Jim Webb

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I rise in support of this amendment. I believe it is reasonable. It is not as draconian in its implications as many of my colleagues, whom I greatly respect in terms of their concerns, are anticipating. I would also like to say there has been a lot of misinformation on the Senate floor about this amendment, to the effect it will allow felons, people who are mentally defective, and other dangerous individuals to carry weapons on the streets of American cities and also to buy up hordes of guns and transport them into places, as Senator Schumer mentioned, such as New York City. My colleague from New York gave as an example, in his terms, a Crip or a Blood moving to Vermont, establishing residency, then bringing a permit down into New York and being able to carry a weapon with impunity. I think the reality of that particular situation is the gang members already have their guns. They don't need this bill. In fact, this amendment has protections that would prevent those who engage in criminal activity--such as gang members--from taking advantage of this legislation. The people who need this bill are the ones the gang members might be threatening. With respect to standards of conduct, aspects of criminality, and issues of mental health, it is important to note there is a Federal floor under this amendment that guarantees certain standards will be met regardless of varying State standards. If you read the amendment, it states: A person who is not prohibited by Federal law from possessing, transporting, shipping or receiving a firearm-- and who meets other conditions, may be granted reciprocity. If you go into the Federal law, and I am going to read from 27 CFR section 478--this is the current standard in terms of being able to possess a firearm or ammunition. Anyone who-- Has been convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding 1 year; May not possess a firearm. Anyone who: Is a fugitive from justice; Anyone who: Is an unlawful user or addicted to any controlled substance; Anyone who: Has been adjudicated as mentally defective or has been committed to a mental institution; Anyone who: Is an alien or illegally or unlawfully in the United States or an alien admitted to the United States under a nonimmigrant visa; Anyone who: Has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions; Anyone who: Having been a citizen of the United States, has renounced his or her citizenship; Anyone who: Is subject to a court order that restrains the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of such intimate partner; or Anyone who: Has been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence--cannot lawfully receive, possess, ship, or transport a firearm. In addition: A person who is under indictment for a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding 1 year cannot lawfully receive a firearm. Those are the Federal guarantees, the floor under which this reciprocity legislation operates. Senator Lautenberg has said in his comments that passing this legislation is akin to allowing someone from another State to come into your State and follow their speed limits. This is not an accurate interpretation of this amendment. The amendment specifically provides that anyone carrying a firearm into another State must follow the laws regarding firearms usage in that State, and I quote from the amendment: . . . in a State that allows residents of the State to obtain licenses or permits to carry concealed firearms . . . A person gaining reciprocity is: Entitled to carry such a firearm subject to the same laws and conditions that govern specific places and manner in which a firearm may be carried by a person issued a permit by the State in which the firearm is carried. I would say the better analogy at work here is the driver's licensing process itself. States decide the conditions under which a license can be granted, but the nature of interstate travel allows licenses issued in another State to be recognized across the country, so long as the holders of those licenses obey the laws of the State in which they are driving. I also keep hearing that this amendment will increase the number of purchases of handguns and other weapons. I would like to clarify for this body, as someone who holds a concealed carry permit, a permit to carry does not allow anyone to purchase a firearm automatically. One still has to go through the entire process of the background check as if you did not have a permit. Illegal firearms sales are a separate matter for this body to address--one that we clearly should be focusing on--but they fall outside the parameters of this amendment. The issue of gun usage in our country understandably divides people-- usually along the lines of those who believe that any relaxation of gun laws will benefit criminal and violent activity versus those who believe gun laws need to be modified in order to allow law-abiding people to defend themselves. I have a great deal of empathy for those who have been the victims of gun violence. I have worked with citizens groups as well as our Governor in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, to focus our approach. We have made significant improvements in our laws since then, including working to modify privacy laws as they relate to mental health matters, which was the primary concern in the Virginia Tech shooting, and also to improve the instant background check process. I will continue to work on these areas. I also believe very strongly that the violence we see in our streets and in our neighborhoods must be addressed. But very little of that violence has ever been caused by those who seek permits to carry. As I mentioned before, the people who are perpetrating that kind of violence already have their guns. Their access to those guns is a matter we should all focus on. But few criminals are going to go down to the county courthouse and file for a permit. Those who seek permits to carry and who are within the Federal guidelines specifically addressed in this bill seek to do so in order to protect themselves from the violence we see on our streets. I would say, when I look at this amendment, a couple clear examples come to mind. One is my father who, in his later years, lived in Florida and then Arkansas, and would drive alone in his car to come and visit me and my brother, who lived in Minnesota. It was usually at least a 2-day journey. My father was older. He was by himself in the car. He was a classic target of potential criminal activity. He carried a weapon, a firearm, when he traveled. When he stopped at night and went into a motel, he brought that weapon with him. You check in a motel by yourself, you are 77 years old, people are going to start looking at you. I don't think people who are in that situation need to wonder if they are committing a felony by having a gun to be able to defend themselves when they are in that situation. Somebody else who comes to mind are all these truck drivers we see on the roads anytime we are on the interstate. These are independent contractors. They are people who are out there making a living the hard way. They constantly cross State boundaries. They have to worry about whether their truck is going to break down. They have to wonder sometimes, where they stop, whether they are going to be victimized if they sleep in the cabin of their own truck. Many can legally carry in their own State. Do they have to worry, if they pull over for the night in another State, if they try to defend themselves they are committing a felony? This is the type of situation I believe this legislation is attempting to address. I believe it will have a beneficial effect. I believe strongly we need to work together in this body to address other situations of gun violence in this country. I am glad to add whatever insights I can have to do so, but I support this legislation and I intend to vote for it. I yield the floor.

