[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 86 (Thursday, June 17, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7170-S7203]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 KOSOVO AND SOUTHWEST ASIA EMERGENCY SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 
                                 1999.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will now 
resume consideration of H.R. 1664, which the clerk will report.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       A bill (H.R. 1664) making emergency supplemental 
     appropriations for military operations, refugee relief, and 
     humanitarian assistance relating to the conflict in Kosovo, 
     and for military operations in Southwest Asia for the fiscal 
     year ending September 30, 1999, and for other purposes.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, this measure is not at the moment covered by 
any time agreement, is it?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct.
  Mr. BYRD. I thank the Chair.
  Mr. President, this is an appropriations bill. I believe Mr. Stevens 
at some point in the afternoon will be on the floor to manage the bill. 
Mr. Domenici, who is very deeply involved in this bill as well, and who 
is on the Appropriations Committee, will be on the floor and will, as 
between himself and Mr. Stevens, manage the bill. I am not managing the 
bill, but until one of those Senators comes to the floor, I have a few 
things I can say about it.
  First, I thank the majority leader for making it possible for us to 
take up this bill at this time. I also thank the minority leader for 
his cooperation in that regard.
  I thank the majority leader for keeping his word with respect to 
calling up this matter. I will have possibly a little more to say about 
that later, so I will explain what I mean in having said that.
  I thank Mr. Stevens, who was chairman of the Senate side of the 
conference, which occurred on the emergency supplemental appropriations 
bill a few weeks ago. I thank the House chairman of the conference, Mr. 
Bill Young of Florida, for his many courtesies that were extended upon 
that occasion, and for his fairness in conducting the conference, and 
for his cooperation in helping to work out a way in which we could at 
that point let the emergency supplemental appropriations conference 
report be on its way and be sent back to the House and Senate for 
the final consideration of both of those Houses. I thank him for his 
efforts in bringing about an agreement whereby that emergency 
supplemental appropriations bill was let loose--if I may use that 
term--from the chains which at the moment had it locked in an impasse 
in conference.

  The provision in this bill, which is before the Senate, and in which 
I am very interested, is what we refer to as the ``steel loan guarantee 
provision.'' There is a similar provision which Mr. Domenici was able 
to include in the bill, and it is similar to the steel loan guarantee 
except that it has to do with oil and gas. It provides a loan guarantee 
program for the oil and gas industry. He will more carefully and 
thoroughly explain that part of the bill later on.
  Both of these provisions had been included in the emergency 
supplemental appropriations bill. Both of these provisions were in the 
emergency supplemental appropriations bill when it passed the Senate. 
Senators had an opportunity, when the emergency supplemental 
appropriations bill was before the Senate, to offer amendments to the 
steel loan guarantee language and to the oil and gasoline guarantee 
language. Senators had that opportunity.
  No amendments were offered to those provisions when that bill was 
before the Senate. Those provisions were put into that bill when that 
appropriations bill, the emergency supplemental appropriations bill, 
was marked up in the Senate Appropriations Committee. Therefore, those 
provisions, as I have already said, were included in the bill when it 
reached the floor, when it came before the Senate. The Senate passed 
the bill. No amendments were offered to those provisions at that time.
  That bill went to conference with the House in due course. It was a 
period of several weeks before the House-Senate conference took place 
on that bill. When the conference did occur, these two provisions--the 
steel loan guarantee provision and the oil and gasoline guarantee 
provision--were gradually put off until the very end of the conference.
  The conference on that bill lasted for several hours over a period of 
3 or 4 days. But it was the wish of both Chairman Young and the 
chairman of the Senate conferees, Chairman Stevens, to delay 
consideration of those two parts of the bill until other matters in the 
bill, other differences between the two Houses, had been resolved. As a 
consequence, as I say, it was toward the very end that we finally got 
around to those two provisions, the loan guarantee provisions.

  In the conference, a vote occurred on the steel loan guarantee 
provision late one evening. I think the vote really occurred after 
midnight, so it was 12:30 or 1 o'clock in the morning of the next day 
that we finally voted on the steel loan guarantee provision, which had 
been written in the Senate Appropriations Committee, which had come 
before the Senate, which had been adopted by the Senate.
  When that vote occurred, all of the Democratic conferees on the House 
side voted to accept the steel loan guarantee provision which was in 
the Senate bill; three of the Republican House conferees voted to 
accept the steel loan guarantee provision. So by a vote, I believe, of 
13-10, the conference adopted the steel loan guarantee provision.
  The next day when the conferees met, a motion was made to reconsider 
the vote that had occurred the previous late evening and the motion to 
reconsider carried. Two of the Republican House Members of the 
conference switched their votes from the previous position of 
supporting the steel loan guarantee to their new position of opposing 
that guarantee. As a consequence, my steel loan guarantee provision 
lost, I think, by a vote of 12-11. It lost by one vote.
  An impasse prevailed. Senator Domenici's oil and gas loan guarantee 
provision had been rejected by the House conferees; on the second vote, 
the steel loan guarantee provision, which I had authored, was rejected 
by the House conferees. There was an impasse. The House conferees 
wouldn't give and the Senate conferees wouldn't give.
  Therefore, rather than see the emergency supplemental appropriations 
bill die in conference, I suggested we have a recess and try to work 
out an agreement whereby we could find a way to let that emergency 
supplemental appropriations bill fly with its wings out of the 
conference, go to the President's desk. In that bill, there were 
appropriations for the military in Kosovo, there was a pay increase for 
the military, and there were various and sundry disaster relief 
provisions which were intended to help people in South and Central 
America and in the United States, as well--American farmers and so on. 
It was certainly not my desire to kill that bill; it was not my desire 
to delay.
  I said: Let's have a recess, Mr. Chairmen--addressing my remarks to 
the two chairmen--let's have a recess and see if we can't work things 
out.

[[Page S7171]]

  We had a recess and met down below, on the next floor of this 
Chamber, where we stand now. I met in the Appropriations Committee room 
with the House chairman, Mr. Young, the Senate chairman, Mr. Stevens, 
being present, along with the House minority, the ranking member of the 
House Appropriations Committee, Mr. Obey, being present, and with the 
Senate minority or ranking member of the Senate Appropriations 
Committee, myself, being present, together with a couple of other House 
Members representing the majority and the minority and a couple of 
other Senate Members representing the majority.
  It was there that we agreed to take our hands off the emergency 
supplemental appropriations bill and let it go to the President and be 
signed. We wanted a commitment that these two provisions which had 
worked their way through the legislative process, coming before the 
Senate, going to conference, be given a chance to pass and become law 
aside from the emergency appropriations supplemental.

  I talked with our majority leader, Mr. Lott, and our minority leader, 
Mr. Daschle. They both agreed that it was very important to let the 
emergency supplemental appropriations bill be on its way and that they 
would help me and Mr. Domenici soon get a freestanding appropriations 
bill up before the Senate which would have in it the steel loan 
guarantee provision and the oil and gas loan guarantee provision.
  With that assurance from the two leaders here, I proceeded to ask Mr. 
Young, the chairman of the House conferees, if he and Mr. Obey and Mr. 
Callahan, a Republican member of the House conference, could proceed to 
talk with the Speaker of the House and get a commitment out of the 
Speaker that would let us deal with a freestanding appropriations bill 
that would give these two provisions I referred to a chance for 
consideration in both Houses, and hopefully for passage in both Houses.
  The Speaker committed himself to calling up the bill within 1 week if 
it came over from the Senate; committed himself, secondly, to 
appointing conferees in the normal fashion so that there would not be 
stacked conferees; committed himself, thirdly, to having a vote on a 
conference report on the measure promptly.
  With those commitments, we let the emergency supplemental 
appropriations bill fly on its way to the White House and the Oval 
Office where it was signed into law.
  Now came the time for the leadership and the Senate to keep its 
commitment. It did. That is what I was referring to when I thanked the 
majority leader a few minutes ago for having kept his word. He and Mr. 
Daschle kept their word. Of course, as we all know, the main 
responsibility and power rests with the majority leader in the Senate 
in things of this kind. Mr. Lott arranged for us to call up this bill, 
have this bill before the Senate now. Cloture was invoked on it last 
Friday by an overwhelming majority, 71-28, on the motion to proceed. 
The motion to proceed was then adopted by voice vote. So the bill is 
before the Senate this afternoon.
  I see my good colleague, Mr. Domenici, is on the floor, ready to 
proceed. Let me just add one or two things.
  Having made the explanation here as to where we are, how we came to 
be here, let me say that because of the circumstances which have been 
obtained from the beginning and which I have outlined and which 
resulted in the two provisions in this bill having already been before 
the Senate, having passed the Senate, without amendment in the Senate, 
I would hope there would be no amendments to this bill by the Senate 
today.
  The Senate has already had its chance to make a run at these two 
provisions. Senators have already had their chances to offer amendments 
to these two provisions when they were before the Senate in the 
emergency supplemental appropriations bill. Now the majority leader has 
carried out his commitment of helping to get the bill up. The minority 
leader has carried out his commitment. I hope we will have the support 
of the two leaders, but they have carried out the spirit of their 
original commitment.
  Now the commitment by the Speaker remains. But he didn't make a 
commitment to this bill if it is loaded down with a lot of amendments 
when it goes back over there. He did not make any commitment on that 
score. Whatever we put into this bill, whether it be nongermane or 
germane, he made no commitment on that kind of thing. He made a 
commitment with respect to these two provisions, the steel loan 
guarantee and the oil and gas loan guarantee.
  I want the Speaker to keep his commitment, but I want him to be able 
to keep his commitment. I don't want us to load this bill down with 
nongermane amendments and send them back over there. We can't expect 
the Speaker to keep his commitment on that kind of thing, because he 
didn't make any such commitment. He only made a commitment with respect 
to these two provisions. That is not saying that the two provisions 
cannot be improved. Perhaps they can be. And I may support an 
improvement. I think, if they were improved upon, the Speaker would, I 
have a feeling--I haven't talked with him--would still feel that came 
within his commitment. But we can't bring in an amendment by every Tom, 
Dick, and Harry and add it and let it run the gamut of whatever the 
subject matter may be, nongermane, and expect the Speaker to take this 
bill up within 3 days, or whatever it was, promptly after it goes over 
there.
  So help us to help the Speaker to keep his commitment. I urge all 
Senators to be conscious of the facts as I have attempted to state them 
and see that we have an obligation. I think the Senate has an 
obligation, having passed these two provisions once, and in the face of 
losing my grip on the emergency supplemental appropriation bill. I had 
that bill in these two fists, and so did Mr. Domenici. We didn't want 
to kill that bill. But we let that bill go, as we should have done. 
After all, we are all interested, first of all, in our country, and we 
want to see legislation passed that is in the best interests of our 
country. Senator Domenici and Senator Stevens and I, and other Senators 
on the conference, came to that conclusion. We did the right thing.
  Now I think Senators have some obligation. I understand their rights. 
Senators have a right to offer any amendments they want. There is no 
rule of germaneness in the Senate with respect to circumstances as they 
prevail at this moment. But it seems to me there is an unwritten 
obligation on the part of Senators to play fair, and to play fair here 
is to let our provisions be debated, and if they can be improved upon, 
fine. But let's not muddy the waters by offering amendments that are 
not germane, because when we do that, as I say, we can't expect the 
Speaker just to take anything we send over there and let his commitment 
earlier govern his actions.
  I think that is about all I have to say at the moment. I will have 
more to say on the steel loan guarantee provision later. Mr. Domenici, 
as I have already indicated, can far better explain the somewhat 
similar loan guarantee on the oil and gas provision.

  I do have a luncheon I am supposed to attend. I am supposed to speak 
there now. I have discussed this with my friend. Senator Domenici has 
indicated that, if he can, he would watch the floor and help me to be 
away a little while. He has to be away some, too, as does Mr. Stevens.
  Having said that, I thank all Senators for listening. I thank my 
friend from New Mexico, who is a valiant comrade and colleague and 
formidable opponent and a very worthwhile and desirable supporter. I 
prefer to be on his side rather than not. I thank him for all of the 
courtesies and considerations that he has given to me in this bill, as 
well as in thousands of other instances in which we have worked 
together.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, before the Senator yields, could I have 
a little exchange so we could make the case that is very important, the 
case that the Senator just made?
  Mr. BYRD. Yes. Yes.
  Mr. DOMENICI. The urgent supplemental that passed the Senate, and the 
supplemental that included the Byrd-Domenici guarantee program, was not 
a frivolous supplemental.
  Mr. BYRD. No.
  Mr. DOMENICI. It was a big, powerful, tough supplemental, and urgent.
  Mr. BYRD. Right. Exactly.

[[Page S7172]]

