Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I further ask unanimous consent that the substitute amendment, which is at the desk, be agreed to, the bill, as amended, be read a third time and passed, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and that any statements relating to this measure be printed in the Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Commerce Committee be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 5618, and the Senate then proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be discharged from further consideration of S. 3536 and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolutions be agreed to, the preambles be agreed to en bloc, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of calendar No. 1084, S. Res. 659.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and that any statements relating to the resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session and that the Intelligence Committee be discharged of PN1791, the nomination of J. Patrick Rowan, to be an Assistant Attorney General; that the Senate then proceed to the nomination; that the nomination be confirmed and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; that any statements relating to the nomination be printed in the Record, as if read; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action; that the Senate resume legislative session; and that no further motions be in order.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as in executive session, I ask unanimous consent that the injunction of secrecy be removed from the following treaty transmitted to the Senate on September 26, 2008, by the President of the United States: Agreement on Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels, Treaty Document No. 110-22. I further ask unanimous consent that the treaty be considered as having been read the first time; that it be referred, with accompanying papers, to the Committee on Foreign Relations and ordered to be printed; and that the President's message be printed in the Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 441, S. 1492.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand in recess until 9:30 a.m. tomorrow, Saturday, September 27; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate resume the House message to accompany H.R. 2638, the consolidated security, disaster, continuing resolution; that the time until 10 a.m. be equally divided between the two leaders or their designees; and that at 10 a.m. the Senate proceed to vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 2638.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, at approximately 10 a.m. tomorrow, there will be a cloture vote on the House message to accompany the consolidated appropriations bill.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand in recess under the previous order.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time and passed, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate, and any statements related to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 1079, H.R. 5001.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate concur in the House amendment and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 1039, S. 3109.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I applaud the majority leader for the enormous, hard, successful work he is doing in these hours.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Democracy as an institution will not do well if we are all satisfied to be told what we want to hear and not what we need to know. Democracy will not address problems well if our elected leaders traffic in ideology instead of respecting reality. Reality bites hard when she is ignored. Democracy will not flourish if leaders tout for special interests instead of fighting for the public interest. Democracy will suffer a terrible blow when the days of reckoning come, when the rendezvous with reality occurs and our people, particularly our young people, turn to us and say: How could you? How could you not have warned us? How could you not have been square with us? How could you have been so irresponsible? As elected officials, we have a trust and we had better begin to honor it. So as we grapple with the proposal for the biggest bailout in history, a $700 billion patch on Wall Street and our credit market, what do we look for next? What is the next wave that will hit? Well, I fear the next internal wave we face could be credit card debt. We have 115 million households in America. They have 1.2 billion credit cards; 115 million households in America with 1.2 billion credit cards. The total credit card debt that Americans will carry by the end of this year will likely be $1 trillion. To put that in context, our international gross domestic product is only $14 trillion. With that many cards in use and that much debt piled up, we now have a pretty fixed pool of credit card borrowers out there. This is not an expanding market. The Bush economy has stressed this pool of borrowers and stressed them hard. The average middle-class family under age 55 makes $2,000 less than when George W. Bush took office. Their average family expenses have increased by $4,600 since George W. Bush took office. If you add the two together, the average middle-class family is $6,600 a year worse off after 8 years of Republican misrule. So they are stressed. They are not whiners, as Senator Gramm, one of the Presidential candidate's campaign advisers, said, and the economy around them is not fundamentally sound, as one of our Presidential candidates has busily been telling Americans until it had become too preposterous to continue saying it. So what happens to these stressed families? Well, the credit card companies see a family stressed, and they see them as a worse credit risk, so they raise their interest rates and they impose steep