Mr. WEBB

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

Mr. WEBB. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. WEBB. I yield the floor.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, today I am introducing, with great pride, the Adult Education and Economic Growth Act of 2009. I wish to point out that I and my staff have been working on this legislation for more than a year. It is designed to address a problem that we quite frankly do not spend enough attention on, I think, as we discuss the challenges of education in America. This is not the problem that is often discussed with respect to technical degrees or how we can compete with foreign countries in the number of engineers we are putting out, with those sorts of issues. It is the question of how we can assure basic competencies at the working level of a lot of American companies. I have started calling this the Second Chance Act for Education. There are a lot of people in this country who, for a variety of reasons, when they are in their teens or their late teens, cease their educational pursuits even before they finish high school. Perhaps someone might have a child, or get in trouble with the law, or get an independent streak and decide to leave school. Then when you get to the age of say 30 or beyond, you realize the disadvantage you have in attempting to compete in the marketplace. There are very few provisions in our law and in our policies that address this situation. This bill is designed to address it. We seek to reform and increase investment in what we call adult education, which is that span of education that will bring people beyond a high school degree and hopefully into postsecondary education. We are looking at job training and other workforce programs that we need as a country to build a 21st century workforce. I am pleased to be joined in this initiative as a principal cosponsor with Senator Sherrod Brown. By almost any measure, our Nation faces a critical need to strengthen existing programs of adult education. Our current adult education system falls far short in preparing our people to compete in the global marketplace. In fact, it is estimated that only 2\1/2\ million of the 93 million people who could benefit from these types of services are actually receiving them today. The American labor market has changed dramatically with the advent of new technology and with the loss of jobs in our manufacturing sector. The need for well-trained and highly skilled workers is obvious. It has increased. At the same time our adult education system, which should be effectively preparing low-skilled workers to meet the demands in this shifting economy, has not kept pace. Since 2002, the Federal Government has consistently decreased spending on adult education. In addition, the Nation's primary Federal resource for adult education, job training and employment services, the Workforce Investment Act, has not been reauthorized for more than 10 years. One can imagine how the American economy and the American workforce has changed over the last 10 years. There are other signs pointing to the need for a better approach to adult education. If we look at adult education enrollment rates, in 1998, there were more than 4 million individuals enrolled in these types of programs. By 2007, that number had dropped to only 2 million, basically a 40-percent drop from when the Workforce Investment Act was originally enacted. One of the largest barriers to economic growth in many communities is the lack of a skilled workforce, particularly those with entry-level skills. It is critical that we increase the number of individuals who obtain a high school diploma and encourage them to go forward into postsecondary education. I am sure we can all agree that the best economic tool for any community is a well-educated, skilled workforce. A growing number of American skilled workers right now are facing retirement age, and the growth in skilled labor has actually stagnated. If we continue along the current path, we will see only a 19-percent increase in the number of postsecondary education equipped native-born workers, which is about one-seventh the rate of growth during the past two decades. By comparison, countries such as China and India are doubling and tripling the number of college graduates in their countries. According to the Workforce Alliance, 80 percent of the jobs in today's economy require some sort of education past a high school degree, yet there are 8 million adults in the workforce today who have low literacy, limited English proficiency, or lack educational credentials beyond high school. With so many workers who are unemployed or underemployed, it is clear that we should be investing in the training or retraining of American workers to fill this growing gap. Our legislation begins that vital task by addressing these problems. Today we are proposing a two-pronged approach to strengthen the Nation's workforce. First, we want to build on ramps for American workers who got off track, perhaps, in their teens and need new skills and a better education in order to improve their lives. Just as importantly, we want to encourage employers to help them by offering tax credits to businesses that invest in these employees. Our government has long provided employers with limited tax credits when they help their employees go to college or to graduate school. It is basic logic, and I believe to the national good, that we should provide similar incentives for this type of adult education. This bill authorizes a rather modest $500 million increase in funding to invigorate State and local adult education programs nationwide in order to increase the number of adults with a high school diploma. As a result, the bill will inevitably increase the number of high school graduates who go on to college and update and expand the job skills of the American workforce writ large. All of this is relevant to my longstanding personal goal of promoting basic economic fairness in our society. Other provisions in the bill will improve workers' readiness to meet the demands of a global workforce by providing pathways to obtain basic skills, job training, and adult education. It will provide workers with greater access to on-the-job training in adult education by encouraging public-private partnerships between government, business, and labor. It will increase the use of technology in workforce skills training. It will improve access to correctional educational programs to channel former offenders into productive endeavors and to reduce recidivism. It will encourage investment in lower-skilled workers by providing employers with a tax credit if they invest in their employees' education. This tax credit is aimed at encouraging general and transferable skills development that may be in the long-term interest of most of its employers but are not always so clearly rewarded by the marketplace. This act focuses on addressing the unique needs of adults with limited basic skills, with no high school diploma, or with limited English proficiency. Those individuals who may have taken a different path early in their lives and who now find themselves eager to go back to school and receive additional job training and skills should be provided opportunities to get back on track. My legislation also would bolster the President's just announced goal of ensuring that 5 million more Americans graduate from communities college by 2020 and updating curriculum to keep up with the skills needed in today's workforce. I encourage my colleagues to support this important endeavor. I am very proud of the work my staff has done on this for more than a year. Our Nation's workforce and local communities will be stronger for it. It is my hope that this legislation could be passed in a timely manner. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, today I am introducing, with great pride, the Adult Education and Economic Growth Act of 2009. I wish to point out that I and my staff have been working on this legislation for more than a year. It is designed to address a problem that we quite frankly do not spend enough attention on, I think, as we discuss the challenges of education in America. This is not the problem that is often discussed with respect to technical degrees or how we can compete with foreign countries in the number of engineers we are putting out, with those sorts of issues. It is the question of how we can assure basic competencies at the working level of a lot of American companies. I have started calling this the Second Chance Act for Education. There are a lot of people in this country who, for a variety of reasons, when they are in their teens or their late teens, cease their educational pursuits even before they finish high school. Perhaps someone might have a child, or get in trouble with the law, or get an independent streak and decide to leave school. Then when you get to the age of say 30 or beyond, you realize the disadvantage you have in attempting to compete in the marketplace. There are very few provisions in our law and in our policies that address this situation. This bill is designed to address it. We seek to reform and increase investment in what we call adult education, which is that span of education that will bring people beyond a high school degree and hopefully into postsecondary education. We are looking at job training and other workforce programs that we need as a country to build a 21st century workforce. I am pleased to be joined in this initiative as a principal cosponsor with Senator Sherrod Brown. By almost any measure, our Nation faces a critical need to strengthen existing programs of adult education. Our current adult education system falls far short in preparing our people to compete in the global marketplace. In fact, it is estimated that only 2\1/2\ million of the 93 million people who could benefit from these types of services are actually receiving them today. The American labor market has changed dramatically with the advent of new technology and with the loss of jobs in our manufacturing sector. The need for well-trained and highly skilled workers is obvious. It has increased. At the same time our adult education system, which should be effectively preparing low-skilled workers to meet the demands in this shifting economy, has not kept pace. Since 2002, the Federal Government has consistently decreased spending on adult education. In addition, the Nation's primary Federal resource for adult education, job training and employment services, the Workforce Investment Act, has not been reauthorized for more than 10 years. One can imagine how the American economy and the American workforce has changed over the last 10 years. There are other signs pointing to the need for a better approach to adult education. If we look at adult education enrollment rates, in 1998, there were more than 4 million individuals enrolled in these types of programs. By 2007, that number had dropped to only 2 million, basically a 40-percent drop from when the Workforce Investment Act was