  Mr. DOMENICI. Why? Because the President asked for $6.5 billion to 
replenish funds for the Kosovo engagement, which was being taken--by 
operation of law, nothing illegal about it--from other military needs. 
That is the way these things happen. The request was: Help us replenish 
it; give us the money.
  Now, the point you have made is, we were in conference over that bill 
to which the Senate had seen fit to add $6 billion more for defense 
because we were so worried about preparedness, operational maintenance, 
and spare parts. So it was not just $6.5 billion urgent for defense; it 
was almost $12 billion.
  Now, what you have said, my friend from West Virginia, you said we 
had a right, as conferees--and we had support--to say, let's get our 
part of this decided in this conference. And what would have happened? 
We could still, perhaps, be locked up in conference and the urgent 
money would be yet not decided upon, which funding, in fact, has 
already been signed by the President and is operating to help our 
military.
  Mr. BYRD. Absolutely.
  Mr. DOMENICI. We decided, at the request of our chairman, Senator Ted 
Stevens, to find a way to let that urgent bill go and relinquished our 
right to bring that back in disagreement, if we wanted, and have some 
more votes on the issue.
  I have done that in my life. The Senator has done it a number of 
times: OK, we are going back to the bodies again and vote again. They 
would have had to have voted on our amendment there.
  Mr. BYRD. Precisely, they would have.
  Mr. DOMENICI. They would under law, under the rules. We said we would 
give that up, provided--and you stated the proviso. The proviso was 
that we be here today, just as we are, with this bill freestanding. We 
now have it here properly, over long threats for long debates, because 
the Senate overwhelmingly said: Let's get on with it; even if we don't 
vote for it, we want to get on with it.
  So it's urgent that everybody know it's here again with the Senate 
already having voted for it.
  Mr. BYRD. Yes. Yes.
  Mr. DOMENICI. They voted for that bill, with large, large support, 
which had our amendments on it.
  Mr. BYRD. Yes.
  Mr. DOMENICI. So the Senate already voted for this.
  Mr. BYRD. Yes.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Then it is over there in conference. We have a right to 
keep it there.
  Mr. BYRD. Yes.
  Mr. DOMENICI. We have a full-blown argument between the House and 
Senate. We said, no, the defense money is more urgent. That was the 
national interest.
  Mr. BYRD. That is right.
  Mr. DOMENICI. So we said, OK, we will do that, but we ought to have a 
vote someday.
  Mr. BYRD. Absolutely.
  Mr. DOMENICI. That is why we are here, and that is why you are 
saying: Why do we have to have so many votes on items that are not 
germane to this bill? This is completing a job that was started in the 
Senate and it broke off in the conference in the interest of a bigger 
problem--to wit, adequate funding of defense--but we had a commitment 
we would get a vote.
  Mr. BYRD. Yes.
  Mr. DOMENICI. I am not saying we had a commitment that it would pass. 
That is our job, with the help of Senators.
  Mr. BYRD. No. No.
  Mr. DOMENICI. I am not suggesting the leader or anybody said there 
would be no amendments.
  Mr. BYRD. No. No.
  Mr. DOMENICI. We are talking about what is next, what is fair, what 
is the follow-on to what we did, remembering all the time that whatever 
arguments are made, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to pass the bill.
  Mr. BYRD. It did.
  Mr. DOMENICI. With these two guarantees in it.
  Mr. BYRD. Yes. I yield the floor, but may I say before yielding that 
the bill that is before the Senate is here through orderly procedures, 
it having been reported from the Senate Appropriations Committee in due 
course, and that is where we are now. I thank the distinguished 
Senator.
  Mr. DOMENICI. I yield the floor.
  Mr. SPECTER addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Roberts). The distinguished Senator from 
Pennsylvania is recognized.
  Mr. SPECTER. I thank the Chair. I have sought recognition to support 
this bill, because I believe that a real need has been shown for these 
loan guarantees, certainly for the steel industry, and I believe for 
the oil and gas industry as well.
  Senator Byrd and Senator Domenici have outlined the procedures which 
were followed in the Appropriations Committee, and I was part of that 
conference. The conference worked one night until past midnight, and 
this provision was the subject of debate.
  Coming in the Senate bill, the House of Representatives accepted it 
after some substantial consideration, and then, as has been specified, 
some votes were changed. The Speaker of the House of Representatives 
was not pleased with this provision. The House of Representatives then 
changed its position after having agreed to this amendment. Then we 
were faced with a very difficult problem of a stalemate as to what 
would happen with the Senate insisting on this provision and the House 
opposing it. We were faced with the need to get this emergency 
supplemental appropriations bill to finance the military operations in 
Kosovo.
  The meeting finally eventuated in a very small session in S-128 
downstairs where Senator Stevens was present, Senator Byrd was present, 
and I was present representing the Senate. There were a few of the 
House Members. It was a very tough bargaining session.
  Senator Byrd finally agreed, in the interest of moving the bill, and 
we all agreed, to take this particular amendment off in order that the 
provisions as to financing the military operation in Kosovo could go 
forward. The arrangement was made that this other legislative vehicle 
would be available to bring the bill back up for consideration by the 
Senate.
  Senator Domenici has just outlined the absence of a commitment on the 
vote, and I think that is, candidly, a generous position. There is a 
basis for contending that this amendment should be placed in the same 
position where it was prior to being taken off the earlier bill. If 
that is to be so, then this amendment will be agreed to and it will go 
back as the Senate's position for a conference with the House, with the 
House having first accepted it and then having rejected it.
  Whatever may eventuate in this Chamber today obviously remains to be 
seen in accordance with our rules.
  On the merits, I believe that is a sound proposal. The steel industry 
has been very hard hit over the past several decades with dumped and 
subsidized steel coming into the United States. The dumped steel ought 
not be tolerated. It is against our trade laws. It is against 
international trade laws. But, the dumping continues in great volume.
  That dumping has, in the immediate past, cost the jobs of thousands 
of steelworkers and caused tremendous lawsuits to the steel industry, 
which is a threat not only to the economy and to jobs and to profits, 
but also a threat to national security.
  It is one thing to have dumped steel coming from Russia at the 
present time where the Russian economic situation leads them to sell at 
virtually any price to get dollars, but if a national emergency arises, 
are we going to get steel from Russia?
  We have dumped steel from Brazil, from Korea, from Japan, and other 
countries. In times of national emergency, are we going to rely on 
those other countries as a source of supply?
  The steel industry once had some 500,000 workers and was an enormous 
industry in the United States. Over a period of time, that number has 
dwindled down to about a third--less than a third, actually--about 
150,000 workers. The steel industry has capitalized with some $50 
billion to be very competitive. But you cannot compete against dumping. 
You cannot compete against a seller who will sell at any price. That is 
why the steel industry is in the very serious condition it is today.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, will the distinguished Senator yield 
without--well, I guess the Record will have to show an interruption.

  Mr. SPECTER. I yield to the Senator from West Virginia for any 
purpose under any circumstance.

[[Page S7173]]

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator. He is 
always a gentleman.
  Mr. SPECTER. I retain my right to the floor. I had a lengthy debate 
with Senator Byrd about that many years ago when you had to retain your 
right to the floor. Senator Bayh has been patient, and I am glad to 
yield unconditionally.
  Mr. BYRD. I merely want to thank the distinguished Senator for his 
support in this matter. He comes from a State and represents people who 
are very much like my State and my people. He understands the problems 
of the steel industry and the fact that many steelworkers have been 
laid off, others have lost their jobs permanently.
  I have to leave to be elsewhere for an hour or so. I will not be able 
to listen to the Senator's speech. That is why I interrupted him, to 
apologize for not being here to hear his speech, but to thank him for 
speaking, thank him for his support in this matter, and also to express 
my exceedingly high regard for him as a Senator, as a gentleman, and as 
someone who is dedicated, sincere, conscientious, and always courteous 
and helpful.
  Mr. SPECTER. I thank the distinguished Senator from West Virginia for 
those kind remarks. Our seats are pretty close on the Senate floor as 
evident if the television picture catches both of us, and I am sure it 
will. I walk over very frequently to confer with Senator Byrd on 
constitutional issues. Occasionally, he calls me his attorney general. 
He just gave a nod in the affirmative----
  Mr. BYRD. Absolutely, I admit to that.
  Mr. SPECTER. I only got to be a district attorney. Senator Byrd and I 
have a long, unguarded border with southern Pennsylvania and northern 
West Virginia. We intend to keep it that way, especially if we can keep 
the steelworkers employed.
  I will be relatively brief, and I know the Senator from Indiana is 
waiting to speak and the Senator from New Mexico. The Senator from New 
Mexico has spoken. If I know his practice, he may speak again. There 
may be some additional occasion.
  We have had a very grave time in the steel industry with the loss of 
jobs. This is a relatively modest proposal. It is a loan guarantee 
proposal, and the borrowers have to provide collateral. The borrowers 
have to pay the fees.
  I believe this program can be administered in a way that the loan 
guarantees will not be called into play. That, of course, is a 
speculative matter. The reality of the situation is, if the companies 
cannot borrow commercially and have to have a loan guarantee, there is 
some element of risk. But I believe that is a fair proposition.
  The loan guarantee has been structured in a way to provide for 
collateral; that is, assets will have to be put up by the borrowing 
companies. Collateral means to fall back on if the borrower defaults; 
the collateral can be used to satisfy the loan.
  The payment of fees is another provision to save the Government of 
the United States costs. The situation has been recognized by the House 
of Representatives when it voted in overwhelming numbers, close to 290 
votes, in favor of the steel quota bill; less than half of that in 
opposition.
  I have pressed legislation over the years which would provide for an 
equitable remedy to stop dumped goods from coming into the United 
States. In the early 1980s I had a legislative proposal to provide for 
injunctive relief, where the injured party could go into court and get 
relief within the course of a few weeks instead of many months or even 
years, which we now have under the procedures of the International 
Trade Commission. That legislation is pending now. It has been revised 
to provide for duties instead of injunctive relief to be GATT 
consistent.
  I believe the companion provision here offered by Senator Domenici on 
loan guarantees for the oil and gas industry is solid, especially for 
the small producers who have had a very difficult time.
  Years ago, my father had a used oil field supply business in Russell, 
KS. It really was a junkyard. At that time I had some experience with 
the small producers in the oil patch. I know that they have difficult 
times, too, and that this loan guarantee program makes sense there as 
well.
  I thank my colleague from Indiana for awaiting my recognition here. I 
thank the Chair and yield the floor.
  Mr. BAYH addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The distinguished Senator from Indiana is 
recognized.
  Mr. BAYH. Thank you very much, Mr. President.
  I commend my colleague from Pennsylvania for his very persuasive 
remarks. This is a major industry in both of our States. We both share 
a commitment to dealing with this issue. So I appreciate your 
leadership very much, I say to Senator Specter.
  Mr. President, I rise today in support of the Emergency Steel Loan 
Guarantee Act. I would like to begin by commending our colleague, 
Senator Byrd, who had to leave for just a brief period of time for 
other pressing matters. I commend him for adopting an approach that is 
not just good for West Virginia, not just good for the steel industry, 
but good for the Nation.
  Senator Byrd's dedication to doing what is right for America, and not 
just the narrower parochial concerns, was evidenced very clearly in the 
colloquy we heard between Senator Domenici and Senator Byrd in which 
Senator Byrd was going to accommodate the national interests in 
allowing a supplemental appropriations bill to go forward at a time our 
Nation was involved in military action abroad. That is indicative of 
his lengthy record of national leadership.
  As further evidence that the approach favored by Senator Byrd and 
Senator Domenici, and others of my colleagues, is the correct approach, 
I am pleased to identify several Governors who have written to endorse 
this legislation. The list will demonstrate that it has broad regional 
support from the East to the West, from the North to the South. Not 
only my own Governor of the State of Indiana, but the Governor of 
Maryland, the Governor of Pennsylvania, the Governor of Illinois, the 
Governor of West Virginia, the Governor of Iowa, the Governor of Utah, 
and the Governor of South Carolina have written to express their 
strong, unequivocal support for taking immediate action to address this 
very critical situation.

  Likewise, I urge that this bill be passed expeditiously and without 
amendment. We have a crisis on our hands. It is very important that we 
not get bogged down in other extraneous matters but that we move this 
legislation forward unencumbered.
  I sometimes wonder what citizens think when they view us at our work 
here. We have prerogatives, of course. We have rights, of course. But 
it is important at this time, with the situation in the oil and gas 
industry, with the situation in the steel industry, that we move this 
bill forward cleanly and expeditiously and, I for one would hope, 
without amendment.
  I know something about this issue, having served as Governor of my 
State for 8 years and now in the Senate. Indiana happens to be the 
largest steel-producing State in the United States of America, 
producing more tons of steel than any of our 49 sister States. We 
currently have approximately 30,000 working men and women employed in 
the steel industry in Indiana. These are good-quality jobs, with high 
wages, high benefits, the kind of employment around which you can raise 
and support a family and a decent quality of life.
  Many communities in our State, particularly in northwest Indiana, are 
dependent upon the health and vigor of this industry for their very 
livelihoods. The last 20 years or so have not always been good times 
for the steel industry across our State or across our country. In my 
State alone, over the last 20 years we have seen tens of thousands of 
jobs disappear. Our market share has shrunk. Perhaps some of this was 
inevitable, but perhaps some was not.
  There was a point in time when the industry had to acknowledge its 
fair share of the blame for the state of affairs. They perhaps had been 
too complacent, had not made the investment in the latest technology 
and equipment to be world-class competitive. But those days and those 
arguments no longer apply.
  This industry and the workers who labor within it have invested 
hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, in the very 
latest kinds of equipment, the latest technology. If you

[[Page S7174]]

tour the steel mills across our State, and elsewhere, they are state of 
the art, world class, world competitive. We are in a position today 
where we can produce steel of the highest quality, at an 
internationally competitive price, if it is fair competition.
  But, as we all know, since last year the competition has been 
anything but fair. Given the collapse of currencies across Southeast 
Asia, many of those countries were desperate--desperate to export their 
steel and to gain hard currency under any terms, in any circumstances. 
A flood of illegal--and I stress ``illegal''--imports began to come 
across our shores.
  Just this week, our Government has indicated that Japan has been 
involved in illegal trade practices. And there were other countries 
cited for this activity before that. This is just the latest evidence 
of the kind of unfair and illegal trade competition we have been facing 
since at least last year.
  The consequences have been very damaging. We have had several 
companies go out of business, thousands of jobs lost; and once these 
companies shut their doors and close down, once their jobs are lost, in 
all likelihood they will be permanent losses to our economy, with 
consequences to these families and these communities that go way beyond 
the economic toll.

  This legislation is a balanced approach to dealing with this problem. 
It is fair to taxpayers, because the costs are offset with reductions 
elsewhere. It requires the loans to be repaid in only 6 and a half 
years, which is a relatively short period of time for major loans of 
this nature. There is a panel established to scrutinize every loan 
before it is given to make sure that the recipients are creditworthy 
and, in fact, that the taxpayers will be ultimately repaid.
  Before closing, I will say just a couple more words about this bill 
because, as I mentioned, the consequences are national. In my own mind, 
they deal with trade and other industries as well. I personally believe 
that free and fair trade and competition is good for our country. It is 
good for consumers--with higher-quality, lower-cost goods at their 
disposal. It is good for our economy, because it forces us to be 
competitive and productive. In the long run, it leads to the most 
efficient allocation of resources.
  But when trade is illegal, when other countries undertake steps that 
are not fair, are not just, and, any economist would say, in the long 
run do not lead to an efficient allocation of resources or a good deal 
for consumers or working men and women in this country, that is the 
kind of thing where we must take a stand.
  If I am to go back to the citizens of my State and argue why free 
trade is in our best interest, it must go hand in hand with vigorous 
enforcement of current law and helping those industries that have been 
targeted by illegal activity. I emphasize that the pernicious effects 
of this illegal dumping will last a long time after the dumping has 
stopped.
  Many of our companies have been permanently weakened. If we do not 
take these steps to allow them to get back on their feet, to allow them 
to overcome the consequences of this sort of illegal activity, who can 
say who will be next? Quite possibly, one of our foreign competitors 
will say: I'll pay a few fines in the short run, bear that short-run 
cost to permanently, in the long run, weaken American competitors.
  That is not right. This loan guarantee program will allow these 
companies that have been harmed by this illegal activity to get back on 
their feet, to regain their competitive standing, so that we will have 
free and fair competition moving forward.
  So, in conclusion, this is a bill of national consequence, not just 
to any one State or region; its interests go way beyond the steel and 
natural gas and oil industries to affect literally the long-term well-
being and competitiveness of the American economy as a whole. That is 
why I strongly urge my colleagues to adopt this legislation, to do it 
now, and to do it without amendment.
  Thank you, Mr. President, for your patience, your time. I thank 
Senator Domenici for his leadership on this issue, and many others as 
well.
  I am now pleased to yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, this is the first time I have had a 
chance to say this on the floor, but while you were in the House 
serving in various positions, there was a Senator here with the same 
last name as the junior Senator from Indiana--Birch Bayh. He sat right 
over there.
  Many a time we were on the floor arguing, debating, sometimes 
agreeing, sometimes disagreeing. So he can read it in the Record, I say 
to my good friend, former Senator Birch Bayh, he did a great job in 
producing such a son. He was always so proud of him, telling me about 
him. I am very pleased I have a chance to serve with him. I look 
forward to that, because I think he has a marvelous, level head, and 
very good common sense. I say that as if that is an exceptional quality 
around here. I didn't mean to say that. If that is what I said, it is 
OK.
  Mr. BAYH. The Senator could not have given me higher praise, Mr. 
President. For that, I am personally and eternally grateful. It has 
been a privilege for not only me but for my family to serve with you. 
You have always been a man of decency, courage and honesty. For that, 
we are very grateful. I look forward to serving with you for many 
years. On behalf of both my father and myself, I thank you for your 
courtesy.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I just want to put the word out, 
Democrat or Republican, whoever has amendments, this bill is subject to 
amendment. Senator Byrd has expressed the desire that we try to keep it 
to germane amendments, but that is not the rule. It is up to Senators. 
I am here on the floor. While many may think I don't have to eat, 
because other Senators are slimmer than I, and could probably go 
without lunch more often, I would like to be working. I hope we have 
something to do. I urge that people get their amendments to the floor 
and start discussing them. There are a number of them that we want to 
talk about, with Senators Gramm and Nickles, whenever they are prepared 
to discuss items with us.
  I am going to suggest the absence of a quorum. I do have a few 
minutes I could use up with some comments about oil and gas, this bill, 
but I truly ask, if there are no Senators that want to offer amendments 
or speak, I will send word to the leader that we should have a recess 
for a few minutes to see if we can get some amendments to the floor. In 
any event, somebody will be here one way or another waiting.
  Before I finish and ask that my request for a quorum call be 
announced, I note the presence of the junior Senator from Alabama. I 
wonder if he would want to comment on something.
  Mr. SESSIONS. I would like to comment on the bill, but if we could 
have a few minutes for a quorum call, that would be good.
  Mr. DOMENICI. You may have as much time as you like.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The distinguished majority leader is 
recognized.
  Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, what is the parliamentary situation? Senator 
Domenici is managing the time. Are we ready to hear a statement from 
Senator Sessions and waiting on an amendment to be offered?
  Mr. DOMENICI. There are no time limits, I say to the Majority Leader. 
We were waiting for amendments.
  Mr. LOTT. I encourage Senators who are working on amendments to come 
to the floor. I know of two or three amendments that are being 
prepared. Perhaps one of them could go ahead and be offered. There is 
at least one that would be pretty simple. It would be to strike the 
emergency provisions. So it doesn't take a lot of preparation. We could 
go ahead and continue to make progress.
  We need to finish this bill today. If we do not get our work done 
during the daylight hours, we will be here tonight. That is OK, if we 
have to do it, but if it is not necessary, it would be preferable we 
work during the day. I know the Senate likes to return to its nocturnal 
habits, but I hope that will not be the case. If there are two or three 
or four good amendments to be offered, let's bring them out on the 
floor. Let's have an hour debate, and let's vote. Then let's get to 
final passage on this issue.
  I am glad that Senator Sessions is here and Senator Domenici. I know 
we

