conservative Justices departs from regular judicial practice by relying for precedent on its own members' previous concurring and dissenting opinions, as if they were their own little court, building a scaffold of arguments alongside the law, in wait for the right case with a sufficient majority to abandon the law and jump to their scaffold of argument. As Justice Stevens accurately pointed out, the majority opinion of the right wing bloc is essentially an ``amalgamation of resuscitated dissents.'' Finally, and most disturbingly, the Chief Justice evaluates precedent in terms of whether his five-member bloc objects to it. He is surprisingly outright about this. He said this: ``Stare decisis,'' the principle that a settled question is settled, that it stands decided-- ``stare decisis effect is . . . diminished when the precedent's validity is so hotly contested that it cannot reliably function as a basis for decision in future cases.'' He later continues: ``The simple fact that one of our decisions remains controversial . . . does undermine the precedent's ability to contribute to the stable and orderly development of the law.'' As anybody looking at this can see, it is a completely self- fulfilling theory, and it allows the five-man right wing bloc on the Court to gradually undermine settled precedent, to tunnel under it with quarreling objections, hotly contesting it, perhaps even to accelerate the process of undermining it; then, at some point, decree that the settled precedent is no longer valid because they have quarreled with it. Now it must fall. There can be little doubt that the conservative bloc is laying the foundation for future right wing activism in a seemingly deliberate and concerted effort to expand its political philosophy into our law. Of course, always the dramatic changes observably fall in the direction of the Republican Party's current political doctrine and interests. I will close by quoting Justice Stevens, who I think puts the fundamental issue of the Citizens United majority opinion in clear relief. ``At bottom,'' he says: . . . the court's opinion . . . is a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect-- Justice Stevens concludes-- few outside the majority of the Court would have thought that its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as we continue to debate our Nation's debt limit on the Senate floor, I rise today to review how we came to this point of serious budgetary imbalance and, in particular, how $9 trillion of it is Bush-Republican debt. At a time when tens of millions of Americans are out of work and families across the Nation are struggling to heat their homes and pay their bills and buy their prescriptions and put food on the table, our constituents are rightly frustrated at America's lack of fiscal restraint. They deserve to hear the whole story. The unfortunate truth is that President Bush left us with a budget so warped and imbalanced and an economy in such disarray that President Obama and this Congress have had no choice but to run temporary deficits. The previous administration must bear at least $9 trillion worth of the blame. Let's roll back to the time when George Bush took the oath of office as President of the United States. In his first address to the Nation, he pledged to ``call for responsibility and try to live it as well.'' It had been a divisive election, and many Americans now found some comfort and hope in those words. They were to be disappointed. But on the budgetary front, there was good reason for optimism on that January morning in 2001. After decades of deficit spending, President William Jefferson Clinton had set the Nation on its healthiest fiscal path in generations. After 28 straight years of multibillion-dollar budget deficits, our Nation saw surpluses beginning in 1998 under President Clinton. In President Clinton's last full year in office, we saw the largest budget surplus in our Nation's history--a budget surplus of $236 billion under President Clinton--and that good budgetary news looked forward as well. The month George Bush first moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, our Congressional Budget Office--the nonpartisan accounting arm of Congress--projected that we would continue to see surpluses throughout the following decade. Those budget surpluses, the product of responsible governing--some might even say fiscally conservative governing--were projected to be enough to completely wipe out our national debt by 2009. That was the picture we looked forward to when George Bush took office in 2001-- predictions by the Congressional Budget Office that our national debt would be zero by 2009. Indeed, there was actually debate in academic circles about whether a debt-free America was a good idea. That discussion seems rather bitter now. In other words, at that time, the hard work had been done. The Nation was on a strong financial course. If President Bush had stayed that course of fiscal responsibility, he could have been the first President since Andrew Jackson in 1836 to govern a debt-free United States of America. If President Bush had chosen the responsible path, we would be having a very different debate today. Of course, President Bush and the Republicans who governed Congress did not choose the responsible path. This chart illustrates the difference between the surpluses that George Bush inherited and the