originally enacted. One of the largest barriers to economic growth in many communities is the lack of a skilled workforce, particularly those with entry-level skills. It is critical that we increase the number of individuals who obtain a high school diploma and encourage them to go forward into postsecondary education. I am sure we can all agree that the best economic tool for any community is a well-educated, skilled workforce. A growing number of American skilled workers right now are facing retirement age, and the growth in skilled labor has actually stagnated. If we continue along the current path, we will see only a 19-percent increase in the number of postsecondary education equipped native-born workers, which is about one-seventh the rate of growth during the past two decades. By comparison, countries such as China and India are doubling and tripling the number of college graduates in their countries. According to the Workforce Alliance, 80 percent of the jobs in today's economy require some sort of education past a high school degree, yet there are 8 million adults in the workforce today who have low literacy, limited English proficiency, or lack educational credentials beyond high school. With so many workers who are unemployed or underemployed, it is clear that we should be investing in the training or retraining of American workers to fill this growing gap. Our legislation begins that vital task by addressing these problems. Today we are proposing a two-pronged approach to strengthen the Nation's workforce. First, we want to build on ramps for American workers who got off track, perhaps, in their teens and need new skills and a better education in order to improve their lives. Just as importantly, we want to encourage employers to help them by offering tax credits to businesses that invest in these employees. Our government has long provided employers with limited tax credits when they help their employees go to college or to graduate school. It is basic logic, and I believe to the national good, that we should provide similar incentives for this type of adult education. This bill authorizes a rather modest $500 million increase in funding to invigorate State and local adult education programs nationwide in order to increase the number of adults with a high school diploma. As a result, the bill will inevitably increase the number of high school graduates who go on to college and update and expand the job skills of the American workforce writ large. All of this is relevant to my longstanding personal goal of promoting basic economic fairness in our society. Other provisions in the bill will improve workers' readiness to meet the demands of a global workforce by providing pathways to obtain basic skills, job training, and adult education. It will provide workers with greater access to on-the-job training in adult education by encouraging public-private partnerships between government, business, and labor. It will increase the use of technology in workforce skills training. It will improve access to correctional educational programs to channel former offenders into productive endeavors and to reduce recidivism. It will encourage investment in lower-skilled workers by providing employers with a tax credit if they invest in their employees' education. This tax credit is aimed at encouraging general and transferable skills development that may be in the long-term interest of most of its employers but are not always so clearly rewarded by the marketplace. This act focuses on addressing the unique needs of adults with limited basic skills, with no high school diploma, or with limited English proficiency. Those individuals who may have taken a different path early in their lives and who now find themselves eager to go back to school and receive additional job training and skills should be provided opportunities to get back on track. My legislation also would bolster the President's just announced goal of ensuring that 5 million more Americans graduate from communities college by 2020 and updating curriculum to keep up with the skills needed in today's workforce. I encourage my colleagues to support this important endeavor. I am very proud of the work my staff has done on this for more than a year. Our Nation's workforce and local communities will be stronger for it. It is my hope that this legislation could be passed in a timely manner. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I have filed an amendment to this supplemental appropriations bill which is designed to put more transparency and more measurable control factors into the way we are spending these appropriations with respect to the situation in Pakistan. I would begin by saying I have a great deal of concern, as do many Members of this body, with respect to the achievability of some of the strategic objectives that have been laid out by the new administration. We are still looking for clear and measurable end points to the strategy itself. At the same time, I believe the new administration deserves an opportunity to attempt to bring a greater sense of stability into that region. It is a big gamble. As I mentioned to General Petraeus when he was testifying, and as I mentioned to other witnesses before the Armed Services and the Foreign Relations Committee, the biggest gamble we face with respect to the policies that have been announced in Afghanistan and Pakistan are that we are basically allowing ourselves to be measured by unknowns, over which we have no real control. In Afghanistan, this is very clear, when we put as one of our objectives the creation of an Afghani national army. I asked General Petraeus if he could tell me at what point in the Afghan history has there ever been a viable national army, and the answer is, except for a period of about 30 years when the Afghanis were sponsored by the Soviets, there was no viable national army. And even there it was not one you would measure in the same context of what we are saying we are going to attempt to achieve. So that puts our success in the hands of a rather speculative venture but one I hope we can achieve in some form. I would also point out an article in the New York Times today, which points out there was a good bit of American weaponry ammunition found in the aftermath of battle between the Taliban and American forces, which shows there are munitions that were procured by the Pentagon that now seem to be in the hands of the troops who are fighting against Americans. I would point out that is not unusual for this region. When I was Secretary of the Navy more than 20 years ago, one thing we were seeing in the Persian Gulf, with the Iranian boghammers attempting to attack our vessels, was that some of the rocket-propelled grenades that were found in these boghammers actually could be traced back to weapons we had given the Afghani anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan. It is a common occurrence in this region. The question is, How we can minimize those sorts of occurrences? With respect to Pakistan, the situation is even more difficult. We have very few control factors in Pakistan in terms of where our money goes when we send it in or what happens to our convoys that go through Pakistan on the way to Afghanistan. Eighty percent of the logistical supplies that go to Afghanistan go by ground through Pakistan. We cannot defend those convoys. We have had many occurrences since last summer where they have been interrupted, where they have been attacked, trucks have been destroyed, and other vehicles have been stolen, et cetera. In Pakistan there are a number of reputable observers who point out that some elements in the Pakistani military, particularly in their intelligence services, actually have continued to assist the Taliban. Because of--No. 1, the vulnerability of our supply routes; No. 2, the instability of the Government itself, obviously which we are attempting to assist; and No. 3, the focus of Pakistan in terms of its principal national security objectives as being India rather than Afghanistan itself--that leads to a situation where we must have a measurable source of control and accountability over the money we are going to appropriate to assist the situation in Pakistan as it relates to international terrorism, the future stability of Pakistan, and attempting to defeat al-Qaida. With all that in mind, I asked a series of questions last week in the Armed Services Committee to Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This basically was the line of questioning. First, do we have evidence that Pakistan is increasing its nuclear program in terms of weapon systems, warheads, et cetera? Admiral Mullen gave me a one-word answer--yes. I declined to pursue that answer because I didn't believe that was the appropriate place to have a further discussion. But I did say, and I believe now, this should cause us enormous concern at a time when we are having so much discussion in this country about the potential that Iran would obtain nuclear weapons, where Pakistan, an unstable regime in a very volatile part of the region, not only possesses nuclear weapons but is increasing its nuclear weapons program. I then asked Admiral Mullen: Can you tell me what percentage of the $12 billion that has gone to Pakistan since 9/11 has gone toward its defense measures related to India or to other areas that are not designed to address directly the terrorist threat or the activities of the Taliban? The answer was we do not know. No. We cannot measure those with any degree of validity because of the opaqueness in the Pakistani Government. I then asked him: Do we have appropriate control factors, in terms of where future American money will go? Secretary Gates indicated there were improved control factors, but we do not have the control factors in Pakistan as now exist even in countries such as Afghanistan, with all the difficulties in that country. With all of that in mind, I drafted a simple amendment. I hope this can go into the managers' package. I believe all of us who are going to step forward right now and attempt to assist the administration can agree that what we should have is a simple statement from the Congress, from the appropriators, that none of the funds we are appropriating could be used for either of these two purposes--No. 1, to support, expand, or in any way assist the development or deployment of the nuclear weapons program of the Government of Pakistan; or, No. 2, to support programs for which these funds in the appropriations act have not been identified. It is a very simple amendment. It simply says no money will go directly or indirectly to assist Pakistan's nuclear weapons program; No. 2, no money will be spent in any way other than the way we have identified it in this program and that the President must certify this and must come back every 90 days and recertify whether any funds have been appropriated for those purposes. I hope the managers of this bill can accept this amendment. If not, I will seek a vote on the floor. I yield the floor. Amendment No. 1144