penalties and fees. It is an industry where when you are down, they make it even worse for you. So now the family is more stressed. So they fall more behind, and a vicious cycle emerges. Another vicious cycle operates right alongside. One credit card company finds a new dirty trick to gouge the consumer, so they make more money. Investors and competitors see them making more money, and in a market economy, capital goes to the highest rate of return. So now all the other credit card companies have to copy them to compete. So that credit card agreement gets more and more pages, longer and longer, more tricks to hit you with fees, penalties, and rate hikes. They get more devious and complex, and nobody can get off that merry-go-round, because if they try, they will lose their competitive position to the worst of the lot. So you have two vicious cycles and they converge and together they can drive credit card debt in only one direction. The tricks and traps and rate increases and penalties and fees get worse and worse, driven by the jungle force of competition among the credit card companies. Struggling families see credit costs rising ever higher, driving them further and further underwater, with no end in sight. There is no present mechanism to interrupt these gathering forces. Now, in a reality-based mode of governing, prudent men and women would do something. There should be consequences when abusive lenders take advantage of families in difficult circumstances. This summer our majority whip, Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois, and I introduced the Consumer Credit Fairness Act, legislation that would provide a powerful incentive for loan companies to keep their rates and fees at reasonable levels and would give borrowers leverage to negotiate better terms. It would interrupt the vicious cycle. But more can be done. For generations, for generations in this country, the 50 States had the power to enforce their own what were called usury laws, laws that limited the amount of interest that could be charged to fair and nonabusive levels, and they were able to enforce their usury laws against anyone. They were their citizens and they could protect them. Then, in 1978, in a fairly narrow decision, construing the National Banking Act, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Marquette v. First Bank of Omaha and decided that States could only set limits on the interest rates and fees charged by in-state credit card companies. So what do you expect would happen? Predictably, credit card companies began moving to States with the weakest lending laws, with the worst consumer protections, setting off what has become a race to the bottom among credit card companies, all at the expense of consumers. I intend to propose that we restore to our sovereign States the rights they historically enjoyed for two centuries, to set limits on the interest rates and fees charged to their own citizens. It does not seem like asking a lot. I will soon be introducing legislation to accomplish this. I encourage my colleagues to try to help me bring this to reality. If we simply reempower the States to protect their own citizens from unscrupulous lending practices, we can end the confluence of these two vicious cycles before this situation, too, gets out of hand. While the current economic crisis gives us this moment of clarity, this moment of reality, this moment of reality-based governing, while this $700 billion rendezvous with reality has our attention, before we revert to claims that the No. 1 issue facing the United States is to drill for more oil or whatever we get back to, while we have a moment of honest focus, this is our chance to get ahead of one of these problems. We will still have the $7.7 trillion Bush debt to deal with, we will still have the $34 trillion Medicare debt to deal with, we will still have the $734 trillion trade deficit to deal with, we will still have our energy hemorrhage to deal with, and we will still have global warming to deal with, to name a few. But let's get ahead of this one. Let's not mess up this one. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that I may go beyond the 10 minutes for morning business to perhaps 12 minutes.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I gladly suspend for the majority leader.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, we are working this week, many of us working very hard this week--none harder than my friend and senior colleague from Rhode Island, Jack Reed--to address a paroxysm in the financial markets, one that has been a long time coming. During that long time, people in Washington, over and over, missed opportunities to prevent it. Make no mistake, this whole episode we are going through now was preventable. This is a human failure not some natural disaster, not economic inevitability. A political sellout to financial interests, a sellout given intellectual cover by a toxic ideology of deregulation appears to be at the heart of what happened. I was not here to see it, but all the clues point to that. This crisis is now past preventing. We have to fix it. It is a shame on those responsible that it happened in the first place, but it is a shame on all of us if we do not learn its lesson because there is more to come. In his famous ``Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death'' speech, Patrick Henry also noted: We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. We should heed these words from the earliest days of our democracy and not shut our eyes to the painful truth of what has happened and not shut our eyes to the painful truths that still lie before us. Folks here have too often told Americans what they want to hear and too rarely told them what they need to know. There is no painful truth that Americans cannot deal with; there is nothing Americans cannot solve--but not if we are not told