[[Page S7175]]

all need to get a bite to eat. If we could keep this moving along, I 
think it would save us some time tonight. I thank our colleagues for 
their cooperation.
  I will go and make a call to Senators that I know have amendments. I 
urge them to come on out and have the amendments offered, and then we 
could make some progress.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
  Mr. DOMENICI. I thank the distinguished leader. I am trying very hard 
to stay here and do my part, and I hope Senators will heed his 
admonition. We would like to finish.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. SHELBY. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SHELBY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SHELBY. Mr. President, I think we need to make a couple of things 
clear today about the bill before us and why it is so important to so 
many people.
  First, I am a strong supporter of free trade, trade that is free and 
fair. I believe this bill is completely consistent with those basic 
principles. But while we engage in free and fair trade, many countries 
in the rest of the world do not abide by those same principles. We have 
trade laws to address this, but, as the distinguished Chair knows, they 
are slow to address the kind of serious economic injury that faces many 
companies and communities in America.
  We can't afford to lose more industries to illegal trade practices, 
particularly the two we propose to offer short-term support to today: 
oil and gas and steel.
  Second, I believe this is a reasonable response to a terrible crisis 
that threatens more than just companies but whole communities across 
America. This bill does not propose quotas. Indeed, it is GATT legal, 
and it is intended to provide only a short-term loan guarantee.
  This is not some radical idea. Federal loan guarantees are used every 
day in the farm industry, the housing industry, the small business 
community, and for foreign countries. So let's be clear about how 
anathema this is to our free trade principles, because we do this all 
the time.
  Third, this program is not a Federal handout or Federal grant or 
Federal award or Federal subsidy which Congress provides daily and, I 
might add, to millions of companies and organizations and industries in 
this country. It is a short-term loan guarantee program that provides 
that every dime--yes, every dime--is paid back. Contrary to some 
representations, the risk of the default is not that great, according 
to the Congressional Budget Office. Based on these calculations of 
cost, however, the program has also been completely offset.
  Finally, I think it needs to be reemphasized that this program is not 
going to solve long-term problems that may face some companies in this 
industry. That is not what this is about. It is about trying to 
minimize the serious economic side effects that illegal trade practices 
have exacted on several companies in the steel industries. If this 
program helps one company get through this tough time until our trade 
laws address these illegal practices, and if it saves one community in 
America, it will be worth it.

  Mr. President, I believe Americans deserve to be treated fairly--and 
not inordinately suffer the consequences of our inability to minimize 
and protect against continuous and systematic illegal trade practices 
of other countries.
  I urge my colleagues to support this short-term loan guarantee 
program, and I thank the Senators from West Virginia and New Mexico for 
their leadership in this area.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. SESSIONS addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama is recognized.
  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I am pleased to join with the senior 
Senator from Alabama as we support this piece of legislation that I 
believe will help the American steel industry. It is not an industry 
that has stuck its head in the sand, that has failed to modernize, that 
is not competitive. The steel industry has gone through very difficult 
times and has, in fact, been able to make itself competitive and is 
able to sell steel products in this country cheaper than foreign 
imports can be sold here. That is good for America because it means 
that Americans are working to produce that steel. It is an important 
thing for this country.
  I really want to say that I have visited Gulf State Steel in Gadsden, 
Alabama, where my wife grew up. It is the largest employer there, 1,800 
or so people. I have visited there at least three times and I felt the 
fire in that furnace. I met with the people who work there. They are 
producing steel at world class competitive prices, and they are 
continuing to get better. They are going to continue to get better. But 
we have had this circumstance of a crisis around the world in foreign 
countries, desperate for American dollars, and they have sold their 
steel here below cost.
  You may say, well, that helps the automobile industry, or whatever. 
Maybe you could make that argument. It is an economic argument that 
people like to make. But I suggest, and believe strongly, that what is 
happening is we have a potential in this period of dumping to destroy 
significant segments of our steel industry, which will in the future, 
and soon, be competitive again. Do you see what happened? Through these 
cut-rate imports, sold below cost, it can sink companies like Gulf 
State Steel. They are struggling to survive. Many of these people have 
been working at that steel mill for many, many years. Some of them are 
children of people who worked there. If they weren't competitive, OK; 
but they have been competitive. They have made the needed changes, and 
this short-term dumping has the ability to sink those companies. This 
loan program, I believe, will deal with that.

  There is no doubt that dumping has occurred and that it has 
materially injured this industry. There is no doubt that the Clinton 
administration knew that illegal dumping was occurring, and they failed 
to take the kind of decisive action that would have ended the problem 
months ago. So I am offering my support for this bill, which will take 
a modest step toward helping steel companies and small oil and gas 
companies who have been victimized by illegal dumping.
  The Department of Commerce has determined that illegal dumping of 
steel into the U.S. market began in 1997. During the fourth quarter of 
1997, there were 7 million tons of steel imported. But within a year, 
that number had totaled 11 million tons, which is a 55 percent 
increase. Is that explained because of some technical breakthrough by 
foreign competitors that reduced their costs? Did American steel 
companies who have been on the cutting edge of efficient production 
suddenly revert to outdated production methods? Did U.S. steelworkers, 
who produce more steel per worker than any other in the world, lose 
their edge? The answer is no.
  U.S. steelworkers and companies did not lose a share of the market 
because of inefficiency or a sudden improvement in the competitors' 
efficiency. The steel that came into our market was below production 
cost prices because countries like Russia, Brazil, Japan and Indonesia 
were subject to a currency crisis and needed U.S. dollars. Because the 
administration had a history of not enforcing these trade laws, 
sometimes as a back doorway to implement foreign policy goals, our 
overseas competitors saw an opportunity to dump steel and get this hard 
currency. Unfortunately, our foreign policy goals came at the expense 
of steelworkers and their families. Despite repeated calls from 
Congress, including myself, there has been an insufficient response to 
date.
  Even in the face of indisputable evidence that dumping was occurring, 
we have not stopped the wave of illegal imports flooding our shores. In 
November of 1998, the U.S. International Trade Commission, an 
independent commission that examines illegal trade practices, 
determined that dumping as defined in that agreement was in fact 
occurring. It was not until 4 months later, and over a year after the 
problem was first identified, the Department of Commerce finally began 
to enforce

[[Page S7176]]

trade laws and placed a tariff, a preliminary dumping margin, on steel 
imported for Brazil and Japan in February of 1999. This enforcement 
action was narrowly focused and left out some of the biggest countries, 
such as Russia, which were found to be dumping steel on the U.S. 
market. Adding insult to injury, the Secretary of Commerce entered into 
a suspension agreement with Russia. The practical effect of this was to 
end the Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission's 
trade investigations of Russia. It did nothing to discourage future 
dumping by Russia or any other country. In fact, the suspension 
agreement may have actually rewarded Russia for its illegal trade 
practices by sending the stark message that there is no adverse 
consequences for committing or attempting to commit trade crimes 
against the United States. The worst that may happen if you commit 
trade crimes against the U.S., under this climate, is a polite request 
through a suspension agreement to please stop.

  The administration's actions have been too little too late. The 
suspension agreement should be viewed as an ineffective method. This 
action will undoubtedly lead to additional dumping by other countries. 
Thousands of good jobs in this country have already been lost. The 
pattern of poor action and inaction taken by this administration will 
undoubtedly set groundwork for future job losses and create a crisis 
that we need to be concerned about.
  The United States must not sit idly by and allow its economic 
strength to be damaged by consistent, unfair trade practices. We must 
respond to that. In Alabama, there are a number of steel companies that 
have been injured. Gulf State Steel, as I mentioned, in Gadsden has 
been directly impacted by imports. As a result, employees and families 
have been faced with increasing uncertainty about the future of their 
very facility. The production methods used and the caliber of the 
workforce at Gulf State and other steel plants--many of them are in 
Alabama--make this industry one of the most efficient in the world. 
Alabama steelworkers can compete effectively with other countries in 
the United States and indeed throughout the world. The current 
financial problems faced by our domestic steel makers are not the 
result of poor management, outdated equipment, or an underskilled 
workforce; rather, it is the direct consequences of illegal dumping of 
foreign imports into the United States. If Gulf State Steel was to 
cease operations as a result of illegal dumping, it would force 
dismissal of nearly 2,000 workers. According to an economic impact 
study conducted by Auburn University, the economic impact of a plant 
closing would be staggering to Etowah County, which has already seen 
one plant close of 1,300 people. Direct job losses would exceed 1,800 
workers. Indirect job losses would total 3,020. Statewide job losses 
would total 4,820, and the overall economic impact on Etowah County 
would exceed $300 million. This is just one example of the crisis 
dozens of steel companies now face throughout the United States.
  The steel, oil and gas loan bill we are considering today is a modest 
solution to assist these companies that have been already injured by 
illegal trade practices.
  It is not a handout. It is not corporate welfare. It is a loan 
program designed to give these companies which might otherwise be faced 
with bankruptcy--some are faced with bankruptcy right now--an 
opportunity to recover the damages they have suffered at the hands of 
unfair trade practices.
  While this bill would authorize a highly qualified board to offer 
heavily secured loans to the distressed owing up to $1 billion, it will 
not cost $1 billion. The Congressional Budget Office has put the total 
cost at $247 million. The Congressional Budget Office takes into 
account the fact that some companies which might receive loans have 
been damaged beyond the point of recovery, which could result in some 
defaults. But the cost of inaction is much greater. In Etowah County 
alone, Auburn University's economic study put the cost of bankruptcy 
for just this one steel company at over $300 million. This figure 
doesn't even account for the tremendous social costs associated with 
the loss of jobs and income to families employed by this company.
  I want to say I support free trade. I do not believe in providing 
unjustified economic assistance to companies. I don't believe in 
erecting unwise and unjustified trade barriers.
  This bill would not hurt free trade. It would instead provide modest 
assistance to the companies and their employees who have been injured 
by the rampant proliferation of illegal trade practices that we have 
permitted to occur, and that this administration has permitted to occur 
too long.
  I believe that we have a situation much akin to maybe people on the 
edge of water, a body of water. The water doesn't reach their level, 
and they have been able to survive and live for a long time. But a 
giant wave comes along one time, and the wave hits them with such an 
impact that they are knocked down and they are destroyed. We have had a 
wave of illegal imports. It has been declared by an agency to be 
illegal. That wave that hit our country has destabilized and undermined 
the strength of a number of different steel companies and, therefore, 
jeopardized the jobs of many Americans and incomes to the country.
  When you are in bankruptcy, it is hard to get a loan. It is hard to 
get financing if you are in bankruptcy, or on the verge of it. So this 
would allow these companies to get this income to continue to operate.
  Once we end the dumping, we are going to be back to a circumstance in 
which they can continue to operate and make a profit, as they were 
before this occurred.
  I believe it is justified.
  I see the senior Senator from West Virginia, Mr. Byrd, who has worked 
so hard, and Senator Domenici and others. I am pleased to support him 
in this effort. I believe that somehow, some way, when this thing is 
over, we will have been able to provide some assistance to these 
companies to enable them to survive and continue to be productive 
contributors to our Nation's economy.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The distinguished Senator from West Virginia 
is recognized.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I thank the Chair. I also thank the very 
distinguished Senator from Alabama, Mr. Sessions, for his comments and 
for his work on this bill. I thank, as well, Mr. Shelby, the senior 
Senator from Alabama, for his support and for the work that he has 
contributed to this legislation.
  I feel very good about having their support. They are both very able 
Senators, and they are utilizing their talents in the best interests of 
the Nation in supporting this legislation.
  American steelworkers earn their daily bread by the sweat of their 
brow. That is in accordance with the edict that was placed upon man 
when God evicted Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Steelworkers are 
earning their daily bread by the sweat of their brow amid the glow of 
productive glass furnaces filled with molten steel. American fortunes 
were built on their backs. Their collective might forged a national 
defense and a national economy second to none.
  Today, after almost 20 years of downsizing and rightsizing and 
modernizing, just 160,000 steelworkers are employed in state-of-the-art 
American steel mills, compared to some 400,000 --400,000--in 1980. The 
industry, which retooled to adapt to international market changes, is 
now a world class--a world class--competitor, even while adhering to 
high U.S. safety, labor, and environmental standards. But the ranks of 
American steelworkers, it appears, are in danger of future cuts that 
could undermine their ability to support U.S. priorities.
  This situation is not, as some would have us believe, due to a 
failure of the steel industry to economize or to increase efficiency. 
America's steel industry serves as a model in the art of modernizing to 
enhance competitive prowess. America's steel producers have sacrificed, 
they have trimmed, and they have automated, investing nearly $60 
billion in the process. In return, they have been forced to compete on 
a playing field that is tilted--tilted--by the weight of the unfair and 
illegal trade practices of foreign competitors.
  Last year, a record 41\1/2\ million tons of cheap and illegally 
dumped steel