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak with respect to an amendment I have filed.

Mr. WEBB

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

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I wish to speak in support of the Coburn amendment.

Mr. WEBB. I thank the Senator. Mr. President, there is, rightfully so, a great deal of varied opinions among our body about the issue of gun control, gun rights, the second amendment, who, where, what. We have seen it debated many times in the now 2\1/2\ years since I have been here in the Senate. I think it reflects the diversity of our country. I think it affects the different challenges that different regions, different urban and nonurban environments have when it comes to the use of weapons, and I respect that. I respect the fact that many on our side of the aisle have a great deal of concern about amendments such as this amendment. It just depends on what you are reading into it, in many cases. The other part of that is that I believe this particular amendment addresses those differences, and it does so in a way that attempts to bring some fairness to people who live in States that have a different view of the right to bear arms than in other areas. So I think we need to calm down a little bit in terms of what the intent of this amendment is and what its application would actually bring about. This amendment is very clear. It basically says that if you are authorized to possess a firearm in your State and if the possession of that firearm is in compliance with the laws of your State and if there is a national park or a national wildlife refuge system in that State, then you would be authorized to possess a firearm in your State in those areas. If you look at Virginia, there are a lot of national parks and wildlife areas that intermingle, even along our roadways. So we have a State that permits individuals to not only possess firearms but also to carry them, and potentially they could be at legal risk if they are driving down the same highway and they get pulled over because they have crossed into areas that are now national park areas. If you go along the mountain areas in the western part of our State, that is true. It is actually true right across the river. If you are driving down the George Washington Memorial Parkway from Arlington to Alexandria, you can suddenly enter an area that is a national park area. So that places a burden on a lot of people who are obeying the law and who are carrying out the standards that have been placed on people in Virginia, and this amendment helps to clarify that. That is all it does. If you live in a State where you can legally possess a firearm and if you meet the standards to legally possess a firearm, then in a national park inside that State, or a national wildlife refuge, you can continue to possess a firearm. It doesn't mean you can go hunting. It does not mean a 12-year-old can have a weapon inside a national park. It simply means that there is a consistency inside that State. If you live in a different State that doesn't want to allow people to possess firearms to the extent that the second amendment would allow that sort of State legislation, then you can't bring a weapon or a firearm inside one of those jurisdictions. So, to me, as someone who believes in all of the amendments in our Bill of Rights, as one who believes very passionately in the first amendment and the fourth amendment and the fifth amendment as well as, in this case, the second amendment, I believe this amendment is proper, and I intend to support it. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business and that the time not be charged to the Durbin amendment.