what we need to know. So we are now borrowing $700 billion because people here refused to face a painful truth about our financial markets, about the folly of deregulation. But that is just one of many painful, in some cases inconvenient, truths that we confront today. I remember sitting with the Presiding Officer, the distinguished Senator from Minnesota, in the Environment and Public Works Committee hearing the president of the Association of Health Directors of all the States and territories across the Nation deliver the unanimous statement of that association on global warming. It was a strong statement, a stern and sobering statement. But most important, it was unanimous. Yet in this Chamber some still ignore or deny the painful truth of the changes befalling our planet. Our capacity for denial, for artifice, and for self-delusion has become dangerous. Phony doubts about global warming may hide the facts of our planet's condition from our people, but the Earth doesn't care about doubts. She will behave the way nature dictates, and the consequences will be on all of us. Phony theories of deregulation may have obscured the facts of the financial markets from us, but the markets don't care about our theories. If we let them come to failure, they will fail. And now the consequences are on all of us. The painful experiences we are going through today are, for the Bush administration, a rendezvous with reality. It is not the only one we have coming, if we don't begin to govern in a reality-based environment. The $7.7 trillion debt that George W. Bush has run up as President-- there will be a rendezvous with reality on that. The $34 trillion Medicare liability, which is just one symptom of our bloated and unstable health care system--there will be a rendezvous with reality on that. The $740 billion annual trade deficit the United States of America is running--there will be a rendezvous with reality on that. An energy policy that hemorrhages $600 billion a year to oil-producing countries and puts us on the losing end of the biggest wealth transfer in the history of humankind, all to keep big oil happy--there will be a rendezvous with reality on that. There will be a rendezvous with reality on the tons of carbon and greenhouse gases we are pumping into our thin and delicate atmosphere. These rendezvous with reality will come. The only question for us is on what terms will we meet them. We can decide: Will we be prepared or be caught flat-footed? Will we tackle problems while they are still manageable or wait until they overwhelm us? Will we address difficulty or face calamity? These are choices of ours and they pose the question, Are we capable of reality-based governing. I ask these questions because there is a common narrative through all these problems, and it is a perilous one to our democracy.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I rise to applaud the Senate's passage yesterday, as part of the so-called tax extenders legislation, of important tax provisions that will move our Nation toward a green economy. But I also would like to reiterate my support for our budget pay-as-you-go rule and to express my disappointment that a nonoffset version of the so-called alternative minimum tax, AMT, patch was part of the tax package the Senate passed. With our national debt level at a record high, and growing by the day, responsible governing requires that we balance new spending and revenue reductions with decreased spending or revenue increases. I am proud to have supported Senator Conrad's amendment to the tax extenders package that would have provided for the extension of the AMT patch and other tax extenders on a fully offset basis. I also supported Senator Conrad's effort to raise a point of order under the Senate rules against the extenders amendment which was not fully offset. Although I strongly prefer Senator Conrad's approach of abiding by our budget rules, I decided to support final passage of the partially offset tax package because of the many critical energy tax provisions in the bill. I have been a strong proponent of growing our green economy, which will both help us combat global climate change and encourage investment in new technologies that will create jobs and strengthen our position in the world economy. This tax extenders package includes extensions of incentives for renewable energy, such as wind, solar, and geothermal, and the extension of the research and development tax credit on which businesses in Rhode Island and across the Nation have come to depend. In addition, the legislation that we passed yesterday includes a mental health parity law long championed by Congressman Patrick Kennedy of my State of Rhode Island and his father, Senator Edward Kennedy. This landmark provision will ensure that health insurers provide mental health patients with quality coverage and will go down as one of the signature accomplishments of this Congress. I want to take this opportunity to congratulate Congressman Kennedy and the other architects of this important tax legislation.