deficits he created. This top line, at the top of the red, shows the CBO budget outlook I have described that was projected by CBO in January of 2001, climbing with increased surpluses over the years to come. The bottom line at the bottom of the red shows what the Bush administration actually did, the budget results under the Bush administration. The difference between the anticipated path President Clinton left this country on and what President Bush actually did is a mind-boggling $8.9 trillion. For purposes of rounding, I will call it $9 trillion. That is a conservative figure that does not include the likely cost of servicing that debt over the years. We have to pay interest and not just pay back our borrowing. It also does not include the spending President Obama had to do to offset fiscal disaster because of the financial meltdown he inherited. That spending by President Obama was not anything President Obama wanted to do. It was not anything he campaigned on. It was not on his agenda. It was an emergency measure necessary to clean up the economic wreckage left by the Bush administration. Look at one particular contrast. Our current majority leader, Harry Reid, has worked to craft a health care reform bill that would not only achieve near universal coverage but would do so without adding one penny to the national debt. In contrast, when George Bush and his Republican allies in Congress designed a Medicare prescription drug benefit, they did so without offsetting at all the hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending. Indeed, they even larded it up with special deals for the pharmaceutical industry. In other words, the Republicans relied entirely on deficit spending to fund a huge new entitlement program. That was the way they actually did business. The Republicans relied entirely on deficit spending to fund a huge new entitlement program. That is the fact. Now Republicans inaccurately and, frankly, hypocritically, rail on budgetary grounds against our efforts to extend health care coverage. But unlike their costly prescription drug bill, our health care bill improves our budget baseline. The baseline we inherited from President Bush desperately needs improvement. This next chart shows the deterioration of annual deficits under the previous administration. The facts are plain. George Bush vastly increased spending while cutting tax revenues. The structural deficit he built in and left to President Obama simply cannot be sustained. But how soon our friends on the other side of the aisle forget. In fact, as this next chart shows, the national debt limit had to be increased seven times--seven times--while George Bush was President. President Bush inherited from President Clinton a $5.95 trillion national debt limit. By the time he left office, his reckless spending and his tax policies favoring the rich at the expense of working Americans necessitated a debt limit almost twice as high, at $11.52 trillion. We should not take lightly the borrowing expansion we are now forced to pursue to help recover from the Bush economic meltdown. But we should also not forget how we ended up in this position. Each borrowed dollar, borrowed under the Bush administration, involves a debt service cost, and the Republican explosion of debt between 2001 and 2009 now makes everything we do, from running the government to stimulating the economy, more expensive. Balancing our budget is a priority at which Democrats have succeeded in the past. It is one of the legacies of President Clinton. I am confident Democrats will succeed at it again because we believe in responsible governance. But now is not the time to play games with our Nation's finances and put essential programs on which families depend at risk. In the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, the analogy between family budgets and the Federal budget is a false one. If the Federal Government contracted its spending, shrunk its spending at the time when States, municipalities, companies, and families are all shrinking and constraining their spending, it would further shrink the economy. It would worsen the recession. It would make things worse for American families. Period. Saying anything else is simply false. Unemployment hovers around 10 percent nationwide and even higher in hard-hit places such as my home State of Rhode Island. Economic recovery must remain our top national priority. Indeed, we need to do even more to put Americans back to work. The increased borrowing power we are now considering will give us the flexibility to enact new job- creating legislation. Let me make one point very clear. An upfront commitment of resources to creating jobs need not add to our Nation's long-term liabilities. Let me give some examples. Throughout the Nation, there are bridges condemned or under weight restrictions. We have bridges in Rhode Island that are condemned or under weight restrictions. There are roadways that the U.S. Department of Transportation has deemed unfit for further maintenance. In my State, the Providence viaduct is in that condition. We have, across the country, water treatment facilities that release raw sewage into our waterways after it rains. We have old school buildings that pose demonstrated safety hazards for our students. We have numerous other structures in demonstrable disrepair. We have an infrastructure deficit. All these projects