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I have a resolution I have left at the desk which would honor the Vietnamese refugees who came to this country after the fall of South Vietnam. I would like to take a few minutes to discuss the importance of this day, April 30. Today is a day that, for Vietnamese around the world, is as significant as the distinctions that are often made in other cultures between B.C. and A.D. Thirty-four years ago, on April 30, 1975, the Communist forces from North Vietnam finished their conquest of the south, and the struggling, war-torn country of South Vietnam ceased to exist. Many who fought on the Communist side and others who supported them believe that the motivation for pursuing this war was the unification of the country and independence from outside influence, and in many ways the position that they took, and the loss of 1.4 million Communist soldiers on the battlefield in pursuit of that position, is understandable. But it is just as understandable to recognize and honor the aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the people of South Vietnam who fought long and hard at a cost of 245,000 battlefield deaths for a government that, like our own here in the United States, allows true political and individual freedom. Those aspirations fell to the wayside as North Vietnamese tanks entered Saigon in blatant violation of the 1973 Paris Peace accord and instituted a harsh, Stalinist system of government that was marked at the outset by cruel recriminations toward those who had resisted its takeover. And thus, for millions of Vietnamese around the world, April 30 is a reminder of the loss of everything, including their homes, their way of life, and their hopes for a prosperous and open future for the country that they loved. Americans in general tend to avoid or ignore this day and the significance it has not only on the Vietnamese but also on our own history. But it is important for us to look back on that day and on the war itself, not in anger but in fairness, in a way that gives credit where credit is due. And it is also important, for all of the reasons that led many of us to support that war endeavor, that we commit ourselves to working together to build the right kind of dialogue with the present Government of Vietnam in order to help bring a better future for the Vietnamese people and a more stable strategic environment in east Asia as a whole. Frankly, I believe this war still divides Americans in a way that they still feel but no longer openly discuss. I am not sure we can even agree on the facts, much less the rightness or wrongness of our policies, that caused us to commit our military to that battlefield, with the eventual loss of 58,000 dead and another 300,000 wounded. Was it right to go into Vietnam? Was it important? If you ask those in academia, the predictable answer, growing ever more predictable as the years cause us to summarize the war ever more briefly, is that it was a mistake. And yet here is a piece of data that should still cause all of us to think again. In August, 1972, 8 years after the Gulf of Tonkin incident that brought us full-bore into Vietnam, even at a time when the Nation had grown weary of bad strategies, after tens of thousands of combat deaths, and years of massive antiwar protests, a Harris Survey showed that 72 percent of Americans still believed that it was important that South Vietnam not fall into the hands of the Communists, with only 11 percent disagreeing. Over the years, we have lost the reality of those concerns. Too often in today's discussions that examine the Vietnam war, we are overwhelmed by mythology. I hear it said quite often that this was a war between the United States and Vietnam. Nothing could be further from the truth, and nothing could be more offensive to the millions upon millions of Vietnamese who supported the South Vietnamese Government and its long- term goal of a stable democracy. Our attempt to help that government was no different than the manner in which we assisted South Korea when it was attacked after being divided from North Korea, or the motivation that caused us to support West Germany when the demarcation line at the end of World War II divided Germany between the Communist east and the free society in the West. We were not successful in that endeavor in Vietnam for a number of reasons. But it would be wrong to assume that this was an action by our country against the country of Vietnam, or that it was motivated by lesser ideals. We hear a lot of dismissive talk about the domino theory and the supposedly unjustified warnings about what was going on in the rest of the region with respect to efforts that were backed by the Soviet Union and Communist China in the runup to our involvement. But these were valid concerns at the time. The region had seen a great deal of turmoil during and after World War II. Most of the European colonial powers had receded throughout Southeast Asia, largely because of the enormous costs of that war, leaving poverty, war damage and unstable governments behind. Japan had withdrawn from the territories it had invaded and occupied. Governmental systems throughout the region were in transition, many in chaos. The Communists had moved into power in China. Within a year North Korea invaded South Korea, and were joined on the battlefield by the Chinese. Indonesia endured an attempted coup, sponsored by the Chinese. In fact, Lee Kuan Yew, the brilliant leader who created modern Singapore, has said many times that the American effort in Vietnam was a key contribution in slowing down communism's advance throughout the region, and allowing the other countries in the region to stabilize and prosper. The point, simply made, is that there was a great deal of strategic justification for what we attempted to do. This brings us to April 1975. A North Vietnamese offensive had begun in the aftermath of a vote in this Congress to cut off supplemental funding to the Government of South Vietnam. This was combined with a massive refurbishment of the North Vietnamese army, with the assistance of China and the Soviet Union, that allowed the offensive to kick off at a time when our South Vietnamese allies were attempting to reorganize their positions in order to adapt to the reality that they were going to get markedly less funding in terms of vital supplies such as ammunition and parts for their American-made weapon systems, as well as medical supplies. The events following the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, have never really been given the proper attention, probably because proper attention would embarrass so many people who had downplayed the dangers of a Communist takeover. A gruesome holocaust took place in Cambodia, the likes of which had not been seen since World War II. Two million Vietnamese fled their country--usually by boat--with untold thousands losing their lives in the process, and with hundreds of thousands of others following in later years. This was the first such Diaspora in Vietnam's long and frequently tragic history. Inside Vietnam a million of the South's best young leaders were sent to reeducation camps, where 240,000 stayed for longer than four years. More than 50,000 perished while imprisoned, and others remained captives for as long as 18 years. An apartheid system was put into place that punished those who had been loyal to the U.S., as well as their families, in matters of education, employment and housing. The Soviet Union made Vietnam a client state until its own demise, pumping billions of dollars into the country and keeping extensive naval and air bases at Cam Ranh Bay. As a consequence of that bitter day in April, 1975 there are now more than 2 million Americans of Vietnamese descent. We are better off as a nation for their contributions to our society, at every level. It was not always easy for these refugees when they arrived during the late 1970s, to a country that had been so torn apart by the war itself. But they won the rest of us over with their perseverance, their reverence for education, and their dedication to their families. Our gain, at least in the short term, was Vietnam's loss. It is important that Americans understand this journey, because those who lived it deserve a fair place at the table as we continue to work toward better relations in the Vietnam of today. Not to undertake a new round of recriminations; not to relive the bitterness of the past; but to build a proper bridge between our country and Vietnam, for the good of both countries, for the health East Asia, and for the benefit of all the people inside today's Vietnam. With respect to the region, Vietnam remains one of the most important countries in terms of the manner in which the United States should be preserving all of its legitimate interests on the East Asian mainland. With the steady accretion of Chinese influence to the north, the expansion of India to the southwest, and the evolution of Muslim influence in Southeast Asia in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and the southern reaches of the Philippines, Vietnam, along with Thailand and Singapore, are absolutely vital to our posture as an Asian nation. With respect to the Hanoi Government, with which I have had a long and not always pleasant relationship since 1991 when I first returned to Vietnam, I have a great appreciation for the very significant strides they have made since those early days. The relationships that are now evolving between Vietnam and the United States are healthy. In the long term, I believe they are going to be successful. And even though I remain proud of my Marine Corps service in that war so many years ago, I welcome them. When I first returned to Vietnam in 1991 I went to Easter Mass at the Hanoi cathedral. There were perhaps 20 people in the church, all of them elderly. Last Christmas I attended Christmas Mass and there were at least 2,000 people in the church, overflowing into the courtyard. People can argue around the edges--we can have our political debates--but this is progress. We need to reward those strides with reciprocal behavior, even if we remain at odds on other issues. There is a lot to be proud of in terms of the transformations that have been going on in Vietnam. Vietnam is growing. It is growing economically. It is growing politically. It is reaching out to the rest of the world. It is acting responsibly in the international arena. We have much to do with that success, and we have much work to do. We have much work to do in terms of encouraging more openness and greater political freedom. But we are on a pathway where, with the right kind of continued dialogue, I believe all of that is going to occur. And so I would like to reemphasize that the best legacy for those of us who care deeply about this issue, and who remember all the tragedies of the war, will be for us to see Vietnam, the Vietnam of today, as a strategic and commercial partner and also as a vibrant, open society whose government reflects the strength of the culture itself, a strength that has been demonstrated over and over again by the Vietnamese who have come to this country and who, I am proud to say, are now Americans. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I would like to add my voice in support of the nominee, Chris Hill, whom I have had the pleasure of working with extensively in his current assignment, both in my role as a member of the Armed Services Committee and also of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I think he is a uniquely qualified individual. He has a long history of success. If anything, in the current debate, I believe he is perhaps being victimized by the fact that he is a loyal diplomat and was carrying out, with great expertise, the charges that had been given to him as someone who has a career in that area. The numbers are pretty clear. He is going to get at least 70 votes. I believe it is time for us to end this debate and have the vote and get Chris Hill on his way. I respect the Senator from Kansas. I respect his concerns. He has been a great champion in terms of human rights. I would just suggest that this is not the place to continue this sort of discussion when the situation in Iraq is filled with unknowns, as it is, and our need of getting someone who has these types of qualifications over there to do this job. The Chris Hill nomination is no more place to have this debate than it was when the nomination of the current Ambassador to South Korea was also held up for similar reasons. The points have been made. I think all of us understand them, and we need to get on with this nomination.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Madam President, I would like to take some time today and talk a little bit about an individual for whom I have great admiration who passed away without much comment from this body last month, John Hope Franklin, I think perhaps the most eminent Black historian in America. Even that does not do justice to John Hope Franklin, one of the most eminent historians in our country, who happened to be of African-American descent. I make these comments as someone who spent a good deal of my life as a writer and dedicated to examining American history, and also I make them in the spirit that our Attorney General offered when he said: Maybe we should have a little more courage when we are talking about issues like race in America. It is interesting to take a look at the paper this morning and see the Pulitzer Prizes that were awarded this year, the Pulitzer Prize for history being awarded to Annette Gordon-Reed for a book entitled ``The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,'' which ties into the continuing saga of Thomas Jefferson; and for general nonfiction, a book entitled ``Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War To World War II,'' by Douglas A. Blackmon, which is another examination of the situation of Black America in the American South. Those are both important contributions to our understanding of American history. When I look at John Hope Franklin, who died at the age of 94 last month, and the contributions he made and the environment in which he grew up and basically conquered through his success, I look at an individual who had a lot of impact on me when I was a young man trying to put the history of the American South into some context because John Hope Franklin had the courage to not only address Black history but to place it into the context of American history, not to deal with it as a separate issue. There is a very fine obituary that was written in the Economist April 4 edition which outlined a lot of the high points and the challenges of John Hope Franklin's life. I ask unanimous consent this obituary be printed at the end of my remarks.