[[Page S7177]]

flooded the U.S. market. Piles of this foreign-made, below-cost steel 
amassed at our ports. It drove U.S. producers to drop prices, to impose 
layoffs, to shut down furnaces, and to slow down production.
  Those cold mounds of steel represented an 83-percent increase in the 
amount of steel imported into this country--83 percent over the 23 
million tons, on average, imported in each of the previous 8 years.
  Contrary to some reports, this Congress was notified of signs of a 
potential flood of both legal and illegal steel imports in January 
1998. I, in conjunction with the Senate steel caucus leadership, have 
worked during this year and a half to lay a foundation that would 
provide meaningful help to the U.S. steel industry. The chairman of 
that steel caucus is Senator Specter, and the ranking member, or vice 
chairman, is my colleague from West Virginia, Senator Jay Rockefeller. 
I have joined the Senate steel caucus in writing numerous letters to 
the administration and in holding hearings and discussions to provide 
testimony about the impact of the crisis.
  I commend Mr. Specter and my colleague, Mr. Rockefeller, on the work 
that they have done.
  Although prices for steel have been dropping below domestic 
manufacturers' costs to produce due to the flood of imports, the U.S. 
market still offers an outlet for surpluses generated by very sharply 
depressed demand in Asia and elsewhere. A poor market is better than no 
market, so rather than idle their own furnaces and mills, foreign 
exporters are flooding the U.S. market. The United States was the 
principal destination in 1998 for Japanese-finished steel mill exports 
that were diverted from the depressed Asian market--to the tune of 4.2 
million tons of the 4.7 million tons that Japan had exported to Asia 
just 1 year earlier.
  In 1996, Japan exported just 18,190 net tons of hot-rolled sheet 
steel to the United States each month, on average, a modest increase 
over 1995. But, in 1997, that figure of 18,000 net tons rose to 43,095 
net tons each month, on average.  From January through September 1998, 
that average monthly figure had skyrocketed to 192,812 net tons. Over 
the same period, however, the value of each ton of Japanese hot-rolled 
sheet steel fell, from $460 a ton in 1995, to $409 in 1996, to $367 in 
1997, to $295 a ton in 1998. At the same time, Japan's domestic market 
remains virtually closed to foreign steel, allowing Japanese steel 
mills to command unusually high prices at home.

  A similar story can be told in the case of Russian hot-rolled sheet 
steel. In 1995, the average monthly import volume was 46,661 tons. In 
1996, that figure had climbed to 67,587 tons per month. In 1997, it was 
165,268 tons per month, and from January through September 1998, the 
average monthly import volume of Russian hot-rolled sheet and plate-in-
coil steel was 286,311 tons. At the same time, the price per ton fell 
from $316 in 1995 to just $240 in 1998. That is a lot of cheap steel to 
absorb, and that is just one particular type of steel product.
  Our government's response to this threat was to handle cheating--
cheating--foreign competitors with kid gloves due to concerns that the 
economies of those foreign nations have been in distress.
  Now, who pays our way here? Who pays the fare for our trip from 
Sophia, WV, to Washington, DC? Who pays the fare from Arkansas to 
Washington, DC? Who pays the fare from Kansas, for those who represent 
Kansas in the Congress, to Washington, DC? Not those foreign 
competitors, I can assure you, as far as I am concerned. They don't pay 
our way. They don't pay our fare. They don't pay us. We are not on 
their payroll. The people of West Virginia send me here, and the road 
that leads to Washington leads back home.
  I am going to be first, last, and always interested in the people of 
our own Nation who look to us for leadership, look to us to help them 
with their problems--not the foreign competitors.
  The argument has been made that caution must be exercised so as not 
to push these teetering economies over the edge. I understand concerns 
about the intertwined economies of an increasingly global marketplace, 
but my heart will not bleed for cheaters. My heart aches for those 
American men and women who have worked and sacrificed and followed the 
rules, only to have their futures and the futures of their families, 
their communities, and their steel industry thrown into question.
  The illegal dumping of steel on American shores is real. It is not 
imaginary. It is not something we are just dreaming about. It is not 
something we are seeing visions about. It is real. The crisis does 
exist.
  Our domestic steel industry has been seeking remedy through 
antidumping and countervailing trade cases. The Commerce Department has 
ruled on or is investigating cases against Japan, Russia, Brazil, South 
Korea, France, Italy, India, and Indonesia. On June 11, just last 
Friday, the International Trade Commission, by a 6-0 ruling, found that 
imports of dumped hot rolled steel from Japan are ``materially injuring 
or threatening material injury'' to the U.S. steel industry.
  Based on this determination, duties will be retroactively applied to 
imports from Japan that enter the United States after February, 19, 
1999, but the international trade system established to help domestic 
manufacturers recover from trade-induced damage has thus far failed our 
steelmakers. The process is too painfully slow.
  When I was a boy I read a book, ``The Slow Train Through Arkansas.'' 
We are talking about a slow process here, and it has failed our 
steelmakers. The process is too painfully slow to avert long-term 
financial disaster for many U.S. steel mills.
  One of the opponents to this bill said the other day: Well we have a 
process here.
  Yes, we have a process. I am saying it is too painfully slow to avert 
long-term financial disaster for many U.S. steel mills.
  That is why we have come to the floor with this bill, this provision 
that will help in the short-term. Damage must be done before a case can 
even be filed. Now, that is the process; damage must be done before a 
case can even be filed, and the investigation and the adjudication 
takes months.
  Even if our steel companies succeed in getting our trade laws to 
support them by levying tariffs on unfair competitors or otherwise 
reducing their attempts at undercutting our domestic market, these 
steel mills will not receive any of those tariffs to make up for their 
losses or to help out their workers. The damage has been done. The 
damage has been done.
  At best, they will get an eventual reduction of illegal imports that 
will allow them to compete in their own country, at least until some 
other nation decides to flood our markets. It is not fair. It is not 
right. It is not right for our steel industry. It is not right for our 
steelworkers. It is not fair to our steelworkers. Nor will communities 
that are hard hit by layoffs and threats of layoffs receive any direct 
compensation from the tariffs that are paid by illegal dumping. The 
damage has been done.
  The little community of Weirton has been hard hit. The Weirton Steel 
Company employed 14,000 men and women a few years ago; today, it is 
down under 5,000. The Weirton Steel Company is the lifeblood of 
Weirton, WV. Without it, the community would be dead, dead, dead!
  There are other communities. But these communities, as I say, that 
are hard hit by layoffs--and there have been additional layoffs at 
Weirton; 800 steelworkers laid off since last November because of this 
illegal dumping of below-cost steel into American ports by those 
foreign countries that wave their nose at the trade laws. Communities 
hard hit by layoffs and threats of layoffs will not receive any direct 
compensation from the tariffs paid by illegal dumpers. Now, that is the 
process. They say, well, let the process work.

  The recent years of uncertainty that deterred people from buying 
houses, buying cars, buying anything they might have to finance longer 
than their job might last, no one can make up for those kinds of losses 
that ripple through a community, affecting jobs, affecting lives that 
are directly linked to a steel mill paycheck.
  This crisis may not be abating, as some would have us believe. 
Foreign steel markets are not yet rebounding to their previous levels, 
and oversupply remains very high. Nearly all of the recent import 
declines are due to antidumping cases against just three countries. 
Historically, such cases have

[[Page S7178]]

eventually caused increased imports from other exporters and for other 
steel products. We have seen that in this instance, as well.
  When the Commerce Department investigates import surges of a 
particular type of steel from a single source, that exporter 
temporarily cleans up his act. You see, he gets religion fast. He 
cleans up his act with regard to that particular type of steel. But he 
makes up for it. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is 
doing in that case. While he cleans up that act, he makes up for it by 
flooding the U.S. market with a different steel product that is not 
under investigation, or another nation steps in to fill the opening 
provided by tariffs placed on a foreign competitor.
  So no sooner is one dog leashed than another dog is on the attack. 
For many months, manufacturers and steelworkers lobbied and protested 
and cried: ``Help me, Cassius, or I sink!''
  They protested and tried every conceivable approach to draw the U.S. 
Government's attention to their plight, and their pleas were met by 
dawdling and disbelief.
  We cannot afford to continue hemming and hawing, as the fires die 
down in the blast furnaces at Weirton, WV, or in Illinois or Indiana or 
Missouri or Alabama or Pennsylvania or Ohio. This is an emergency. That 
is why it was put into an emergency appropriations bill. It requires 
urgent action. We have responded to emergencies in other industries and 
in other nations; why can we not respond to a critical situation in our 
own steel industry?
  Do you remember the story of Joseph and Mary, who went from Nazareth 
up to Judea to pay their taxes? They went to Bethlehem. Their baby was 
born and wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. Why was it 
laid in a manger? Because there was no room at the inn. There was no 
room for the baby at the inn. It had to be laid in a manger because 
there was no room for Joseph and Mary and the baby at the inn. No room 
at the inn. So to the steelworkers, there is no room for the 
steelworkers at the inn, no room at the inn.
  This crisis cannot be merely dismissed as a West Virginia matter, as 
some sought to do earlier. I know the word went around, well, this is 
just to help workers in West Virginia; this is just to help Senator 
Byrd from West Virginia. That is not the case. That is not the case.
  So this crisis cannot merely be dismissed as a West Virginia matter. 
This is a national matter. It affects Kentucky. It affects Virginia. 
When one industry hurts in this country, the whole country hurts. When 
steelworkers are thrown out of jobs, there is a great ripple effect. 
When jobs are lost in Indiana and Illinois and West Virginia, it hurts 
in Kentucky. It hurts in Virginia. This is a national matter involving 
an industry that stretches across the Nation.

  When you see those television pictures of the tanks in the Balkans, 
those tanks are not made of pasteboard. They are not made of nylon. 
They are not made of plastic. They are made of steel. I know what it is 
to weld that steel, having welded in the shipyards in World War II. It 
was this mighty country with its steel mills and its experienced 
steelworkers and its efficient steel companies that made the ships to 
carry the manpower and the weaponry to Europe in World War I and in 
World War II. Let another war come. We will send tanks of pasteboard?
  The ill effects that have been visited upon this industry loom in 
Utah, Illinois, Arkansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Alabama, 
California, and other States. It touches the lives of all Americans. 
Just read the newspapers and the trade publications from around the 
Nation.
  Bankruptcy looms for Gadsden, AL, based Gulf States Steel. Last 
month, Laclede Steel shut down its Alton, IL, pipe and tube plant, 
putting 200 employees out of work because of high levels of imports.
  In April, FirstMiss, a Pennsylvania steel producer of high-grade 
specialty steel, announced plans to shut down, putting 140 people out 
of work.
  These are Americans. These are people of flesh and blood, just as you 
and I are flesh and blood.
  Geneva Steel Company of Vineyard, UT, filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy 
in February, citing the surge in steel imports as the cause of its 
financial distress. Geneva Steel employs roughly 2,400 workers in Utah 
making hot-rolled and plate steel. In December 1998, Geneva officials 
had conceded that they would be unable to make January's interest 
payments on senior notes.
  Bethlehem Steel officials announced in January that the steel import 
crisis caused them to decide to close two plants--in Washington, PA, 
and Massillon, OH--and eliminate a total of 540 jobs. Not surprisingly, 
no buyer could be found for the Massillon mill, given the poor market 
prospects.
  In November 1998, Bethlehem Steel temporarily shut down facilities in 
Burns Harbor, IN, and Steelton, PA; it cut back shifts at facilities in 
Sparrows Point, PA, and idled production lines in Coatsville, PA, that 
employed 1,000 people, all because of unfair, illegal competition from 
imported steel, and unfair competition from foreign countries.
  The Scriptures say that charity begins at home. We don't want 
charity. We simply want a fair, level field so the American 
steelworkers, whose efficiency is as great or greater than that of any 
other workers in the world, can make their way, can earn by the sweat 
of their brow their daily bread.
  I have been in the Senate 41 years. I have never turned my back on 
any other State or any category of people in this country who are hard 
up and who are out of work and who need help in order to earn their 
bread by the sweat of their brow.
  Whether it is in my State or not, if it is somewhere else in America 
that an industry, that the farmers need help, that the farmers need 
loans, that the homebuilders need loans, I am here to help, always have 
been. I do not say it does not help my people. I do not say that. The 
chain is as strong as its weakest link. I say help them if it is on the 
west coast, if it is on the east coast, if it is in the North or the 
South--wherever. If it is America, count me in.
  In November, LTV officials announced that the company would 
permanently close some operations at their Cleveland Works facility, 
eliminating 320 jobs, because, in part, of dumped imports. The previous 
month, LTV had temporarily laid off an additional 320 workers on a 
different production line. U.S. Steel also cut back operations in 
November, laying off several hundred of the 850 workers at the 
Fairless, Pennsylvania, plant. These are not West Virginia plants, but 
if it hurts Pennsylvania; it hurts me; it hurts West Virginia.
  National Steel announced the idling a blast furnace producing 1.1 
million tons of iron at its Great Lakes Division last October, reducing 
the steelmaking capacity there by 25 to 30 percent. Last September, 
California Steel Industries reported that it had lost 15 to 20 percent 
of its sales volume, and had reduced production operations 
proportionally. Also last September, Illinois-based Acme Metals, 
Incorporated, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, halting 
production at a new, $370 million slab caster designed to take 
advantage of its high-quality blast furnace operations while linking it 
to low-cost, mini-mill style casting and rolling equipment. So much for 
modernizing to remain competitive! We have done it. The steel industry 
has done it. They have modernized the steel mills. The lesson steel 
makers have learned is that their investment decisions to remain modern 
and efficient can be undercut at any time by foreign producers driven 
by their own interests, or subsidized by their own governments, to 
increase their market share by driving under the domestic competition.
  I could go on, but I think I have made my point. These American steel 
companies are suffering not only from the kind of depressed export 
market that has led the administration and this Congress to provide 
emergency relief to our Nation's farmers, but also from unfair, below-
cost imports that are squeezing our steel industry out of our domestic 
market. Why is it this Congress can so readily support funding for 
direct low-cost loans to farmers--and I am for that--in order to help 
them survive the tough times, but some Members balk at providing loan 
guarantees to allow an equally critical industry--one that is necessary 
to maintain a robust defense as well as a robust economy--to obtain 
market rate loans to restructure debt and tough out a battle against 
depressed