need repair, and repairing them is going to require our attention sooner or later. Thus, getting that work done now would not add in a meaningful way to our national long-term liabilities. We have to rebuild this failed infrastructure. We are not going to let those bridges fall into the rivers. Why not do it now when we need the jobs? Why not do it now when the old adage ``a stitch in time saves nine'' prevails? Every American understands, whether they are working on their car or making repairs on their house, that when you get after maintenance earlier, the cost is always lower. So there is no need to be concerned about the Nation's fiscal liabilities when we are engaged in the repair of decrepit infrastructure. A vote to increase the debt limit should be taken in proper context. When he was sworn in, President Obama faced the twin evils of a deep recession--a recession that for many American workers is as bad as the Great Depression--and he faced the $9 trillion Bush debt, run up in a time when things were fine. It was fair-weather spending, fair-weather debt. Our top priority now must be to continue working on job creation until our economic prosperity is restored, until we have recovered from this great recession. We must not sit still for lectures in fiscal probity from the party that ran up $9 trillion in fair-weather debt to fund a war that need not have been embarked on, to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans who did not need them, and to pursue economic policies that led to the recession we are trapped in now. Those policies lit the fires President Obama still is fighting to put out. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I thank Chairman Baucus. As we are here in the Senate today, Washington rests under a blanket of snow, reminding us here of the Christmas spirit across the Nation, the spirit that is bringing families happily together for the holidays. Unfortunately, a different spirit has descended on this Senate. The spirit that has descended on the Senate is one described by Chief Justice John Marshall back in the Burr trial: ``those malignant and vindictive passions which . . . rage in the bosoms of contending parties struggling for power.'' Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Hofstadter captured some examples in his famous essay, ``The Paranoid Style in American Politics.'' The malignant and vindictive passions often arise, he points out, when an aggrieved minority believes that ``America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.'' Does that sound familiar in this health care debate? Forty years ago, he wrote that. Hofstadter continued, those aggrieved fear what he described as ``the now familiar sustained conspiracy''--familiar then, 40 years ago; persistent now--whose supposed purpose, Hofstadter described, is ``to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism. . . .'' Again, familiar words here today. More than 50 years ago, he wrote of the dangers of an aggrieved rightwing minority, with the power to create what he called ``a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible''--``a political [environment] in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.'' The malignant and vindictive passions that have descended on the Senate are busily creating just such a political climate. Far from appealing to the better angels of our nature, too many colleagues are embarked on a desperate no-holds-barred mission of propaganda, falsehood, obstruction, and fear. History cautions us of the excesses to which these malignant, vindictive passions can ultimately lead: tumbrels have rolled through taunting crowds; broken glass has sparkled in darkened streets; ``strange fruit'' has hung from southern trees; even this great institution of government that we share has cowered before a tail gunner waving secret lists. Those malignant moments rightly earned what Lord Acton called ``the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.'' But history also reminds us that in the heat of those vindictive passions, some people earnestly believed they were justified. Such is the human capacity for intoxication by those malignant and vindictive political passions Chief Justice Marshall described. I ask my colleagues to consider what judgment history will inflict on this current spirit that has descended on the Senate. Let's look at what current observers are saying as a possible early indicator of the judgment history will inflict. Recently, the editor of the Manchester Journal Inquirer editorial page wrote of the current GOP, which he called this ``once great and now mostly shameful party,'' that it ``has gone crazy,'' is ``more and more dominated by the lunatic fringe,'' and has ``poisoned itself with hate.'' He concluded, they ``no longer want to govern. They want to emote.'' A well-regarded Philadelphia columnist recently wrote of the ``conservative paranoia'' and ``lunacy'' on the Republican right. The respected Maureen Dowd, in her eulogy for her friend, William Safire, lamented the ``vile and vitriol of today's howling pack of conservative pundits.'' A Washington Post writer with a quarter century of experience observing government, married to a Bush administration official, noted about the House health care bill, ``the appalling amount of misinformation being peddled by its opponents''; she called it a ``flood of sheer factual misstatements