Mr. WEBB. I am going to hit a couple of points in this obituary, then I want to talk about the American South as John Hope Franklin understood it and where we are today, White and Black. John Hope Franklin grew up in Oklahoma. His father moved to Oklahoma when he was 6 years old to practice law. He had his own challenges in that environment during the Jim Crow laws. He then went to Fisk University, was an outstanding scholar, got a doctorate at Harvard. He became the first African American to lead an all-White history department at Brooklyn College. He later taught at the University of Chicago, and as the Economist pointed out: Unlike many after him, he did not see ``black history'' as an independent discipline and never taught a formal course on it. What he was doing was revising American history as a whole. His books, especially ``From Slavery to Freedom'' which was first published in 1947, offered Americans their first complete view of themselves. When I was at Georgetown Law Center, after I left the Marine Corps, and was studying on my own stead, sort of an avocation, of ethnic settlement patterns in America, I was being confronted with a lot of rhetoric that had come out of people who did not understand the American South, who did not really understand that, in truth, the American South has never been White against Black, even during its worst times. It was more a three-tiered than a two-tiered society. It was a small veneer of White aristocrats in many ways manipulating White against Black. White and Black in the majority of the American South economically differed very little at all. I started reading John Hope Franklin's classic book, ``From Slavery to Freedom.'' I saw that he was an intellectually honest observer, a passionate observer of true history, and he commented in this book on that in 1860, at the height of slavery right before the Civil War began. Region-wide, less than 5 percent of the Whites in the South owned slaves. If you think about what the American perception is on the issue of South versus slavery, you will realize what an astounding statistic that happens to be. He also went on to say: Fully three-fourths of the white people of the South had neither had slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery or the plantation system. So contrary to a lot of rhetoric today and a lot of misunderstanding, John Hope Franklin was giving an actual context that in the South, fully 75 percent of the Whites living alongside Blacks during the Civil War and afterwards had never benefitted from slavery or had never participated in it as an economic institution. The aftermath of the Civil War was a very difficult time for the American South, White and Black. As I wrote in my book ``Born Fighting,'' between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II, the South was basically an owned place. It was a colonized place and, in fact, it was colonized doubly. It was colonized from the outside, an entire region owned from the outside in its basic infrastructure, its banking systems, its schools not properly funded, and it was also colonized from the inside. This is the area that we see so many historians commenting on even today; that is, the planters society, early, before the Civil War, became, in many ways, this aristocracy that kept White and Black down at the same time, and it has taken us a very long time to get past that. In 1933, President Roosevelt published probably the most comprehensive document on the economic conditions of the American South that has ever been written. He pointed out in this document in 1933, the educational base of the South has been decimated, White and Black. Illiteracy in the South was five times as high in the North Central States and more than double the rate in New England than the Middle Atlantic States. The total endowments of all of the colleges and universities in the South were less than the combined endowments of Harvard and Yale alone. The South was being required to educate one-third of the Nation's children with one-sixth of the Nation's school revenues. The richest State in the South in 1933 ranked lower in per-capita income than the poorest State outside the region. In 1933, the average annual income in the South was only $314, while the rest of the country averaged more than $600. This report pointed out, importantly, using the terms of the time: Whites and Negroes have suffered alike. Of the 1.8 million tenant families in the region, about 66 percent are white [the South's population at this time was 71 percent white] . . . half of the sharecroppers are white, living under conditions almost identical with those of Negro sharecroppers. The region had 28 percent of the country's population. In 1937 it had 11 percent of the Nation's bank deposits. So this was a region, all the way into World War II, where you had legal separation, which we were able to overcome through the Civil Rights Movement and through a lot of very courageous people, John Hope Franklin among them. But once you get past the legal restrictions, the economic conditions among a preponderance of the population were basically the same. But this has provided downstream implications for both African Americans and people of European descent in the American South. When I was in law school in 1974, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago did a study on White ethnic groups, broke them down by 17 different criteria. White Baptists, which basically are a population that has descended out of the American South through the Scotch-Irish migration--of which I wrote in ``Born Fighting''--averaged 10.7 years of education. Blacks nationwide averaged 10.6 years of education. So the point to be made is that for both of these groups with a very common heritage, once we set aside, as we have, the legal disparities that tormented the South for so long, have very similar challenges in terms of breaking down generational cycles. In the obituary from the Economist that was written about John Hope Franklin, this point was made: Militancy was not in his nature. He was too scrupulous a historian for that, and too courteous a man. Asked whether he hated the South, he would say, on the contrary, he loved it. His deepest professional debt was to a white man, Ted Currier, who had inspired him to study history and had given him $500 to see him through Harvard. I would say, as we remember this truly brilliant American, that he not only loved the South, he understood it. Exhibit 1 [From the Economist, Apr. 4, 2009] John Hope Franklin His chief pleasures were contemplative and patient. With watering can and clippers, he would potter in his greenhouse among hundreds of varieties of orchids. Or, standing in a river, he would wait for hours until a fish tickled his line. These were, one could say, typical historian's amusements; very close, in rhythm and character, to the painstaking, careful accumulation of tiny pieces of fact. And yet what John Hope Franklin collected, over a lifetime of scholarship, were scraps of horror. Five dollars for the cost of a branding iron. A deed of sale, in Virginia in 1829, for a male slave ``of a yellow colour'' who ``is not in the habit of running away''. Or the testimony from 1860 of Edward Johnson, a black child apprentice: ``I was tacon and plased with a rope a round my rists my back intiarly naked and swong up then and there Each of [the men] tuck a cow hide one on Either side and beet me in such a manner when they let me down I fanted and lay on the ground 2 hours.'' To these Mr Franklin could add from his own experience. The train journey to Checotah, Oklahoma, when he was six, that ended when his mother refused to move from the whites-only carriage. His father's small law office in Tulsa, reduced to rubble after a race riot in 1921. The day he was told by a white woman whom he was helping, at 12, across the road, that he should take his ``filthy hands'' off her. And the warm evening when he went to buy ice cream in Macon, Mississippi-- a tall 19-year-old student from Fisk University, scholarly in his glasses--only to find as he left the store that a semi- circle of white farmers had formed to block his exit, silently implying that he should not try to break through their line. Academia offered no shelter. He excelled from high school onwards, eventually earning a doctorate at Harvard and becoming, in 1956, the first black head of an all-white history department at a mostly white university, Brooklyn College. Later, the University of Chicago recruited him. But in Montgomery, Louisiana, the archivist called him a ``Harvard nigger'' to his face. In the state archives in Raleigh, North Carolina, he was confined to a tiny separate room and allowed free run of the stacks because the white assistants would not serve him. At Duke in 1943, a university to which he returned 40 years later as a teaching professor, he could not use the library cafeteria or the washrooms. Whites, he noted, had no qualms about ``undervaluing an entire race''. Blacks were excluded both from their histories, and from their understanding of how America had been made. Mr Franklin's intention was to weave the black experience back into the national story. Unlike many after him, he did not see ``black history'' as an independent discipline, and never taught a formal course in it. What he was doing was revising American history as a whole. His books, especially ``From Slavery to Freedom'' (1947), offered Americans their first complete view of themselves. Thomas Jefferson's wine Militancy was not in his nature. He was too scrupulous a historian for that, and too courteous a man. Asked whether he hated the South, he would say, on the contrary, that he loved it. His deepest professional debt was to a white man, Ted Currier, who had inspired him to study history and had given him $500 to see him through Harvard. Yet, alongside the dignity and the ready smiles, a sense of outrage burned. He longed to tell white tourists thronging Washington that the Capitol had been built by slaves, and that Pennsylvania Avenue had held a slave market, ``right by where the Smithsonian is''. Profits made possible by enslaving blacks had not only allowed Thomas Jefferson to enjoy fine French wines: they had also underpinned America's banks, its economic dynamism and its dominance in the world. The exploitation of blacks was something he admitted he had ``never got over''. Nor had America got over it, despite the march from Selma, in which Mr Franklin led a posse of historians, and Brown v Board of Education, where he lent his scholarship to help prove that the Framers had not meant to impose segregation on the public schools. The ``colour line'', as he called it, remained ``the most tragic and persistent social problem'' the country faced. His own many black firsts--president of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association, membership of Washington's Cosmos Club--had not necessarily opened the door to others. The night before he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, a woman at the Cosmos Club asked him to fetch her coat. He was overjoyed by Barack Obama's election, but could not forget the poor, immobile blacks revealed by Hurricane Katrina. He yearned to improve things, but wondered how Financial reparations he was doubtful about; apologies seemed trifling. Only time, in historical quantities, seemed likely to make a difference. For some months he was chairman of Bill Clinton's Initiative on Race, a disorganized effort that ended by recommending ``community co-operation''. Hostile letters poured in, mostly from people who did not think the subject worth talking about. Mr Franklin took them in his stride. He would go and work on his next book, or retire to the greenhouse, implements in hand; and practise patience.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. I ask my colleagues to consider 10 words: The American people deserve to know where their money went.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Madam President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. WEBB. I ask consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Today I am pleased to be introducing a piece of legislation designed to establish a national criminal justice commission. I do so with, at the moment, 12 cosponsors, including our majority leader, the chairman and the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the chairman and the ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, and other members of our leadership. I introduce this bill after more than 2 years of effort here in the Senate that I will explain shortly; also with the prior conferral with Supreme Court Justice Kennedy and having discussed this matter with the President and the Attorney General, both of whom I think are strongly supportive of this concept. Our design, our goal in this legislation, is to create a national commission with an 18-month timeline, not to simply talk about the problems that we have in our criminal justice system but actually to look at all of the elements in this system, how they are interrelated in terms of the difficulties that we have in remedying issues of criminal justice in this country, and to deliver us from a situation that has evolved over time where we are putting far too many of the wrong people into prison and we are still not feeling safer in our neighborhoods; we are still not putting in prison or bringing to justice those people who are perpetrating violence and criminality as a way of life. I would like to say that, although I am not on the Judiciary Committee, I come to this issue as someone who first became interested in criminal justice issues while I was serving as a U.S. marine, serving on a number of courts-martial and thinking about the interrelationship between discipline and fairness; then after that, from having spent time as an attorney at one point representing, pro bono, a young former marine who had been convicted of murder in Vietnam. I represented him for 6 years pro bono. He took his life halfway through this process. I cleared his name 3 years later, but I became painfully aware of how sometimes inequities infect our process. Prior to joining the Senate, I spent time as a journalist, including a stint 25 years ago as the first American journalist to have been inside the Japanese prison system, where I became aware of the systemic