[[Page S7179]]

markets and unfair competition? I confess that I simply do not 
understand this logic.
  Help the farmers. We have heard that cry from the steeple tops, and 
my vote has been there. I do not have large farms in West Virginia, but 
when the call comes to help the farmers, my vote has been there. I have 
never opposed help for all the farmers.
  I have been on the Appropriations Committee 41 years, Mr. President. 
You do not find me opposing aid to farmers just because West Virginia 
does not have big farms. Why provide loans and grants for foreign 
governments? What is the logic in the U.S. Government providing loans, 
direct loans in many instances, guaranteed loans and grants to people 
in foreign lands, foreign governments? Why help them, when there is no 
room at the inn for American steelworkers?
  Think of it. I would be ashamed--ashamed--to deny our own people when 
we do not deny foreign governments. I have a list of the direct loans. 
I have a list of the guaranteed loans. I have a list of the outstanding 
loans to foreign governments. And then a Senator will stand in this 
Chamber and vote against guaranteed loans for an American industry, the 
steel industry, steelworkers, steel families. I know some Senators do 
not like to hear it, but listen to me. If you do not hear me, you will 
hear from them, the people for whom there is no room at the inn.
  Opponents of this loan guarantee program would have us believe that 
this is an excessively costly solution to a nonexistent problem. It is 
neither. The loan guarantee program outlined in this bill would provide 
qualified steel producers access to loans through the private market 
that are guaranteed by the federal government in the same way that the 
federal government now guarantees loans made to homebuilders, farmers, 
even foreign governments. These guarantees are needed because banks, 
seeing the same flood of low-priced imported steel, are not willing to 
make loans or restructure existing debt when their collateral--the 
steel made and sold by the borrowers--is so devalued. both the 
Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget, 
acting under the credit reform provisions of the Budget Enforcement 
Act, have calculated the budget authority estimates of this program at 
only $140 million, reflective of the fairly low risk of default and the 
value of the potential collateral to be offered. This cost, as has been 
stated time and again, is fully offset.
  The steel loan guarantee program will be established and administered 
by a distinguished board of directors--namely, the Secretary of the 
Treasury, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Commerce, who 
will serve as chairman of the board. This board will be given 
flexibility to determine the percentage of the federal guarantee, the 
appropriate collateral, as well as the loan amounts and interest rates.
  This board will disburse loans of not less than $25 million, subject 
to a waiver, and not more than $250 million to any one company, and the 
total amount of all guarantees will not exceed $1 billion. As the loans 
are paid off, funds will become available for additional lending. All 
loans, however, must be repaid within 6 years, with interest.
  This loan guarantee program is GATT-legal. We are still playing fair. 
We are not subsidizing our steel industry. We are not undermining 
someone else's domestic steel industry by dumping steel at below 
production cots. This program would operate within the international 
trade rules.
  This emergency loan guarantee program is an important tool to help 
these companies deal with the immediate effects of this crisis as they 
pursue their legal cases and as other legislative remedies are being 
considered. By itself, this program will not solve this crisis, but it 
is needed to ensure that these companies can make it through some very 
tough times and keep their employees--our fellow citizens--working.
  Which of you, the Scriptures say, if your son asks for bread, will 
give him a stone? Which of you, being a father, if your son asks for 
fish, will give him a serpent? Which of you, if your son asks for an 
egg, will give him a scorpion?
  When I say to Senators, these steelworkers are our fellow Americans, 
our fellow citizens, they are asking for the opportunity to earn their 
daily bread, in the sweat of their brow, are we going to give them a 
stone?
  So, what do we have to lose here by ensuring that funding is 
available for a crisis that our own Department of Commerce verifies is 
upon us? If the money is not needed, not one red cent will be dispersed 
from the Treasury. But if we do not act, and steel companies start to 
go under, you can bet that we will not be able to act quickly enough to 
save some of those companies, some of those jobs, and some of those 
steel towns that will be pulled under by the rip current of our failure 
to respond.
  It cost us at most $140 million to act decisively now to avert a 
crisis that is within our shores. Our failure to act will surely cost 
us much more as a nation. I speak not only of the tangible costs of 
inaction--in increased unemployment, cuts in services, and bank losses, 
in addition to increased spending for welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, 
housing assistance, child care assistance, community adjustment 
assistance, worker adjustment assistance, and so forth, but also of the 
intangible costs. What does it mean if we let our steel industry fail? 
What does it mean if we allow it to be sliced away mill by mill by mill 
until only the biggest survive? What does it mean for our future to 
have another critical defense component delivered from a ship arriving 
from distant shores? Ships from distant shores will bring the steel. 
Can our space launch capacity be held hostage to specialty materials 
and components produced overseas? Can a new stealth bomber still be 
produced without a foreign partner?
  What does it mean when we let trade theory or consideration for 
foreign trading partners allow us to tie our own hands and let foreign 
competitors unfairly or illegally pull the rug out from under American 
citizens? Should American steelworkers and their families go on 
unemployment or even welfare in order to allow foreign steelworkers to 
retain their jobs? I do not think so.
  I think our people should come first, as far as I am concerned. This 
country has been very charitable to the rest of the world. This Nation 
has helped other nations when disasters came upon them. This Nation has 
helped other nations to rebuild after destructive wars. But we should 
not ask this Nation to give up its industries and ship those industries 
overseas. We should not ask our steelworkers to give up their jobs in 
order that steelworkers somewhere else, thousands of miles away, across 
the deep waters, may have their jobs.
  The people who send us here place a trust in us. Those who send us 
here can bring us back home. They ought to bring us home if we do not 
listen to their pleas. They place a trust in us that we will stand for 
issues important to them, their lives, and their livelihood.
  I cannot, in good conscience, turn my back on America's steelworkers, 
just as I cannot turn my back on the oil and gas workers. And I cannot 
turn my back on the farmers in this country. But I hope that each of 
you will not turn your back on our steelworkers. The time will come 
when you may come to my door, saying: I need your help. I may have that 
rollcall on how you voted when the steelworkers needed your help, when 
their families needed your help in order that they might have bread to 
eat, clothes to wear, and the other necessities of life. Let's not 
forget we have to help one another.
  The questions for every Member of Congress are these: do we care if 
we have a domestic steel industry? Does it matter? Or should we throw 
in the towel and allow foreign competitors to chip away at our steel 
industry until we are forced to depend on foreign steelmakers for our 
every steel need in the next century? Let us not dither. Let us not 
believe there is no problem here. Let us not play politics.
  Let's leave philosophy to Socrates and to Plato and the other great 
philosophers. Let's tend to things closer to home. Let us act. I urge 
the adoption of this legislation.
  My colleague, my friend, Pete Domenici, who is on the floor at the 
moment, who represents the great State of New Mexico, will speak for 
oil and gas. I fully support him--fully support him. What affects his 
oil and gas

[[Page S7180]]

industries affects me and my people, affects West Virginia.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. GRAMM addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bunning). The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I first say to our colleagues that Senator 
Nickles and I, who are on the other side of this issue, have been at 
the Finance Committee where we have been holding a hearing on Larry 
Summers, who has been nominated to be Secretary of the Treasury. As a 
result, it has taken until now for us to get the opportunity to 
participate. Because this is the most significant confirmation since 
either one of us has been on the Finance Committee, we did not have the 
luxury to miss that hearing. So if we have inconvenienced our 
colleagues by being late, I apologize.
  I also say that one of the things that is always hard about our 
business--and our business is a noble business; it is American 
democracy at work--is that you do not get to choose your allies.  If I 
had an opportunity to choose my allies based on their ability and 
knowledge and persuasiveness, I would never undertake any battle where 
I did not have Senator Byrd and Senator Domenici on my side. The 
problem is that when the Lord handed out ability, He did not distribute 
basic philosophy and values and also a reading of the facts in the same 
way He distributed ability, at least from this Senator's own point of 
view.

  I find myself, which happens from time to time and never creates 
happiness on my part when it does, fundamentally disagreeing with two 
of our most able Members and two Members of the Senate for whom I have 
a deep affection and a deep respect.
  What I would like to do today is the following: I would like to try 
to outline the changes that I believe should be made in the bill. Let 
me make it clear that I am not for this bill. I see this as harkening 
back to another day, the days of the Carter administration, where we 
were basically trying to engage in industrial policy. I will talk more 
about that in a minute.
  But if we are going to pass the bill, there are some things we should 
do--and I hope we will do--that could dramatically improve the bill. So 
what I would like to do today is talk about those amendments and try, 
for the convenience of our colleagues, to outline the amendments that I 
see that we would present today.
  I can't speak for any other Member of the Senate. There may be 
others, besides Senator Nickles and I, who have been working on these 
amendments together, who would want to come over and offer amendments. 
But to sort of give an outline, I would like to go through and outline 
what I think is wrong with the bill in terms of what could be improved 
by amendment. I would like to talk about each of those amendments and 
try to explain why they make sense so everybody would sort of get the 
lay of the land of the battlefield that we are likely to contest today 
and vote on today.
  I would then like to try to talk about the problem in the steel 
industry, because Senator Byrd has spoken with such passion and 
conviction that, if you are going to oppose what he is trying to do, 
you have an obligation to explain why you disagree. So I will try to at 
least give you the view through the lens that I have in looking at this 
problem as to where I am coming from and why I think as I do.
  Then it would be my proposal to either offer the amendments that I 
have outlined and simply have them there so anyone could debate them 
or, if Senator Nickles comes over, then we could go back and forth. But 
it is not my objective to try to delay the process. It is pretty clear 
what I would like to at least have the Senate make a decision about 
today.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?
  Mr. GRAMM. I am happy to yield.
  Mr. DOMENICI. I need to get consent on behalf of the leader. It will 
take 30 seconds.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the committee amendments 
be agreed to en bloc and that the bill, as thus amended, be considered 
as original text for the purpose of further amendment, provided further 
that no points of order will have been waived.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Now that I have the floor, I wonder if my friend will 
engage in a little discussion with me for a moment. I think the 
approach you have just spoken of will be a good one for the Senate.
  I am somewhat familiar--I will be more familiar when you are finished 
with your discussion of your four points--with what kind of amendments 
you are seeking. I believe it is possible we could sit down with 
Senator Byrd and work on all of those amendments. Some of us have been 
thinking about some of those amendments, even without you offering 
them; and some of them make eminent good sense to me.
  So if you will do that, if you will discuss them, I am certain that 
unless there are other Senators beyond you and Senator Nickles, what 
you are talking about, even if we do not agree, we are not going to be 
here late tonight on those, if we can get them done. The question is, 
are there others? And we don't know about that. There may be; there may 
not be.

  It may be that we cannot vote on some of these because of some other 
matters that are beyond our control. But I do not think we need time at 
10 tonight to debate the ones you are talking about. We will understand 
them very soon, and we will start working with you and see what we can 
do.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. GRAMM. I thank Senator Domenici and say, in complying with his 
wishes, that what I will do is simply go through and talk about four 
areas that I think we need to work on to improve the bill. Then I want 
to talk a little bit about the underlying amendment and about steel and 
about my different perspective on the problem than Senator Byrd has.
  First of all, this bill has an emergency designation in it. What does 
that mean? What it means is this bill will be exempt, because of that 
emergency designation, from the budget caps that we set out in law and 
that we reinforced when we adopted the budget this year. To the degree 
to which that emergency designation allows us to spend beyond the cap, 
that expenditure will take money away from the budget surplus, every 
penny of which is Social Security trust fund money.
  The way the bill is written, it is written in such a way that it does 
make some effort to try to deal with the cost of the program. In doing 
so, it is not effective, because it doesn't lower the spending caps to 
pay for this bill.
  My first objection--without getting into all of the delicacies of the 
budget which aren't really important to this--is the following: We have 
a surplus today in terms of the books of the Government. But we do not 
really have a surplus in the sense that if we had to keep our books 
like the private sector does, where we had to take into account all the 
liabilities that we are incurring by guaranteeing Social Security 
benefits in the future, if we had to use what accountants call 
``accrual accounting,'' we would be running a huge deficit. It creates 
a problem because now, as virtually everybody in America, I hope, 
knows, we are collecting more in Social Security taxes than we are 
spending on Social Security, so we are running a surplus and the Social 
Security trust fund would tend to grow as a result of that surplus.
  But much to my distress, and I believe it would be distressing to the 
American people, if everybody understood it, it seems like weekly we 
spend more money, every penny of which comes out of Social Security, so 
that effectively we are plundering Social Security to pay for other 
programs.
  Now, you can argue the merits or the demerits of this loan program. I 
will tend to argue the demerits. But even if you thought this program 
had great merit, I think it is bad policy, and wrong, to take the money 
out of Social Security to pay for it.
  So the first effort that Senator Nickles and I will undertake is that 
there is a budget point of order in the budget against any emergency 
designation for non-defense discretionary spending, when that 
discretionary spending would, in this case, take money out of Social 
Security.
  So the first thing we intend to do, or at least we intend at some 
point during this process, is to raise that budget point of order to 
strike the emergency designation out of this bill.
  Let me make two points about that. No. 1, it won't kill the bill. 
What it will

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say is: You have to pay for the bill, because every penny you spend on 
these loan guarantees is money that you are not going to have to spend 
on something else. If we do not strike the emergency designation, then 
the money we spend on the loan guarantees will basically come out of 
Social Security; and since we have on several occasions, and will 
again, be debating whether or not to put the Social Security money in a 
so-called lockbox, I can't, in good conscience, keep voting to say we 
are putting it in a lockbox when we keep turning around and spending 
it.
  I have a little bit of trouble taking a position one day that we are 
protecting Social Security money and, a day or two later, supporting 
spending it.
  So the first issue we need to deal with is the issue of whether we 
should eliminate any possibility that this money would come out of 
Social Security. We can do that by raising the point of order that the 
bill has an emergency designation, and if that is successful, or if an 
agreement should be reached to simply take the emergency designation 
out, then any money this bill spends is money under the spending caps 
that can't be spent on anything else.
  So if we are successful there, what we will have done is, for all 
those who believe this bill is a very good idea, or even a good idea, 
we will have set up a situation where it has to be paid for. I believe 
that is prudent public policy, and I think it should be done.
  The second amendment we would be offering is an amendment to change 
the makeup of the board that will be making the loans. Let me remind my 
colleagues, and anybody else who is following this debate, that the 
reason these loan guarantees cost money is that we don't expect some of 
the loans to be repaid. The whole reason this loan guarantee package 
costs money--the reason we expect it to cost $140 million--well, that 
is the steel number. One of the reasons we expect this program, in 
total, to cost $270 million over the next 2 years is that we expect 
many of these loans not to be paid back.
  That recognition leads to three changes we want to make in these 
loans, and they are the other three amendments.
  No. 1, we don't think these loans ought to be made by the Secretary 
of Labor and the Secretary of Commerce. We believe we should have a 
board that is made up of people who have expertise in finance and who 
can guarantee two things: One, that we maximize the chances that the 
taxpayer will be paid back--I don't know how anybody can object to 
that--and, two, to the maximum extent we can, that we take politics out 
of the decisionmaking.
  So a proposal we will make will be a proposal to change the board 
that will end up making the loan and overseeing the credit transaction, 
overseeing the payment of the loans when they are due, and the 
collection of the principal and interest. Rather than having the 
Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Commerce, we would propose to 
have the chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank and the 
Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then have them, 
together with the Secretary of the Treasury, giving us a three-person 
board, all of whom will have expertise in finance and loans and 
investments.
  So that we can try to achieve two objectives, both of which are 
important: No. 1, try to make the loans in such a way that we maximize 
the chances that they are going to be paid back, because that saves the 
taxpayers money. Secondly, to the maximum extent possible, we don't 
want politics to play a role in who gets these loans if you want them 
made. It is one thing to say they should be made, but it is another 
thing, I think, to set up a structure where we are almost guaranteeing 
that the announcements of these loans will be political announcements 
rather than financial decisions that are made where the board 
represents, in a fiduciary way, the interest of the American taxpayer.
  So the second amendment we will undertake will be to change the 
makeup of the board to go to Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal 
Reserve Bank, as the effective chairman of the board; and then we will 
have the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the 
Secretary of the Treasury serving on the board. I think by doing that 
we will maximize the chances of achieving our objective of maximum 
fiscal responsibility and minimum politics.
  A third amendment we will offer is an amendment having to do with the 
maximum guarantee of a loan. It is virtually unheard of for the 
Government to guarantee 100 percent of the loan, because by 
guaranteeing 100 percent of the loan, we take any risk away from the 
lender. If the lender is not responsible for any portion of the loan, 
the lender has no effective monetary interest in trying to see that the 
borrower has the ability to pay it back--has both the capacity and the 
will. In virtually every program in the Federal Government that I am 
aware of, loan guarantees are such that the Government does take on 
some of the risk in order to encourage lenders to lend, but it always--
in virtually every case--leaves the lender with some residual risk, to 
try to encourage them to be responsible.