about the health-care bill,'' and noted that ``[t]he falsehood-peddling began at the top. . . .'' The respected head of the Mayo Clinic described recent health care antics as ``scare tactics'' and ``mud.'' Congress itself is not immune. Many of us felt President Bush was less than truthful, yet not one of us yelled out ``You lie!'' at a President during a joint session of Congress. Through panics and depressions, through world wars and civil wars, no one ever has-- never--until President Obama delivered his first address. And this September, 179 Republicans in the House voted to support their heckler comrade. Here in the Senate, this month, one of our Republican colleagues regretted, ``Why didn't I say that?'' A Nobel prize-winning economist recently concluded thus: The takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here--and it's very bad for America. History's current verdict is not promising. How are these unprecedented passions manifest in the Senate? Well, several ways. First, through a campaign of obstruction and delay affecting every single aspect of the Senate's business. We have crossed the mark of over 100 filibusters and acts of procedural obstruction in less than 1 year. Never since the founding of the Republic--not even in the bitter sentiments preceding the Civil War--was such a thing ever seen in this body. It is unprecedented. Second, through a campaign of falsehood: about death panels, and cuts to Medicare benefits, and benefits for illegal aliens, and bureaucrats to be parachuted in between you and your doctor. Our colleagues terrify the public with this parade of imagined horrors. They whip up concerns and anxiety about ``socialized medicine'' and careening deficits, and then they tell us: The public is concerned about the bill. Really? Third, we see it in bad behavior. We see it in the long hours of reading by the clerks our Republican colleagues have forced. We see it in Christmases and holidays ruined by the Republicans for our loyal and professional Senate employees. It is fine for me. It is fine for the Presiding Officer. We signed up for this job. But why ruin it for all the employees condemned by the Republicans to be here? We see it in simple agreements for Senators to speak broken. We see it, tragically, in gentle and distinguished Members, true noblemen of the Senate, who have built reputations of honor and trustworthiness over decades being forced to break their word, and doublecross their dearest friends and colleagues. We see it in public attacks in the press by Senators against the parliamentary staff. The parliamentary staff is nonpartisan; they are professional employees of the Senate who cannot answer back. Attacking them is worse than kicking a man when he is down. Attacking them is kicking a man who is forbidden to hit back. It is dishonorable. The lowest of the low was the Republican vote against funding and supporting our troops in the field in a time of war. As a device to stall health care, they tried to stop the appropriation of funds for our soldiers. There is no excuse for that. From that there is no return. Every single Republican Member was willing to vote against cloture on funding our troops, and they admitted it was a tactic to obstruct health care reform. The Secretary of Defense warned us all that a ``no'' vote would immediately create a ``serious disruption in the worldwide activities of the Department of Defense.'' And yet every one of them was willing to vote ``no.'' Almost all of them did vote ``no.'' Some stayed away, but that is the same as ``no'' when you need 60 ``yes'' votes to proceed. Voting ``no'' and hiding from the vote are the same result. And for those of us here on the floor to see it, it was clear: The three who voted ``yes'' did not cast their ``yes'' votes until all 60 Democratic votes had been tallied and it was clear that the result was a foregone conclusion. And why? Why all this discord and discourtesy, all this unprecedented, destructive action? All to break the momentum of our new, young President. They are desperate to break this President. They have ardent supporters who are nearly hysterical at the very election of President Barack Obama: the ``birthers,'' the fanatics, the people running around in rightwing militias and Aryan support groups. It is unbearable to them that President Barack Obama should exist. That is one powerful reason. It is not the only one. The insurance industry, one of the most powerful lobbies in politics, is another reason. The bad behavior you see on the Senate floor is the last thrashing throes of the health insurance industry as it watches its business model die. You who are watching and listening know this business model if you or a loved one has been sick: the business model that will not insure you if they think you will get sick or if you have a preexisting condition; the business model that, if you are insured and you do get sick, job one is to find loopholes to throw you off your coverage and abandon you alone to your illness; the business model, when they cannot find that loophole, that they will try to interfere with or deny you the care your doctor has ordered; and the business model that, when all else fails, and they cannot avoid you or abandon you or deny you, they stiff the doctor and the hospital and deny and delay their payments for as long as possible--or perhaps tell the hospital to