difficulties and challenges we have. At that time, 25 years ago, Japan was half our population, and had only 40,000 sentenced prisoners in jail. We had 480,000. Today, we have 2.38 million prisoners in our criminal justice system and another 5 million involved in the process, either due to probation or parole situations. This is a system that is very much in need of the right sort of overarching examination. I do note the senior Senator from Pennsylvania has joined me on the Senate floor. I am very gratified he has also joined me as the lead Republican on this measure. I look forward to hearing from him as soon as I am finished with my remarks. The third thing I would like to say at the outset is, I believe very strongly, even though we are a Federal body, that there is a compelling national interest for us to examine this issue and reshape and reform our criminal justice system at the Federal, State, and local levels. I believe the commission I am going to present would provide us with that opportunity. I start with a premise I do think not a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5 percent of the world's population. We have 25 percent of the world's known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world's greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the incarceration rate in the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities. Either we have the most evil people on Earth living in the United States or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. And I would ask my fellow Senators and my fellow citizens to think about the challenges that attend these kind of numbers when we are looking at people who have been released from prison and are reentering American society. We have hundreds and thousands of American people who are reentering American society without the sort of transition that would allow a great percentage of them to again become productive citizens. I think we need to look at this in terms of our own history, our own recent history. This is a chart that shows our incarceration rate from 1925 until today. Beginning in about 1980, our incarceration rate started to skyrocket. What has happened since 1980 is not reflective of where our own history has been on this issue. That is another need, why we need to examine it fuller. We also, for a complex set of reasons, are warehousing the mentally ill in our prisons. We now have four times as many mentally ill people in our prisons than we do in mental institutions. There are a complex set of reasons for that, but the main point for all of us to consider is, these people who are in prison are not receiving the kind of treatment they would need in order to remedy the disabilities that have brought them to that situation. Drug incarceration has sharply increased over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison. Today we have more than 500,000. That is an increase of 112 percent. Those blue disks represent the numbers in 1980. The red disks represent the numbers in 2007. A significant percent of these individuals are incarcerated for possession or nonviolent drug offenses, and in many cases, criminal offenses that stem from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. African Americans are about 12 percent of our population. Contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use, in terms of frequent drug use rate, is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14 percent. But they end up being 37 percent of those arrested on drug charges, 59 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of those sentenced to prison, by the numbers that have been provided to us and to the Joint Economic Committee. This is a disturbing statistic for us. I emphasize to my colleagues and to others that the issues we face with respect to criminal justice are not overall racial issues. They involve issues, in many cases, of how people are treated based on their ability to have proper counsel and other issues like that. But this is a statistic with respect to drugs that we all must come to terms with. At the same time, I say we are putting too many of the wrong people in prison, and we are not solving the problems that will bring safety to our communities. Gangs are a hot issue today. I am on the Armed Services Committee. I am on the Foreign Relations Committee. There has been a lot of back and forth in recent months about the transnational gangs that are emanating across the Mexican border. Approximately 1 million gang members are currently in our country today. And I emphasis this is not an issue that is simply existent along the Mexican border. This is an issue that affects every community in the United States, and it is not simply an issue with respect to the Mexican drug cartels, although theirs are the most violent and the most visible today. The Mexican drug cartels are operating in more than 230 American cities, not simply along the border. The incidents along on the border illuminate the largeness of this problem and of this challenge. Gangs in many areas of the United States commit 80 percent of the crimes. They are heavily involved in drug distribution, but they are involved in other violent activities as well. There has been some talk over the past few days about how our position toward drugs and our gun policies feed this problem. I would ask my colleagues to think very hard about that. Drugs are a demand- pull problem in the United States, there is no question about that. There are a lot of weapons that are going back and forth across the border. But we should remember the Mexican drug cartels are capable of very sophisticated levels of quasi-military violence. Many of the members who are brought into the gangs by the drug cartels are former Mexican military. Some of them have been trained by our own special forces, and the weapons they use are not the kind of weapons you are going to buy at a gun show. You do not get automatic weapons, RPGs, and grenades at a gun show. We have to realize these cartels have a lot of money. By some indications they make profit levels of about $25 billion a year. They can buy the weapons they want. We have to get on top of this as a national priority. Again, it is not simply the transnational gangs that come out of Mexico. Many of them are Central American. In Northern Virginia, right across the Potomac River, we have thousands of members who belong to the MS-13 gangs emanating out of Central America, who are very active up the I-95 corridor. There are Asian gangs. We have to get our arms around this problem as we address the other problem of mass incarceration in the United States. Another piece of this issue I hope we will be able to address with this national criminal justice commission is what happens inside our prisons. When I was looking at the Japanese system many years ago, their model in terms of prison administration was basically designed after a traditional military model. You could not be a warden in a Japanese jail unless you started as a turnkey. They had national examinations. They had a year of preparation, training in psychology, in counseling techniques, before an individual was allowed to be a turnkey in a jail. The promotion systems were internal, like the U.S. military. It provided a quality career path, and it brought highly trained people in at the very beginning. We do not have that in America. Prisons vary warden to warden; they vary locality to locality. We need to examine a better way to do that in our country. We also have a situation in this country with respect to prison violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts. We must get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, people who are suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of treatment they deserve. I started, once I arrived in the Senate, working on this issue. I was pleased to be working with Senator Schumer on the Joint Economic Committee. He allowed me to chair hearings to try to get our arms around this problem and see what sort of legislative approach might help. I chaired a hearing on mass incarceration in October of 2007. I chaired another hearing last year on the overall impact of illegal drugs from point of origin through the criminal justice system. How does this work in terms of the underground business environment? How does it work in terms of the disparity in treatment of people who end up incarcerated? How does it affect people's long-term lives? What are the costs associated with it? I was able to work with the George Mason University Law Center to put together a forum bringing people in from across the country to talk about our overall drug policy. Once we started talking about this, particularly over the last year, we started being contacted by people all across the country, people from every different aspect of the political and the philosophical areas that come into play when we talk about incarceration. It is a very emotional issue. As I said, I heard from Justice Kennedy at the Supreme Court. I have heard from prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, former offenders, people in prison, police on the street. All of them are saying we have a mess; we have a mess. We have to get a holistic view of how to solve it. There are many good pieces of legislation that have been introduced in the Congress to deal with different pieces of this issue. But after going through this process over the past year, I have come to the conclusion that the way we should address this is with a national commission that will examine all of these pieces together and make specific findings so we can turn it around. These are examples of some of the editorial support that we have received. I have written a piece for Parade magazine which will be out this weekend to summarize the challenges we have; I hope our fellow citizens will take a look at it. As to the design of this legislation, we are looking for two things. One is to shape a commission with bipartisan balance: the President nominating the chairman; the majority and minority leaders in the Senate, in consultation with the Judiciary Committee, each nominating two members; the Speaker of the House and the House Minority Leader, in concert with the Judiciary Committee, each nominating two members; and the National Governors Association, Republican and Democrat, each getting one member. The idea is not to have a group of people who are going to sit around and simply remonstrate about the problem. It is to get a group of people with credibility and wide expertise to examine specific findings and to come up with policy recommendations on an 18- month time period. This commission will be asked to investigate the reasons in our own history that we have seen this incredible increase in incarceration. What do other countries do, particularly countries that have the same basic governmental systems we do? How do they handle comparable types of crime? What should we do about prison administration policies, prison management? How can we bring more quality, stability, and predictability in terms of the prison environment itself? What are the costs of our current incarceration policies, not only in terms of the billions of dollars we spend on building prisons or the billions we spend on housing people in prisons but also in terms of lost opportunities with our post-prison systems, and how we can better manage that area. What is the impact of gang activities, including these transnational gangs, and how should we approach that issue, not simply in terms of incarceration but as a nation that is under duress from not being able to respond properly? Importantly, what are we going to do about drug policy, the whole area of drug policy, and how does that affect sentencing procedures and other alternatives we might look at? We need to examine the policies as they relate to the mentally ill. We should look at the historical role of the military when it comes to how we are approaching these cross-border situations, particularly on the Mexican border. Finally, importantly, any other area the Commission deems relevant. This is our best effort, after 2 years of coming up with the universe of issues that need to be examined. There are many people, including the senior Senator from Pennsylvania, who have worked on these areas for a number of years. If they have specific findings they believe the Commission should review, we are very happy to accommodate that. The first step for the commission would be to give us findings, factual findings. From those findings, then give us recommendations for policy changes. The same areas I addressed in terms of findings apply in terms of the policy recommendations: How we can refocus our incarceration policies, work toward properly reducing the incarceration rate in fair, cost-effective ways that still protect communities; how we should address the issue of prison violence in all forms; how we can improve prison administration; how we can establish meaningful reentry programs. I believe with the high volume of people coming out of prisons, we must, on a national level, assist local and State communities in figuring out a way to transition these people so those former offenders who are not going to become recidivists will have a true pathway to get away from the stigma of incarceration and move into a productive future. Again, importantly, the last category, any other aspect of the system the Commission or the people participating in it determine necessary. This is our approach. I am gratified to have had as initial cosponsors six members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including the chairman, Senator Leahy; the ranking Republican, Senator Specter; the chairman of the Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, Senator Durbin; the ranking Republican on that subcommittee, Senator Graham; and a number of others, including key Democratic leadership--most importantly, our leader. I hope we can get this legislation done this year. This is an issue that does not percolate up in the same way. It doesn't have a programmatic element to it in many cases, but it is an issue that threatens every community and begs for the notion of fairness. I see the senior Senator from Pennsylvania is on the floor. I greatly admire the work he has done in this area over many years, and I appreciate his support on this endeavor.