  The proposal we will make is that no loan will ever be guaranteed for 
more than 80 percent, so that anybody who is making this loan will have 
to incur a risk of 20 percent. Needless to say, if you are making a $10 
million loan and you are going to have to eat $2 million of it if it is 
not paid back, you are going to be a lot more judicious in making the 
loan than if somebody else is going to absorb the entire $10 million of 
loss if it is not paid back.
  So I think this is simply a good Government amendment. Again, if you 
believe these loans should be made, then they should be made in a way 
that doesn't take money from Social Security, which has an oversight 
board made up of people who have fiduciary responsibility, and who have 
the expertise and knowledge related to it, and who won't be political; 
and, finally, the loans themselves should be such that the actual 
lender has some stake in the loan being paid back.
  The fourth amendment we will offer today will be an amendment aimed 
at the minimum loan level. For some reason--and I don't understand it--
the authors of this amendment have put a minimum on the amount of loan 
that could be made. The minimum is quite large.
  So the net result of that, it seems to me, would be to tilt the 
lending toward specific would-be borrowers and to arbitrarily take 
loans away from small companies that might qualify but that might not 
be either willing or able to borrow the minimum amount.
  So the fourth amendment we propose offering today would be an 
amendment that says we will strike the minimum amount and then we will 
let the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Securities and 
Exchange Commission, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank Board 
decide, based on the applications that are available, who has the best 
creditworthiness, not who would be the biggest borrower.
  So those are the four issues that, it seems to me, there should be 
relatively little debate about.
  No. 1, don't take the money out of the Social Security trust fund.
  No. 2, appoint a board of people who know something about lending and 
who will be good stewards of the taxpayers' money and who won't play 
politics in making the loans.
  No. 3, don't guarantee 100 percent of the loan.
  When a bank is making a loan, require them to undertake some of the 
risk. After all, they are going to get the benefits of the interest 
payments.
  We propose not guaranteeing more than 80 percent of any loans. The 
additional advantage of that is that we could lend more money. If you 
think this lending is a good idea, then I don't see how you could be 
against spreading it more widely.
  Finally, we strike the provision of the bill that sets the minimum 
amount, since there is no logic to saying that we will not lend to 
small business.
  I mean, if there is any modern entity that has taken on the same 
political appeal that Thomas Jefferson's independent farmer had in 
1800, it is a small independent businessperson.
  If you think making these loans is a good idea, how can it make any 
sense to deny those loans to small business?
  Those are the four amendments that we would like to deal with today. 
There are other amendments we are

[[Page S7182]]

looking at, but these four are so clear-cut and so necessary that I 
wanted to put them out on the table early this afternoon.
  It is my understanding that perhaps Senator Domenici and Senator Byrd 
would want to sit down and talk about these. I think the sooner we can 
do that, the sooner we can start moving.
  Finally, I want to respond to Senator Byrd on the steel issue in 
explaining how I see it so differently.
  It is an interesting thing to me. The longer I live, the more I 
discover that when people disagree with you, there are almost two 
reasons. There is generally one of two reasons why they do, and 
sometimes both reasons. One is they have a different lens through which 
they see the world and view things and value things, and that leads to 
a different conclusion. Our founders, Jefferson, for example, 
recognized that good people with good intentions come to different 
conclusions.
  But a second reason that people often differ is a different 
perception of the facts.
  Let me just talk for a minute about the facts and why I believe that 
there will be disappointment if these loans are made, and why it is 
likely that to the extent that if the problem was real, it probably 
would not be solved by these loans.
  Second, I want to argue that at least in terms of steel--I wish I 
could say the same about oil and gas--but at least in terms of steel I 
believe that the crisis is past.
  Let me try, without holding my colleagues up, to just simply run 
through this real quickly.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Will the Senator yield to me for a moment?
  Mr. GRAMM. Yes. Certainly.
  Mr. DOMENICI. First, I want the Senator to know that more times than 
not this past year we have been on the floor on the same side. There is 
an interesting result, which I will not share with anybody when that 
happens.
  Mr. GRAMM. We always win.
  Mr. DOMENICI. But, on this one, I had a different view. I think 
before finishing today, by working with Senator Nickles and Senator 
Byrd we can bring this closer to some of the basic concerns.
  We will not get around to the notion that we will make guaranteed 
loans. In any event, we can't do that, but that would mean we give up 
our fight, I think, on some other issues. We can make the lending of 
them more objective--make it so there is a little bit of risk the 
borrower takes, and also we will discuss with Senator Byrd the makeup 
of the board. I can't say much about that. We have to talk about it.

  I am going to go to an appropriations meeting, and I will be back in 
15 or 20 minutes. I know Senator Nickles is here. I shared the same 
concerns with him. I understand he agrees not to offer amendments. We 
will have a meeting with Senator Byrd, and we will see what we can do 
about the Senator's amendments. I don't know about other amendments.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. Will the Senator yield for 10 seconds?
  Mr. GRAMM. I would be happy to yield.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. I thank the Senator.
  I wonder whether or not Senator Domenici is going to come back and 
speak. I wonder whether Senator Nickles wants to speak. I wonder if I 
can address the Senate, after Senator Nickles and Senator Domenici, and 
be allowed to speak on this bill.
  I thank the Senator.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. DOMENICI. Reserving the right to object, how long does the 
Senator intend to speak?
  Mr. WELLSTONE. Twenty minutes.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Go ahead of me. I have already spoken once. Let's 
change the order.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. After the Senator from Texas and the Senator from 
Oklahoma, I follow?
  Mr. DOMENICI. Yes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, let me try to explain why I look at the 
steel problem and see it so differently than our dear colleague from 
West Virginia.
  First of all, let me just review the facts that nobody disputes.
  In 1980, we had 459,000 Americans who were employed in the steel 
industry. Today, we have 163,000 Americans employed in producing steel. 
So employment between 1980 and 1997 declined from 459,000 to 163,000 
people.
  If you just looked at that number, you would say, well, domestic 
steel production must be just falling completely through the floor; 
that we must have a disaster in the domestic steel industry.
  The plain truth is that while employment fell from 459,000 
steelworkers to 163,000 steelworkers, the production of steel in the 
United States actually went up by 56 percent. In fact, on average, 
since 1980 we have seen about a 9,000-job-a-year decline in the number 
of people working in steel production. Because of technological change, 
we are using fewer workers to produce more steel.
  The complaint that is being lodged where it is being demanded first 
this week that we have the government guarantee loans to the steel 
industry and then next week where we impose a quota on steel imports 
triggering a trade war--remember, we have 40 people using steel in jobs 
for every one person making steel--all of that legislative effort is 
due to a belief that we lost 10,000 jobs this year in the steel 
industry. We have lost 9,000 a year every year since 1980.
  One of the reasons, despite all of this talk about the rush of 
imports and unfair trade practices, that the steel industry has never 
filed a section 201 claim is in part because of an inability to 
demonstrate that the problem is imports.
  In fact, in 1997 when we had the surge in imports, we had the largest 
domestic steel production in American history. In fact, in 1997 we 
produced 105 million tons of raw steel, which is an all-time record in 
steel production.
  Why did imports surge in 1997 when domestic production was at an all-
time high, where in fact some analysts believe that we had overcapacity 
utilization in 1997? What happened was the economy was exploding, for 
which we all rejoice. We were creating 7,500 jobs a day, which still 
continues to this day. Thank God. As a result, people are buying cars 
at record rates, people are building houses at record rates, and we are 
approaching 70 percent of Americans who own their own homes. They are 
buying refrigerators, washing machines, and dryers. All of those 
products use steel.

  We had a record level of domestic production and a record level of 
demand. What happened? We imported steel to fill the gap.
  I think it is also important to note that in 1998, the last year 
where we have records, production was still near an all-time record 
with 102 million tons. In fact, the steel industry earned profits in 
1998 of $1.4 billion.
  I am not complaining about that. If I could snap my fingers and make 
those profits $10 billion or $14 billion, I would do it --or $140 
billion. I don't have any objection to profits.
  But the point I want to make is that in this period where the 
argument is being made that steel is collapsing and that we are being 
drowned by imports, other than on wire rod, no steel company in America 
filed a 201 complaint about imports producing a loss of business for 
them, or costing jobs in their industry.
  When they don't file the 201 complaint, it suggests that they didn't 
have a case.
  Here is the point I am making: 9,000 jobs a year have been eliminated 
because of technological change where production has grown by 56 
percent. We are having the greatest economic boom in American history. 
We are creating 7,500 jobs a day. We have towns, and I'm very grateful 
that my hometown is one of them, where university students go after 
class to have a beer, and they have impressment gangs who come around 
and try to drag them off to factories.
  We are creating 7,500 jobs a day. In the name of 10,000 jobs that 
were probably lost because of technological change, we are being called 
upon to go back to the 1970s, to the policy of Jimmy Carter, and have 
the Government start lending money where we are guaranteed in advance 
we will lose $270 million on the loans upfront. Of course, the default 
when Jimmy Carter was President was 77 percent. If we had that kind of 
default rate, the loss would be many times the $270 million.

[[Page S7183]]

  We are creating more jobs in a day and a quarter than we are talking 
about, and we are jeopardizing those jobs by getting Government in 
exactly the kind of situation we are begging the Japanese to get out 
of: Getting America into crony capitalism, where we are trying to 
institute industrial policy, where Government is making decisions 
instead of the credit markets.
  Second, we are getting ready next week under exactly the same heading 
to debate a provision that would literally start a trade war which 
could destroy millions of American jobs when there is not hard evidence 
these jobs have been lost because of imports.
  Finally, as if all that were not enough, if the problem really 
existed, it has already been solved. American imports of steel have 
declined 28 percent since November of 1998. Russian imported steel is 
down by 96.6 percent; Japanese steel is down by 74.4 percent; Brazilian 
imports are down by 24.4 percent; and Korean imports are down by 46.8 
percent. Imports from all countries are down dramatically.
  Even if this was a problem, as normally happens in these political 
debates, we are a year late.
  I am sympathetic to this problem. I am very sympathetic because my 
State is affected by these problems. The point is, we are not going to 
fix these problems by having the Government come in and lend money to 
an industry as it did when Jimmy Carter was President.
  Some people said the other day that when Jimmy Carter was President, 
we had to do it because the inflation rate was in double digits and 
interest rates were at 21\1/2\ percent. That is true. But were 
inflation rates in double digits and interest rates 21\1/2\ percent 
because we had Government trying to run the economy? Isn't that what we 
changed in the 1980 election?
  I don't want to go back to the policies of the Carter administration. 
This is 1999. That is why I am not for this provision. It is not 
because I'm not sympathetic to someone who lost a job in the steel 
industry. If that job was lost due to technological change--and the 
evidence is pretty overwhelming that it was--do we benefit anybody by 
lending money when we know that a substantial default on the loans will 
occur?
  It seems to me what we need to be doing is to try to promote economic 
growth where people can find jobs and, hopefully, better jobs than they 
lost. When you have technological change in one industry that 
eliminates jobs and you have new technology in others, that creates 
jobs.
  This is a tough issue. It is always easy and, I think, always 
tempting to try to say if anybody in America loses a job for whatever 
reason that the Government ought to do something about it. I remind my 
colleagues that in a day and a quarter we create more jobs in the 
private sector of the economy with the economic policies of open trade 
and private capital allocation and basic free enterprise; we are 
creating more jobs in a day and a quarter than anyone is claiming that 
steel has lost in the last year.

  We have to weigh this point. Isn't it distinctly possible under those 
circumstances that we could lose more jobs by starting a trade war or 
getting Government into industrial policy than we will save by doing 
those two things? Then those jobs might be lost anyway as a result of 
continued technological change.
  It is because I am concerned about working Americans, it is because I 
am concerned about keeping this recovery going, it is because I want to 
keep creating 7,500 jobs a day that I am not for these loan guarantees.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Smith of New Hampshire). The Senator from 
Oklahoma.
  Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I compliment my friend and colleague from 
Texas. I hope his speech is one that all Members of the Senate have 
listened to. I happen to agree with him, I think this bill is a 
mistake.
  I spoke on this bill. We only had 5 minutes before we voted on this. 
The first debate we had on this was actually 10 minutes for the 
proponents, 10 minutes for the opponents. That was the only debate we 
have had on the floor of the Senate. That was on a motion of cloture. 
For people who don't know what that is, it is a motion to proceed to 
debate the bill.
  I told the proponents of the bill, Senator Byrd and Senator Domenici, 
I will object to the bill; I will debate against it; I will offer 
amendments against it. However, I will not filibuster it. If they get 
cloture, they get cloture.
  They got cloture. I lost. I happen to think I was right on the issue.
  I will follow through. I said I would amend it. I told Senator Byrd I 
would not offer a bunch of dilatory amendments. I will not go into 
extraneous matters. I will try to make a bad bill better. I don't think 
this is a good bill. I don't think it should pass. I don't think it 
should become law. I will work to see that it doesn't. This is one step 
in the process.
  Let me say why I think this is a bad bill. I have great respect for 
Senator Byrd and Senator Domenici. They are very effective legislators. 
They have convinced a lot of people we should move forward. My 
compliments to them. I don't happen to think they are right on this 
bill.
  Looking back at loan guarantees, the last time we did this we 
actually ended up having net loan guarantees of $290 million and 
defaulted on $222 million. That is a default rate of 77 percent. That 
means taxpayers had to write a check for $222 million out of a total 
loan guarantee of $290 million. That is a terrible, terrible failure.
  I will mention a couple of things. That is a failure by my words, but 
it is a failure according to Members of previous administrations.
  I will just give you a couple of comments:

       Less than a decade later, all 5 loans [talking about steel 
     loans] are in default.

  And the Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration, in 
an internal memorandum notes:

       By any measurement, EDA's steel loan program would have to 
     be considered a failure. The program is an excellent example 
     of the folly inherent in industrial policy programs.