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as we speak, people are losing their jobs, losing their homes, and often losing the hope that their situation will improve anytime soon. According to many, the worst may yet be ahead of us. For the first time in generations, we Americans can no longer promise our children they will be better off than we are. That prospect strikes at the very heart of the American dream. In less than 2 months, Americans will elect a new President who will inherit an economy indelibly marked by the negligent and incompetent decisionmaking of the Bush administration. No matter what one Presidential candidate may think, the fundamentals of our economy are far from strong. Our economy is off the rails. I believe it is important to take a few minutes to consider how it got dragged off the rails and, more importantly, what must now be done to restore Americans' faith in our economy and put our country back on more solid fiscal ground. President Bush's successor, whoever he may be, will confront four serious problems: an out-of-control financial market, a staggering Federal debt, a looming crisis in health care costs, and an increase in Social Security obligations. For the past 8 years, the Bush administration has preached over the financial markets a gospel of uncontrolled deregulation. Simply leave the banks and the financiers and the lenders to their own devices, they said, and all will be well. Well, all is not well. Markets are places where people come to make money; they do not come for altruistic motives. And some are clever enough when they come to those markets to try to rig or game the market in their favor, to gain monopoly power, to hide information, to cheat, to create special advantage--in short, to find a way to gull the suckers. Markets need to be defended against that age-old risk. Markets have to operate honestly, transparently, and reliably. That is where regulation comes in. That is how markets are defended against crooks and schemers. That is why we have an FTC, an SEC, a CFTC, a FERC, to keep markets honest. Special interests constantly seek special advantages, and it is the regulators' job to push back. In that constant struggle of the special interests against the regulators, the Bush administration always took the side of the special interests. They have systematically undercut the regulators in their efforts to keep markets safe. And now here we are. Senator McCain has been against the regulators, even back to the savings and loan scandals of the 1980s. The schemers, the manipulators, the Enrons, the subprime mortgage packagers, the oil market speculators, the credit default swap artists--they all found a friend in the Bush administration. They all found an ally in the Bush-McCain policies of deregulation. And now here we are. Under an administration that cared more about protecting big investors than protecting consumers, one might expect that at least the stock market would have thrived. But after 225 percent growth during President Clinton's 8 years in office, the stock market now hovers just about where it stood in 2001, when President Bush took office. Instead of growing by leaps and bounds, as we in America have come to expect, under the Bush administration, our economy stood still. I ask my colleagues: Would investors prefer 225 percent growth and then paying a responsible capital gains tax, or would they prefer having big fights about what the capital gains tax rate should be while nobody makes any money? There is a lesson here. Bad economic policy is not cured by mindless tax cuts. Anybody in their right mind would rather be here than here, if they are in the market. The month George Bush became President, the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan accounting arm of Congress, projected we would see surpluses straight through the decade. These budget surpluses, the product of President Clinton's responsible governing, were projected to be enough to completely wipe out our national debt by 2009--to completely wipe out the national debt by 2009. Instead of maintaining the surpluses and paying down the national debt, President Bush chose tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, a war he wouldn't pay for, and bad economic policies to amass a mountain of debt that he will leave to the next generation. This chart shows the difference between the budget left by President Clinton and the one President Bush created. The difference between the two lines, this red area, is the measure of the cost of the Bush Presidency. The difference between the surpluses left by President Clinton and the deficits run by President Bush and his Republican enablers in Congress is a staggering $7.7 trillion. Perhaps the more tangible number is $260 billion, the interest we will have to pay next year on this Bush debt, $260 billion in interest, much of it to foreign nations such as China and Saudi Arabia that do not have our best interests at heart. If we could have used that $260 billion that we now need to pay interest on the Bush debt for other national priorities, here is what we do could have done: fixed almost every unsound bridge, doubled enrollment in Head Start to help kids get ready for school, doubled all Pell grants to help kids get access to college, and provided every American with health insurance--all of it. That is how big $260 billion is, and that is what we are blowing on the Bush debt. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the national debt will go up by another $2.5 trillion over the next decade. The next administration is going to have to figure out how to deal with that mountain of debt. I think we need a Bush debt repayment authority to study the possibility of bringing the Bush debt off budget, to handle it responsibly, to remind the American public what this Presidency has cost them, to pay the Bush debt down responsibly over time. But we must do something. In addition, as the baby boom generation reaches retirement, we also face a tidal wave of health care costs that threatens to drown the Treasury and force unthinkable choices about health care for the citizenry. According to an analysis conducted by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, we have $34 trillion in unfunded future Medicare liabilities alone. That is unsustainable. And the longer we wait to reform the system, the worse it will become. President Bush has wasted the better part of a decade standing idly by as this problem exploded, as health care costs grew and opportunities for reform came and went. Time is not on our side. The need is pressing, and we have spent 8 years making no progress at all. I have said over and over on many occasions in this