Mr. WEBB. I wish to express my appreciation to the senior Senator from Pennsylvania for joining me on this legislation and in this endeavor because it will be an endeavor, as the Senator knows, well beyond the legislative approval of the commission. I think this is going to take years. But I wish to express my appreciation for that, for his comments today, and for all the work he has done in this field. I wish to emphasize a couple of things, in reaction to what the Senator mentioned. I agree. I do believe we can meaningfully address this problem. And ``solution'' is perhaps a more illusive word. But we can certainly meaningfully address this problem. I think it is very important to say that it is in the interest of every American we do so. There are a lot of people who will look at this and talk about specific elements of who has committed a crime and whether you should do the time and these sorts of things, but we do need to sort it out. When we have 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prison population, there are better ways. When we still have public safety issues in every community because of gang violence, and particularly transnational gang violence at this moment, there are better ways. That is the purpose of having a commission: getting the greatest minds in this area in the country together, with a specific timeline, to bring us specific findings and recommendations for the entire gamut of criminal justice in the country--not simply incarceration, not simply gang violence, not simply reentry--but all of those and other issues together, so we can have a much needed and long overdue restructuring of how we address the issue of crime in this country. I ask unanimous consent that Senator Kennedy be added as an original cosponsor on this bill.

Mr. WEBB

Mr. WEBB. Today I am pleased to be introducing a piece of legislation designed to establish a national criminal justice commission. I do so with, at the moment, 12 cosponsors, including our majority leader, the chairman and the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the chairman and the ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, and other members of our leadership. I introduce this bill after more than 2 years of effort here in the Senate that I will explain shortly; also with the prior conferral with Supreme Court Justice Kennedy and having discussed this matter with the President and the Attorney General, both of whom I think are strongly supportive of this concept. Our design, our goal in this legislation, is to create a national commission with an 18-month timeline, not to simply talk about the problems that we have in our criminal justice system but actually to look at all of the elements in this system, how they are interrelated in terms of the difficulties that we have in remedying issues of criminal justice in this country, and to deliver us from a situation that has evolved over time where we are putting far too many of the wrong people into prison and we are still not feeling safer in our neighborhoods; we are still not putting in prison or bringing to justice those people who are perpetrating violence and criminality as a way of life. I would like to say that, although I am not on the Judiciary Committee, I come to this issue as someone who first became interested in criminal justice issues while I was serving as a U.S. marine, serving on a number of courts-martial and thinking about the interrelationship between discipline and fairness; then after that, from having spent time as an attorney at one point representing, pro bono, a young former marine who had been convicted of murder in Vietnam. I represented him for 6 years pro bono. He took his life halfway through this process. I cleared his name 3 years later, but I became painfully aware of how sometimes inequities infect our process. Prior to joining the Senate, I spent time as a journalist, including a stint 25 years ago as the first American journalist to have been inside the Japanese prison system, where I became aware of the systemic difficulties and challenges we have. At that time, 25 years ago, Japan was half our population, and had only 40,000 sentenced prisoners in jail. We had 480,000. Today, we have 2.38 million prisoners in our criminal justice system and another 5 million involved in the process, either due to probation or parole situations. This is a system that is very much in need of the right sort of overarching examination. I do note the senior Senator from Pennsylvania has joined me on the Senate floor. I am very gratified he has also joined me as the lead Republican on this measure. I look forward to hearing from him as soon as I am finished with my remarks. The third thing I would like to say at the outset is, I believe very strongly, even though we are a Federal body, that there is a compelling national interest for us to examine this issue and reshape and reform our criminal justice system at the Federal, State, and local levels. I believe the commission I am going to present would provide us with that opportunity. I start with a premise I do think not a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5 percent of the world's population. We have 25 percent of the world's known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world's greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the incarceration rate in the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities. Either we have the most evil people on Earth living in the United States or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. And I would ask my fellow Senators and my fellow citizens to think about the challenges that attend these kind of numbers when we are looking at people who have been released from prison and are reentering American society. We have hundreds and thousands of American people who are reentering American society without the sort of transition that would allow a great percentage of them to again become productive citizens. I think we need to look at this in terms of our own history, our own recent history. This is a chart that shows our incarceration rate from 1925 until today. Beginning in about 1980, our incarceration rate started to skyrocket. What has happened since 1980 is not reflective of where our own history has been on this issue. That is another need, why we need to examine it fuller. We also, for a complex set of reasons, are warehousing the mentally ill in our prisons. We now have four times as many mentally ill people in our prisons than we do in mental institutions. There are a complex set of reasons for that, but the main point for all of us to consider is, these people who are in prison are not receiving the kind of treatment they would need in order to remedy the disabilities that have brought them to that situation. Drug incarceration has sharply increased over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison. Today we have more than 500,000. That is an increase of 112 percent. Those blue disks represent the numbers in 1980. The red disks represent the numbers in 2007. A significant percent of these individuals are incarcerated for possession or nonviolent drug offenses, and in many cases, criminal offenses that stem from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. African Americans are about 12 percent of our population. Contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use, in terms of frequent drug use rate, is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14 percent. But they end up being 37 percent of those arrested on drug charges, 59 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of those sentenced to prison, by the numbers that have been provided to us and to the Joint Economic Committee. This is a disturbing statistic for us. I emphasize to my colleagues and to others that the issues we face with respect to criminal justice are not overall racial issues. They involve issues, in many cases, of how people are treated based on their ability to have proper counsel and other issues like that. But this is a statistic with respect to drugs that we all must come to terms with. At the same time, I say we are putting too many of the wrong people in prison, and we are not solving the problems that will bring safety to our communities. Gangs are a hot issue today. I am on the Armed Services Committee. I am on the Foreign Relations Committee. There has been a lot of back and forth in recent months about the transnational gangs that are emanating across the Mexican border. Approximately 1 million gang members are currently in our country today. And I emphasis this is not an issue that is simply existent along the Mexican border. This is an issue that affects every community in the United States, and it is not simply an issue with respect to the Mexican drug cartels, although theirs are the most violent and the most visible today. The Mexican drug cartels are operating in more than 230 American cities, not simply along the border. The incidents along on the border illuminate the largeness of this problem and of this challenge. Gangs in many areas of the United States commit 80 percent of the crimes. They are heavily involved in drug distribution, but they are involved in other violent activities as well. There has been some talk over the past few days about how our position toward drugs and our gun policies feed this problem. I would ask my colleagues to think very hard about that. Drugs are a demand- pull problem in the United States, there is no question about that. There are a lot of weapons that are going back and forth across the border. But we should remember the Mexican drug cartels are capable of very sophisticated levels of quasi-military violence. Many of the members who are brought into the gangs by the drug cartels are former Mexican military. Some of them have been trained by our own special forces, and the weapons they use are not the kind of weapons you are going to buy at a gun show. You do not get automatic weapons, RPGs, and grenades at a gun show. We have to realize these cartels have a lot of money. By some indications they make profit levels of about $25 billion a year. They can buy the weapons they want. We have to get on top of this as a national priority. Again, it is not simply the transnational gangs that come out of Mexico. Many of them are Central American. In Northern Virginia, right across the Potomac River, we have thousands of members who belong to the MS-13 gangs emanating out of Central America, who are very active up the I-95 corridor. There are Asian gangs. We have to get our arms around this problem as we address the other problem of mass incarceration in the United States. Another piece of this issue I hope we will be able to address with this national criminal justice commission is what happens inside our prisons. When I was looking at the Japanese system many years ago, their model in terms of prison administration was basically designed after a traditional military model. You could not be a warden in a Japanese jail unless you started as a turnkey. They had national examinations. They had a year of preparation, training in psychology, in counseling techniques, before an individual was allowed to be a turnkey in a jail. The promotion systems were internal, like the U.S. military. It provided a quality career path, and it brought highly trained people in at the very beginning. We do not have that in America. Prisons vary warden to warden; they vary locality to locality. We need to examine a better way to do that in our country. We also have a situation in this country with respect to prison violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts. We must get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, people who are suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of treatment they deserve. I started, once I arrived in the Senate, working on this issue. I was pleased to be working with Senator Schumer on the Joint Economic Committee. He allowed me to chair hearings to try to get our arms around this problem and see what sort of legislative approach might help. I chaired a hearing on mass incarceration in October of 2007. I chaired another hearing last year on the overall impact of illegal drugs from point of origin through the criminal justice system. How does this work in terms of the underground business environment? How does it work in terms of the disparity in treatment of people who end up incarcerated? How does it affect people's long-term lives? What are the costs associated with it? I was able to work with the George Mason University Law Center to put together a forum bringing people in from across the country to talk about our overall drug policy. Once we started talking about this, particularly over the last year, we started being contacted by people all across the country, people from every different aspect of the political and the philosophical areas that come into play when we talk about incarceration. It is a very emotional issue. As I said, I heard from Justice Kennedy at the Supreme Court. I have heard from prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, former offenders, people in prison, police on the street. All of them are saying we have a mess; we have a mess. We have to get a holistic view of how to solve it. There are many good pieces of legislation that have been introduced in the Congress to deal with different pieces of this issue. But after going through this process over the past year, I have come to the conclusion that the way we should address this is with a national commission that will examine all of these pieces together and make specific findings so we can turn it around. These are examples of some of the editorial support that we have received. I have written a piece for Parade magazine which will be out this weekend to summarize the challenges we have; I hope our fellow citizens will take a look at it. As to the design of this legislation, we are looking for two things. One is to shape a commission with bipartisan balance: the President nominating the chairman; the majority and minority leaders in the Senate, in consultation with the Judiciary Committee, each nominating two members; the Speaker of the House and the House Minority Leader, in concert with the Judiciary Committee, each nominating two members; and the National Governors Association, Republican and Democrat, each getting one member. The idea is not to have a group of people who are going to sit around and simply remonstrate about the problem. It is to get a group of people with credibility and wide expertise to examine specific findings and to come up with policy recommendations on an 18- month time period. This commission will be asked to investigate the reasons in our own history that we have seen this incredible increase in incarceration. What do other countries do, particularly countries that have the same basic governmental systems we do? How do they handle comparable types of crime? What should we do about prison administration policies, prison management? How can we bring more quality, stability, and predictability in terms of the prison environment itself? What are the costs of our current incarceration policies, not only in terms of the billions of dollars we spend on building prisons or the billions we spend on housing people in prisons but also in terms of lost opportunities with our post-prison systems, and how we can better manage that area. What is the impact of gang activities, including these transnational gangs, and how should we approach that issue, not simply in terms of incarceration but as a nation that is under duress from not being able to respond properly? Importantly, what are we going to do about drug policy, the whole area of drug policy, and how does that affect sentencing procedures and other alternatives we might look at? We need to examine the policies as they relate to the mentally ill. We should look at the historical role of the military when it comes to how we are approaching these cross-border situations, particularly on the Mexican border. Finally, importantly, any other area the Commission deems relevant. This is our best effort, after 2 years of coming up with the universe of issues that need to be examined. There are many people, including the senior Senator from Pennsylvania, who have worked on these areas for a number of years. If they have specific findings they believe the Commission should review, we are very happy to accommodate that. The first step for the commission would be to give us findings, factual findings. From those findings, then give us recommendations for policy changes. The same areas I addressed in terms of findings apply in terms of the policy recommendations: How we can refocus our incarceration policies, work toward properly reducing the incarceration rate in fair, cost-effective ways that still protect communities; how we should address the issue of prison violence in all forms; how we can improve prison administration; how we can establish meaningful reentry programs. I believe with the high volume of people coming out of prisons, we must, on a national level, assist local and State communities in figuring out a way to transition these people so those former offenders who are not going to become recidivists will have a true pathway to get away from the stigma of incarceration and move into a productive future. Again, importantly, the last category, any other aspect of the system the Commission or the people participating in it determine necessary. This is our approach. I am gratified to have had as initial cosponsors six members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including the chairman, Senator Leahy; the ranking Republican, Senator Specter; the chairman of the Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, Senator Durbin; the ranking Republican on that subcommittee, Senator Graham; and a number of others, including key Democratic leadership--most importantly, our leader. I hope we can get this legislation done this year. This is an issue that does not percolate up in the same way. It doesn't have a programmatic element to it in many cases, but it is an issue that threatens every community and begs for the notion of fairness. I see the senior Senator from Pennsylvania is on the floor. I greatly admire the work he has done in this area over many years, and I appreciate his support on this endeavor.

Mr. WEBB. I wish to express my appreciation to the senior Senator from Pennsylvania for joining me on this legislation and in this endeavor because it will be an endeavor, as the Senator knows, well beyond the legislative approval of the commission. I think this is going to take years. But I wish to express my appreciation for that, for his comments today, and for all the work he has done in this field. I wish to emphasize a couple of things, in reaction to what the Senator mentioned. I agree. I do believe we can meaningfully address this problem. And ``solution'' is perhaps a more illusive word. But we can certainly meaningfully address this problem. I think it is very important to say that it is in the interest of every American we do so. There are a lot of people who will look at this and talk about specific elements of who has committed a crime and whether you should do the time and these sorts of things, but we do need to sort it out. When we have 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prison population, there are better ways. When we still have public safety issues in every community because of gang violence, and particularly transnational gang violence at this moment, there are better ways. That is the purpose of having a commission: getting the greatest minds in this area in the country together, with a specific timeline, to bring us specific findings and recommendations for the entire gamut of criminal justice in the country--not simply incarceration, not simply gang violence, not simply reentry--but all of those and other issues together, so we can have a much needed and long overdue restructuring of how we address the issue of crime in this country. I ask unanimous consent that Senator Kennedy be added as an original cosponsor on this bill.

Mr. WEBB

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