  They are exactly right. Other countries do not do this. They believe 
in the private sector. We believe in it. We believe in developing 
private capitalism. Let bankers take risks, have investments, have the 
right to succeed and the right to fail.
  Now we are on the floor of the Senate and we say, wait a minute, not 
in steel or not in oil and gas; those are two vital industries. I agree 
these are vital industries, but I do not think this bill will help them 
one iota. It did not help in 1978 and 1979. It cost taxpayers millions 
of dollars; it was a boondoggle, it was a failure. Why should we repeat 
it? We know better.
  I am sympathetic when people say we have lost jobs and these are 
really tough times. I will tell you, it is a lot tougher in the oil 
patch than it is in the steel industry, and I think that is the reason 
Senator Domenici offered his amendment. The oil patch lost 50,000 jobs; 
the steel industry lost 10,000. But I do not think this is the right 
solution to help the oil patch. If I did, I would support it. I have 
been pretty supportive of the oil patch in my tenure in the Senate, but 
Government loan guarantees is not the solution.
  I have talked to our producers. I have talked to the people. They do 
not want it, they do not need it, and it will not help to have a 
Government loan guarantee. It will not help. That is not the solution.
  Not everybody in the oil patch and not everybody in the steel 
industry is losing money. There are 16 big steel companies, 12 of which 
are profitable. A lot of them do not even want it. A lot of them do not 
need it. What will they do, if one company gets a loan guarantee and 
gets a subsidized low-interest loan, say, at 6 percent and they are 
paying 9 percent? They will say: Wait a minute, we are in a competitive 
field. How in the world can we allow this company, a competitor, to go 
out and borrow money with the Government guaranteeing it? They get a 
lot better interest rate. We are competing with them. When they are 
doing it, we had better do it.
  So we are, in effect, going to give U.S. Steel or Bethlehem Steel a 
loan guarantee? Those are companies that are probably doing fine, and 
they probably do not want this. I doubt they do. I hope they do not. 
Are they going to let their competitors go in and get a competitive 
advantage? So maybe there will be a race to grab some of

[[Page S7184]]

this money. We should not be exposing taxpayers to that kind of risk.
  We should not be circumventing the marketplace. We know the Secretary 
of Labor, Alexis Herman, is a great lady. I have great respect for her. 
But I don't think she knows better than bankers in the United States 
whether a loan should be made or not; or, for that matter, the 
Secretary of Commerce or the Secretary of the Treasury. This bill says 
they know better, frankly, than all the bankers, all the capitalists in 
this country. The Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Commerce, and 
the Secretary of the Treasury would be making the loans for a billion 
and a half dollars. They are going to guarantee, the Federal 
Government, we will back that loan up. If it fails, we will write a 
check. That is what this bill does.
  You cannot say the bill is without cost. It has been estimated the 
bill could cost taxpayers $270 million. That is not an insignificant 
amount of money. That is a guess. That is an absolute guess. If we have 
default rates like we had 20 years ago, it will be over a billion 
dollars Uncle Sam will be writing a check for. I do not have a great 
deal of confidence the Secretary of Labor or the Secretary of Commerce 
can make the right decisions.

  This bill has a provision that allows the Government to guarantee 
basically 100 percent of the loan. That doesn't make any sense. When 
you get into a loan guarantee, most of our Federal programs guarantee 
70 percent, 75 percent, 80 percent, in some cases 90 percent. Almost 
all small business loans are guaranteed at 90 percent or less. This 
bill says there can be 100 percent. What sense does that make?
  I mentioned that we are going to offer some amendments to make some 
changes. I am hopeful the sponsors of this legislation will support us 
in an effort to adopt those changes. Let me just go over some of the 
amendments I think will make a bad bill less bad. It still will not 
make it, in my opinion, worthy of passage, but as I told the sponsors, 
I am not going to filibuster the bill indefinitely. I am going to offer 
some germane amendments.
  One will be to change the composition of the board. Instead of having 
the Labor Secretary and the Commerce Secretary and Treasury Secretary 
make these decisions, the Treasury Secretary would be a member of the 
board, and he would serve as chairman--in addition the Chairman of the 
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Chairman of 
the Securities and Exchange Commission would serve. They would replace 
the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Commerce.
  It does a couple of things. It gets politics out of it for a lot of 
purposes. The SEC and the Fed are not as politically in tune as a 
Cabinet-level Secretary. I think it offers a little more balanced 
business perspective. I think it would complement the board and make it 
a better board. So that would be one amendment. Hopefully, it will be 
passed.
  Another amendment would be to establish an 80-percent maximum loan 
guarantee. Instead of having a 100-percent loan guarantee, the maximum 
would be 80 percent. So the Federal Government, if this board says okay 
to a steel company or an oil company, we are going to lend up to $100 
million, the maximum exposure of the Federal Government on that $100 
million loan will be $80 million. That means a private financial 
institution which is lending the other $20 million has something at 
risk, and if it fails, they will lose a little bit of money too. It 
will make people a little more prudent when they start applying this 
idea of using Government money or Government guarantees. So, hopefully, 
that will pass.
  We have another amendment that would strike the minimum loan levels. 
Some people say: Why did you have the board set up? We did not pass 
this bill. It passed the Senate one time but not with a direct vote. It 
never went through any authorizing committee. It did not go through the 
Banking Committee in the House or the Senate. No one has looked at it. 
Basically, this has been crafted and it really has not been 
scrutinized. I think we are pulling out some of the deficiencies of the 
bill.
  One of the deficiencies in the underlying bill says we will have 
minimum loan levels. In steel, the lowest, smallest loan they could 
make would be $25 million. Small steel companies, don't apply. This is 
for big steel. In other words, the loan levels in this package--as 
drafted, would have to be between $25 million and a maximum of $250 
million. That is what the Federal Government guarantees. It would not 
guarantee a $10 million loan or a $5 million loan. We want to strike 
the minimum levels for both steel and oil and gas.
  It says, for iron ore, the minimum level was $6 million; oil and gas, 
the minimum level loan guarantee would be $250,000. I probably have 
more small producers in my State than any State, with the possible 
exception of Texas, and why in the world would we have a Federal loan 
guarantee program? But, oh, if you can't borrow at least a quarter of a 
million dollars, don't apply. Does that make any sense?
  We have thousands of producers in our State. Frankly, most of our 
wells produce about 2 barrels a day, 2.5 barrels a day. If we are going 
to help people, are we really going to say, you have to be pretty big 
before we are going to help you? I don't think that makes sense. So we 
are going to have an amendment to strike the minimum loan levels. I 
think that would be important.

  One other amendment I hope and expect we will be successful in 
passing, would be to strike the emergency spending designations in the 
bill or make a point of order that emergency spending does not lie. I 
hope, if anybody in this body is going to make statements such as ``we 
want to protect Social Security, and we don't want to spend those 
Social Security revenues,'' they better support this amendment. Because 
I want to make sure everybody understands, when we are talking about 
striking the emergency section, what it means. If you have the 
emergency section in there, it means the budget doesn't apply. It means 
we are going to add that amount of money to the caps. It means you are 
going to be taking that money out of the surplus and, in this case, 100 
percent of that money is the Social Security surplus. So you are 
raiding the Social Security surplus, raiding the Social Security funds 
in order to be giving loan guarantees to steel and oil and gas.
  I do not know if that sells in Minnesota, but it doesn't sell in 
Oklahoma. It is ludicrous to say we are going to have an emergency 
designation on this. An emergency basically means the budget does not 
apply. Maybe some people do not want to have a budget.
  We just passed a big bill for Kosovo. We declared it an emergency. It 
was a net of $13 billion. We said it was an emergency; the budget cap 
doesn't apply. Some people say that was wartime, it is understandable, 
and so on, even though we increased the numbers rather significantly. 
That is one thing. Are we going to do it 2 weeks later and say that now 
we have an emergency steel loan program; we are going to have to 
declare that an emergency? Are we going to have to do that every 2 
weeks? How many times are we going to declare an emergency? If we are 
going to do it every 2 weeks, let's just stop the charade and don't 
even have a budget.
  Just forget having a budget. It is not necessary. We can just 
appropriate whatever money we want to spend and see how much it is at 
the end of the year. That, in effect, is what we are doing when we 
repeatedly declare something an emergency.
  We are going to make a point of order on the emergency provision, and 
I hope we will be successful. I am going to venture to say on all four 
amendments, we will be successful. I expect we will be.
  I appreciate the fact that Senator Domenici has communicated to us 
already he is willing to see if we can work something out on these 
amendments. It is vitally important we do so.
  We do not really believe in this concept of industrial policy where 
the Federal Government is going to supersede the private sector and 
make financial decisions. Some countries try that. Communist countries 
try it. Socialistic countries try it. Frankly, it does not work very 
well. Look at third world growth rate and see how many jobs they 
create. They do not work well.
  Why would we start doing it? We tried it 20 years ago, and it was a 
dismal failure, a total, complete failure. Basically what they are 
saying is we want to replace the marketplace with political wisdom. It 
is a serious mistake. Again, my State has had

[[Page S7185]]

percentagewise as big a job loss as any, and I still think it would be 
a serious mistake.
  Finally, obviously, big steel has a lot of clout. We are considering 
this bill, and there is another bill which just went through the 
Finance Committee dealing with section 301. Then there is a bill that 
the House has already passed dealing with steel quotas. I believe the 
majority leader said we are going to be voting on that next week. There 
will be a cloture vote on whether we should take it up. I urge my 
colleagues to vote no on cloture and defeat the steel quota bill.
  Today I asked Mr. Summers, who is the nominee for Secretary of the 
Treasury, what his position is on the bill. In the past, we heard the 
President was against it. He said his advisers will be recommending the 
President veto it. That is the right position. They should veto it.
  One has to ask a couple of questions: Do you believe in GATT, the 
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which has made it possible for 
us to have a greater economic activity worldwide? If you believe in it, 
the steel quota bill is totally, completely inconsistent with GATT. 
Totally. Our trading partners would retaliate.
  If you think if we pass this steel quotas bill, that it is going to 
protect steel jobs, it will not, because there will be retaliation. The 
retaliation in many cases will be: We are not going to buy some of your 
other products.
  You may think we are saving a few steel jobs, but the net result is 
we are going to lose a lot more jobs throughout the economy--not a few, 
a lot more--and maybe even start a real trade war. That is a serious 
mistake. We should not do that.
  I urge my colleagues, if you believe in free trade, if you believe in 
GATT, if you believe in negotiations--that does not mean we cannot take 
retaliatory action if somebody is dumping. The administration has 
already imposed antidumping tariffs on Brazil and Japan. There are 
proper avenues to do that. A steel quota is not one, and loan 
guarantees is not one.
  I urge my colleagues to support the amendments that Senator Gramm and 
myself, and I believe Senator McCain, will be offering shortly this 
afternoon. Maybe we can have them agreed to. If not, I hope we will 
have votes and they will be adopted. I urge my colleagues to vote no on 
final passage on this bill.
  Mr. GRAMM. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. NICKLES. I will be happy to yield.
  Mr. GRAMM. I want to be quick because I know our dear colleague is 
waiting. When the Senator talked about the minimum, he may have 
misplaced a decimal point. Under this bill, the minimum loan is $25 
million for steel.

  Mr. NICKLES. That is correct.
  Mr. GRAMM. The second thing I want to know, is the Senator aware that 
mining has been added to where the loans can now go to iron ore 
companies as well with a $6 million minimum?
  Mr. NICKLES. I did not mention that in my statement. The Senator is 
exactly right. Under the iron ore loan guarantee, the minimum loan is 
$6 million, a maximum loan of $30 million.
  Mr. GRAMM. I congratulate the Senator. His remarks were excellent. I 
agree with every point he made, and I believe a couple of things are 
important. This is not going to be the last one of these we do if we do 
this one. If we have already expanded this to iron ore, and we have 
steel and it was expanded in committee to oil and gas, does anybody 
doubt, if we pass this one, that 2 weeks from now, we are going to be 
back passing another one and another one and another one?
  Mr. NICKLES. Good point.
  Mr. GRAMM. The amazing thing is that we are getting the Government 
involved in allocating credit at a time when we are creating jobs at a 
record rate on net of 7,500 jobs a week.
  Finally, I ask the Senator if he is aware that in a Los Angeles Times 
article in March, it pointed out there is expansion in the steel 
industry in that seven new plants will come on line this year, but each 
one of them, very interestingly, will employ 200 or fewer people. What 
is happening is, these small companies, with a small number of 
employees producing specialized products, are really outcompeting the 
bigger companies.
  In looking at the assessments by Wall Street, they are bullish on 
steel in general, and the three companies which have gone bankrupt, 
they say have gone bankrupt because they are too highly leveraged and 
they bet on technology that did not pay off.
  Mr. NICKLES. I appreciate the Senator's comment. I was not aware of 
the article. I am aware of the fact the steel industry as a whole is 
not doing all that bad. I mentioned, I believe, in my comments that 12 
out of 16 of the larger companies are all profitable. Not all 
companies, but several companies are profitable.
  The Senator mentioned seven new plants. I was not aware of that. That 
is an excellent point. I do not think they are clamoring for 
Washington, DC, to give them a loan guarantee. I have not had them 
knocking on my door saying give us a loan guarantee. If they do, I 
certainly would not want to be an investor. If somebody in the steel 
industry is knocking on the door saying, we need the Government to give 
us a loan guarantee, that is a bad sign, poor management, and they are 
in serious trouble.
  Mr. GRAMM. I thank my colleague.
  Mr. NICKLES. I thank my friend and colleague from Minnesota, and I 
yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota is recognized.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I say to both my colleagues, actually 
sometimes coming down and waiting to speak is positive. You get to hear 
people, as my colleague from Texas said, who see it through different 
lenses, who see it a different way.
  What I want to do is, first of all, try to bring this debate back to 
people and talk about it in very personal terms as it affects people in 
my State of Minnesota. Then I want to speak to what I believe has been 
a political economy argument that has been made, and I take sharp 
exception with what my colleagues have had to say.
  As to Minnesota, believe me, the loan guarantees in this legislation 
will be much appreciated in my State of Minnesota.
  My colleagues also mentioned the iron ore mine operations and the 
steel loan guarantee program sets a $30 million ceiling for iron ore 
companies. That is going to be particularly important to the Iron Range 
in northern Minnesota.
  One hears a lot in the media about the Goldilocks economy we have. I 
heard some of my colleagues talk about this Goldilocks economy and how 
great it is; it is a booming economy, we are just humming along. For 
many of our people in Minnesota, especially on the Iron Range in 
northeast Minnesota, this Goldilocks economy is much too cold.
  Already, 10,000 workers have lost their jobs due to a flood of 
illegally dumped imports. This is the worst crisis the steel industry 
has faced since the mid-1980s when 28,000 people left the Iron Range in 
Minnesota for good. We do not want to let it happen again. That is what 
this debate is about: people's lives, about whether or not we are going 
to see more broken lives, more broken dreams, more broken 
families. Now, all these statistics that my colleagues have been laying 
out, they affect real people in real communities. The surge of steel 
imports over the past year or so threatens thousands of people in 
northern Minnesota because iron ore mining is the mainstay of the Iron 
Range economy.