collect from you first, and maybe they will reimburse you. Good riddance to that business model. We know it all too well. It deserves a stake through its cold and greedy heart, but some of our colleagues here are fighting to the death to keep it alive. But the biggest reason for these desperate acts by our colleagues is that we are gathering momentum, and we are gathering strength, and we are working toward our goal of passing this legislation. And when we do--when we do--the lying time is over. The American public will see what actually comes to pass when we pass this bill as our new law. The American public will see firsthand the difference between what is and what they were told. (Mr. FRANKEN assumed the chair.) Facts, as the Presiding Officer has often said, are stubborn things. It is one thing to propagandize and scare people about the unknown. It is much tougher to propagandize and scare people when they are seeing and feeling and touching something different. When it turns out there are no death panels, when there is no bureaucrat between you and your doctor, when the ways your health care changes seem like a good deal to you, and a pretty smart idea--when the American public sees the discrepancy between what is and what they were told by the Republicans--there will be a reckoning. There will come a day of judgment about who was telling the truth. Our colleagues are behaving in this way--unprecedented, malignant, and vindictive--because they are desperate to avoid that day of judgment. Frantic and desperate now and willing to do strange and unprecedented things, willing to do anything--even to throw our troops at war--in the way of that day of reckoning. If they can cause this bill to fail, the truth will never stand up as a living reproach to the lies that have been told, and on through history our colleagues could claim they defeated a terrible monstrosity. But when the bill passes and this program actually comes to life and it is friendly, when it shelters 33 million Americans, regular American people, in the new security of health insurance, when it growls down the most disgraceful abuses of the insurance industry, when it offers better care, electronic health records, new community health centers, new opportunities to negotiate fair and square in a public market, and when it brings down the deficit and steers Medicare toward a safe harbor--all of which it does--Americans will then know, beyond any capacity of spin or propaganda to dissuade them, that they were lied to. And they will remember. There will come a day of judgment, and our Republican friends know that. That is why they are terrified. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I know the Senators have been waiting longer than I have. It is a personal courtesy from them to me to allow me to join Senator Rockefeller and Senator Lieberman as a cosponsor and have our remarks follow in series. I am grateful to both of them. I am here to speak in support of the amendment offered by Senators Rockefeller, Lieberman, and myself, which would strengthen the provisions of the reform bill creating a nonpartisan group of experts to put the brakes on out-of-control medical spending. One of the first things we can count on in terms of this amendment being one to protect Medicare beneficiaries is that the prime sponsor is Senator Rockefeller, a man who has dedicated his career since long before I was here--even during his days in West Virginia--to looking out for seniors and for the disabled and, since he has been in the Senate, looking out for Medicare. That is a credential that deserves great respect with respect to this amendment. One of the most persistent concerns in this health care debate is, of course, cost control. I have spoken many times on the floor about the overriding importance of cost containment for the future of health care and especially the need for innovative delivery system reforms, which can be driven by the way you pay providers. Our Republican attackers complain that Democrats on the bill are just doing more of our usual taxing and spending and that we won't impose any discipline on the system. Mr. President, as somebody who has worked for years on health care delivery system reform, I can tell you that is simply not true. This bill undertakes the most comprehensive redesign of our chaotic, wasteful system ever attempted. One leading health economist and expert in cost containment, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, recently wrote of the Senate Democrats' efforts in this bill that he couldn't ``think of a thing to try that they didn't try. They really made the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here. . . . You couldn't have done better than they are doing.'' Many critics talk about cost control as if it were just a matter of political will, that Congress can come here and cut costs by flipping a switch. Well, that may be true if you want to cut benefits for the elderly and disabled or if you want to throw the elderly and disabled off of coverage or if you want to pay doctors even less for treating Medicare patients. But those would be brutal, callous cuts that would create human misery and suffering. Better to tackle the waste in the system, the $700 billion annually in excess costs found by President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers--a number that may actually be as high as over $1 trillion every year, according to the Lewin Group and to George Bush's former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill. By this method, you save money by improving the quality and efficiency of care; by tackling the multiple sources of waste and inefficiency in the system; by improving quality and access to care and giving doctors, hospitals, employers, and employees all the correct financial incentives to adopt healthy, cost-saving, efficient practices. The complexity of getting those incentives right, aligned with top-flight health care, versus the power of the interest groups that are involved, has historically paralyzed Congress. History teaches that the significant national dialog and debate we are now having about health care is a momentary exception rather than the general rule. It is possible this debate will usher in a sustained period of focus on health reform, but the steepening fall of our health care system toward catastrophe should counsel us to protect against that congressional institutional paralysis. This independent, nonpartisan board of experts to help control costs in a way that is smart, humane, and not all politics, is important. The independent Medicare advisory board will force Congress to act by issuing recommendations to reduce cost and increase efficiency that will automatically go into effect if Congress does what we so often do around here--nothing. If Congress can agree to different ideas, it can change the board's recommendations, but we still have to reduce Medicare costs by a minimum savings target. In other words, the board will force Congress to engage thoughtfully and for the public good on the most important fiscal and health issue our Nation faces. Senator Rockefeller's amendment strengthens this board in several important ways: It expands the circumstances in which the board's recommendations go into effect when Congress does nothing. It raises the maximum level of savings that the board's recommendations must achieve. It ensures all providers of health care services, including large hospitals, are equally responsible for bringing down Medicare costs. It empowers the board to issue recommendations for improving Medicare over the long term, even in years where spending is under control. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have depicted the board as a frightening, Orwellian, all-powerful dictator that will cut Medicare benefits. Hogwash. The bill specifically prohibits the board from doing anything to increase premiums, ration care, restrict benefits, or modify eligibility. The facts no longer seem to matter to our friends on the other side. They have called this group the ``rationing commission.'' If you look at page 1004, lines 3 and 4, it says this: The proposal shall not include any recommendation to ration health care. You are entitled to your own opinion--and we all have one--but not your own facts. It is actually that kind of demagoguery about Medicare that proves the case for creating the board. Thoughtful, smart, technically expert people under congressional oversight but protected from these partisan spasms of congressional vitriol, passion, and folly will make careful and consistent decisions for all of our benefits, without diminishing the power of the American people and their elected representatives, so that we can preserve and protect Medicare. I urge my colleagues to support Senator Rockefeller's amendment, in which Senator Lieberman and I have so proudly joined him. I yield the floor with my thanks to the Senator from Michigan for being so gracious in allowing me to join my colleagues in sequence on the bill.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I am interested in the parliamentary situation that took place earlier whereby one of our Members was actually obliged to withdraw an amendment that was going to be voted on by all of us because of an insistence on the part of the other side that 800 pages be read by our poor clerk before that vote should take place. I have also heard the other side say that we want to get going, we want to move toward votes. I would be interested in the reflections of the distinguished majority whip on the extent to which a procedural objection to force the clerk to read 800 pages of an amendment, and deny one of our colleagues his vote, fairly represents a desire to move forward and get through our votes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. If the Senator from Illinois would yield for another question. I was elected just about 3 years ago, and I came in with the new majority, so I did not have a chance to serve in this body when there was a Republican President and a Republican majority. I wonder if the Senator, who was here at that time, would reflect on how the other side viewed Defense appropriations for our troops during the Iraq war when they were in the majority. Were they desirous of delay and obstruction and debate and procedural maneuver on Defense appropriations at that time or is this a new strategy of theirs?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, will the Senator from Illinois yield for a question?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it appears to be just the two of us here, so if the Senator from Iowa wishes to take a few more minutes to conclude his remarks, I have no objection.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.