Chamber that our health care system needs fundamental change. I will not pursue that point at this juncture, but let me say, our health care system is itself broken. It delivers unsatisfactory results at vast expense, and we need to fix it. As we prepare for a new administration, we need to prepare for the wave of health care costs coming at us. Systemic reforms--a health IT infrastructure, payment reform, major quality improvements--must be at the heart of that effort. Finally, the next administration must grapple with the challenges of Social Security. As with all these issues, the choice of President will make all the difference. Senator Obama will ensure that Social Security remains a strong bedrock of retirement security for generations to come. But Senator John McCain supports privatizing Social Security, putting it in the stock market. This is an important point. Senator McCain and his Republican allies prefer to invest seniors' Social Security funds in the stock market that just dropped by 500 points the day before yesterday and another 450 points yesterday, the very same stock market that stagnated through the entire Bush Presidency while costs and prices rose by double digits. That is not a solution. That is more of the same problems. As for the blame game, which I have heard a bit about on the floor this morning, it is bad enough that bad economic policy caused this preventable disaster. It is worse if we should fail to learn its lessons. I can understand why the proponents of the economic theories that brought us here don't want that talked about, but it would be wrong and irresponsible not to learn from this disaster. It was preventable. We made mistakes. It was economic folly that brought us here and regulatory irresponsibility. To now allow that entire lesson to pass would be an added shame for our country. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as we debate legislation to authorize more than $600 billion for our Armed Forces, we have a responsibility to the taxpayers who foot the bill to make sure that money is being used as carefully and as wisely as possible. Today I rise in support of an amendment offered by Senator Sanders and cosponsored by myself and Senator Feingold that exposes unnecessary and wasteful spending within the Department of Defense and offers a solution. From storage warehouses to assembly lines, the Department of Defense is sitting on billions of dollars in parts and supplies that are in excess of the military's requirements--everything from jet engines to springs to fuel tanks. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and other Department of Defense agencies currently possess $30.63 billion of unneeded spare parts, in addition to $346 million of excess spare parts that are on-order--parts that are still being produced or delivered, but that the military already knows it doesn't need. The Air Force has $18.7 billion of excess spare parts on hand; the Navy has $7.7 billion, and the Army has $4.21 billion. On- order excess spare parts are at lower but still unacceptable levels. The Air Force has $1.3 billion in excess parts on-order; the Navy has $130 million, and the Army has $110 million. It gets worse. Branches of the Armed Forces have millions of dollars of spare parts on-order that they have already decided they will dispose of when they arrive. If a retailer like Target or Best Buy or Kmart controlled its inventory so poorly that it had $307.48 million worth of items on-order that it knew it would have to dispose of immediately upon arrival, that company would quickly go bankrupt. The Air Force has $235 million of spare parts marked for disposal; the Navy has $18.18 million, and the Army has $54.3 million. That's a nonsensical and unacceptable waste of taxpayers' money. The Defense Department's inventory management systems are a big part of the problem: they are incompatible, duplicative, and ill-equipped to the task of managing such a massive volume of parts and supplies. Don't just take my word for it. Over the last decade, the General Accountability Office has repeatedly flagged these inventory management systems as ``high-risk,'' vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. If American companies can get this right, there is no reason that America's military can't. Waste in excess inventory is part of a bigger problem of waste in the Department of Defense. The distinguished chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Levin, recently cited a GAO report detailing $295 billion in cost overruns and an average 21-month delay on Pentagon weapons systems. The GAO report recommends strong congressional oversight of defense programs. To that end, the reporting mechanisms of the Sanders-Feingold-Whitehouse amendment increase oversight and prevent waste in the Department of Defense. Our amendment calls on the Department of Defense to cut waste and fix the problem. This measure would require the Secretary of Defense to certify to Congress that the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Defense Logistics Agency have reduced by half their spare parts that are on- order and already labeled as excess. Until this certification is completed, the amendment would withhold $100 million from the defense budget for military spare parts. Our amendment would also require the Department of Defense to come up with a plan to reduce the acquisition of unnecessary spare parts and improve its inventory systems. It would then require quarterly progress reports to Congress, including reports on the levels of excess inventory that are on hand and on-order. Our troops deserve the best equipment and the best supplies we can give them to help them do their jobs and keep us safe. Leaving billions of dollars of spare parts to rust away in warehouses just doesn't serve that purpose. I urge my colleagues to support this commonsense, important amendment.