  I thought what I would do, since we have heard all these abstract 
economic theories laid out here, is tell you a little bit about the 
Iron Range, about the communities, about the people whose future we 
hold in our hands.
  Let me repeat that. I want to talk about the people and the 
communities of the Iron Range, because we hold their future in our 
hands.
  More than 20,000 jobs in northern Minnesota depend on the iron ore 
industry, though less than a third of those workers actually work in 
the mines. The industry purchases over $876 million in goods and 
services annually from nearly 200 Minnesota communities, and it 
contributes more than $1 billion annually to our State's economy. The 
taconite production tax provides nearly $100 million annually for the 
support of Iron Range counties, cities, townships, and school 
districts, and it provides funding for economic development and 
property tax relief as well.

[[Page S7186]]

  Most of this country's iron ore reserves are in the form of low-grade 
taconite found on the Mesabi Range of Minnesota. There is no shortage 
of taconite. In fact, the Mesabi Range holds about 200 years worth of 
pellet reserves. But the challenge has been to continue mining and 
processing taconite in a cost-efficient way.
  I agree with my colleagues when they talk about the importance of 
being able to compete. No question about it. Back in the 1980s, the 
industry was told they had to modernize in order to compete with 
foreign steel. And they did just that. They played by the rules of the 
game. They poured $1 billion of investment into modernization, and they 
shed 10,000 jobs. As a result, the industry now has only 6,000 workers, 
and this industry is the world's most efficient.
  With the boom in the national economy, some people in the Iron Range 
were starting to hope that they could dig their way out of the debt 
they piled up during the 1980s, make an addition to their house, save 
some money for their kids' college education, and attend to some of the 
needs they had too long neglected. But sadly, because of the steel 
crisis, many of those dreams have proved to be short-lived.
  In 1998, LTV Steel Mining Company in Hoyt Lakes, MN, was forced to 
reduce its fourth quarter production by 360,000 tons, an equivalent of 
66 jobs. Employees at US-Minntac in Mt. Iron, MN, were forced to make 
concessions last fall to prevent 133 layoffs. Employees at EVTAC in 
Eveleth, MN, now have nothing left to give. EVTAC permanently laid off 
168 employees, a quarter of its employees, when it shut down one of its 
two pelletizing furnaces last week. EVTAC is fighting hard to stay out 
of Chapter 11. Two other Iron Range taconite facilities, Butler 
Taconite and Reserve Mining Company, both closed under similar 
circumstances in the mid-1980s. We do not want to go through that 
again.
  The workers who were laid off at EVTAC, and workers throughout the 
Iron Range, and steelworkers all across the country are all looking to 
us for some help. That is where they should look. This crisis is not 
their fault. They were told to modernize and they did. This crisis is 
the result of illegal dumping. Unless we want to see a repeat of the 
1980s, we must act.
  Again, this piece of legislation, this loan guarantee is a good first 
step, but it is only a first step. Soon we are going to be considering 
legislation introduced by Senator Rockefeller which will provide even 
more effective relief. I will be joining Senator Rockefeller, and other 
Senators will be joining him, Democrats and Republicans. I heard some 
of my colleagues speak to that legislation, and I want to respond to 
some of their arguments.
  It is unfortunate that we are in this difficult situation. We should 
have acted sooner. U.S. trade laws and the WTO recognize the legitimate 
need of every country to prevent extraordinary import surges such as 
this one from destroying its industrial infrastructure and eliminating 
thousands of jobs. Under section 201--let me be bipartisan in my 
critique--the administration could have imposed the same remedies as 
now provided in the Rockefeller bill.

  Steelworkers played by the rules when they modernized their industry, 
and steelworkers paid the price for that modernization. They made the 
sacrifice. Steelworkers also played by the rules when they asked for 
Section 201 relief. But they didn't get it. The administration was 
implored for months to take action under section 201, and it chose not 
to do so. Now foreign steel exporters are the ones breaking the rules.
  The question is not who is playing by the rules but, rather, which 
rules the administration chooses to apply. Now, my colleagues--as it 
turns out, Republican colleagues, though I am being critical of my 
administration, a Democratic administration--my colleagues talk about 
how this crisis is all the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand. But 
that is not quite the political economy that we are looking at.
  The administration did not hesitate to slap 100-percent tariffs on 
imports from the EU when a top campaign contributor to both parties, 
Carl Lindner of Chiquita Bananas, had a trade complaint. Lindner's 
dispute with the EU hardly even involves American jobs. It concerns 
bananas grown in Central America. But we were there for them. Now when 
American steelworkers ask for existing trade laws to be applied, 
they're given short shrift. The message this sends to American 
manufacturing workers is that they are not a priority.
  Moreover, this administration went the extra mile, working through 
the International Monetary Fund, to organize bailouts for Wall Street 
investors when their risky investments turned sour in Indonesia, 
Brazil, Korea, Russia and Mexico. But when American steelworkers asked 
for similar consideration under existing trade rules, they get short 
shrift.
  So my colleagues come out here on the floor and they say this bill is 
terrible. The government getting involved in any kind of loan 
guarantees? This is the government running the economy.
  That's hardly the case. When steelworkers say: How about some relief 
for us, how about some consideration for us under existing trade rules, 
my colleagues come out here on the floor and they say, this would lead 
to trade wars. This would do damage to Adam Smith's invisible hand. We 
can't do that.
  I didn't hear those same colleagues when it came to the IMF 
organizing a bailout for the Wall Street investors when their 
investments went bad in Indonesia or Korea or Russia. I didn't hear the 
same colleagues come out and say: Oh my gosh, we have a government 
institution that's involved. When it's these Wall Street interests, it 
is fine. But when the workers ask for some support, it is not so fine.
  The administration is concerned that limiting imports from Brazil, 
Japan and Russia could hurt their slumping economies. I have some 
sympathy for that argument. We should all be concerned about reviving 
growth in these countries. But American steelworkers are not a foreign 
aid charity. They should not be asked to pay the ultimate price, to pay 
with their jobs, for the failure of this administration's foreign 
economic policy. And I might add--given what some of my colleagues have 
said on the other side--I think the failure in foreign economic policy 
is also a failure of the Congress.
  When the Clinton administration, working through the IMF, helped bail 
out Wall Street investors in Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Korea and 
Mexico, it committed public resources. It didn't ask Wall Street to 
pick up the tab by itself, even though the major industrial 
institutional investors were by far the biggest beneficiaries of the 
bailout. The administration and some of my colleagues on the other side 
are now asking steelworkers to pay a price that they would never ask of 
Wall Street.
  I hope we can pass that Rockefeller legislation next week. I hope the 
White House will withdraw its opposition and sign it into law. I heard 
my colleague from Oklahoma say that he had talked to Secretary Summers 
and he said the administration was going to veto this bill. I hope they 
will change their mind.
  I say to the administration, you were there for the big investors 
when their investments went sour in some of these other countries. You 
used public money to help bail them out. You ought to have the same 
concern for steelworkers and working families in our country.
  But we need to do even more than that. We need to widen our focus a 
little bit and address the root causes of this crisis. I heard my 
colleague from Texas speak about what has gone wrong, and I want to 
quarrel with his interpretation of international political economy. I 
think we should be working to change the rules of the global economy so 
that these kind of devastating crises do not keep happening.
  I am not worried, like my colleagues are, about these loan 
guarantees. They will make a difference to an important industry in our 
country and will be important to so many working families. What I am 
worried about is our failure to make some changes in this global 
economy so we don't keep having these devastating crises happening over 
and over again. I am surprised I have not heard my colleague talk about 
this at all.
  The long-term solution to this crisis is restoring economic growth 
around the world. The steel crisis was precipitated by the collapse of 
global demand following the Asian crisis, and worsened by the economic 
crises in Russia

[[Page S7187]]

and Brazil. Excess steel production is being dumped in the United 
States because our country is one of the few economies in the world 
that is growing right now. Only when we have global economic growth, 
only when this growth revives, will foreign steel producers consume 
more of their own steel production and find export markets other than 
the United States.
  Although the administration claims to be working to revive foreign 
demand, its actions speak louder than its words. In fact, I believe its 
policies are marching in the opposite direction. They have tended to 
promote a ``race to the bottom''--a global trade competition that 
rewards those countries that can attract foreign capital by advertising 
the lowest labor, lowest environmental, and lowest safety standards, 
rather than raising environmental and labor and safety standards 
overseas.
  When my colleague from Texas talks about the international economy, I 
will simply say, no wonder we are in trouble with these trade 
agreements that don't make sure there are some environmental standards 
and fair labor standards that other countries have to live up to. What 
you have is a situation where those countries have a workforce that 
can't buy anything. There is no demand for what we produce.
  Those countries tried to export themselves out of the crisis, and our 
working families are hurt both ways. We are hurt because we can't 
export to those countries, because the people there don't have any 
money to buy. At the same time, we are competing against people who are 
working under exploitive, grinding labor conditions. This is the race 
to the bottom.
  Why in the world has this administration not adopted a trade policy 
that makes much more sense for working people in this country, and for 
working people in other countries as well? Why, when my colleagues come 
to the floor, do they continue to talk about this international economy 
as if it were a level playing field? We dare not speak about any fair 
labor standards or environmental standards or any safety standards.
  Despite recent encouraging economic news, there is compelling 
evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with the world economy. 
First, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the global economy 
cannot tolerate ever-increasing inequality among countries and within 
countries. Policies that lead to the replacement of good-paying union 
jobs with jobs that pay subsistence-level wages only contribute to 
growing and dangerous imbalances in the global system. Widening 
inequality at home and abroad depresses the consumer demand necessary 
to fuel our economic growth. We need to encourage foreign countries to 
raise their wages and increase demand, so they can consume more of 
their own production and stop dumping surplus production on our 
markets.
  Similarly, I believe we must reexamine the orthodox view that export-
led development is the key to prosperity. Not everyone can rely on 
export markets for their economic growth. The entry of subsistence-wage 
China into global competition makes this all too clear. Somebody has to 
buy all of those exports. For too long the United States has been the 
buyer of last resort, absorbing excess production from all the export 
powerhouses. While cold war responsibilities obliged us to play that 
role in the past, we cannot do this forever. If we want to have a 
manufacturing sector  in our own country, we should aim to make exports 
a complement, rather than a substitute, to healthy domestic demand.

  Third, we must come to grips with the related problem of overcapacity 
and excess production. For various reasons, in industry after industry, 
gluts have developed in the world economy. The problem of overcapacity 
is now made worse by the recession and deflation in Asia, Russia, and 
South America. We need progrowth, stimulative economic policies to 
restore some of that lost demand. Simply absorbing excess foreign 
production in the U.S. market is not a solution. We cannot indefinitely 
run record trade deficits that hollow out American industry, put 
American workers out of work, and lead to growing economic inequality.
  Finally, I believe this administration must rethink its zealous 
commitment to unfettered capital flows, despite the fact that this is a 
top priority of the U.S. financial interests. Numerous economists have 
agreed that misguided Treasury, IMF, and OECD promotion of capital 
account liberalization was an important cause of the Asian crisis. The 
enormous amount of capital sloshing around the globe at lightning speed 
injects too much instability into the world economy, and it magnifies 
the dangers of capital flight, which the IMF cites as justification for 
plunging Brazil and other economies into deep recession.
  Instead of placing a priority on the interests of Wall Street 
investors, the Clinton administration and some of my Republican 
colleagues should look out more for the interests of average Americans, 
such as American steelworkers. Its top priority should be Main Street, 
not Wall Street. It should ignore Wall Street's demands for more IMF 
austerity overseas, which is designed to safeguard Wall Street 
investments but ends up creating problems that are later dumped on the 
backs of American workers. The administration should promote worker 
rights overseas, rather than demanding antilabor changes in foreign 
countries' labor laws--as it has done for years, to the applause of 
Wall Street. And it should promote policies that reduce economic 
inequality overseas by ensuring that the growth is more broad-based and 
less lopsided.
  By promoting more robust, more balanced growth, stronger unions, and 
more widely shared prosperity overseas, we can help create enough 
foreign demand so that these countries can consume more of their own 
production and stop dumping their excess production on our markets. 
That is the core problem. Looking out for average working people here 
in the United States and overseas is a win-win proposition.
  We need a change in policy. Last month, our trade deficit reached 
record levels. Without a change in course, I am afraid this 
administration will simply repeat the mistakes of the late 1970s and 
1980s, when over 350,000 steelworkers lost their jobs and 28,000 
workers left the Iron Range for good.
  This is why I speak on the floor of the Senate, not just to support 
this loan guarantee legislation today, which we need and which is 
important, but also to support the bill Senator Rockefeller will bring 
to the floor next week that I intend to be out here supporting.
  I am afraid that this administration's solution to the global 
economic crisis, and I am afraid given what I heard my colleague from 
Oklahoma and my colleague from Texas say on the floor of the Senate, 
that their solution to the global economic crisis will be to ask 
Americans to continue absorbing more and more imports. Their solution 
will be to ask--mainly unionized--manufacturing workers to look for 
jobs elsewhere.
  Mr. President, this is no solution at all.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Fitzgerald). Under the previous order, the 
Senator from New Mexico is recognized.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I note the presence on the floor of 
Senator DeWine. Does he want to speak?
  Mr. DeWINE. I would like to speak for about 10 minutes.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I may yield 
to the Senator from Ohio and that I be recognized when he finishes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Ohio is recognized.
  Mr. DeWINE. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from New Mexico. I 
will try to be brief.
  I rise today to support the bill my colleague from New Mexico, 
Senator Domenici, and Senator Byrd, have brought to the floor. This 
bill has great significance in my home State, but I think it also has 
great significance for this country.
  I rise today to express my strong support for this bill. Our steel 
industry today is in trouble. Why? I think as we engage in this debate 
we need to start at the beginning of the story.
  To my colleagues who have risen on the floor this afternoon opposed 
to this bill, I would point out one thing that I think their comments 
have failed to reflect; that is, we are here today because of illegal 
activity. We are here today because of illegal dumping of

[[Page S7188]]

steel into the United States. That is an uncontroverted fact. That is 
what the truth is. That is what the finding has been. Steel has been 
dumped repeatedly, month after month after month, and it has been 
dumped illegally. That has been the findings. That is why we are here 
today.
  Last year, U.S. steel producers had to withstand an onslaught of 
illegally imported steel. In 1998, 41 million tons were dumped. That 
represented an 83-percent increase of imported steel for the previous 8 
years. In other words, if you took the previous 8 years and looked at 
the amount of imported steel on the average for those 8 years, what you 
would find is that when we got to 1998, and compared 1998 to the 
previous 8 years, it went up 83 percent. That is a phenomenal increase 
in the importation of steel. It is no accident. This was clearly 
dumped.
  Many steel companies are, obviously, reporting financial losses, most 
attributable to the high levels of illegal steel imports. It has been 
estimated that 10,000 Americans--10,000 workers, 10,000 families--have 
already lost their jobs because of this illegal dumping. The 
Independent Steelworkers predict job losses as high as 165,000, if 
steel dumping is not stopped.
  I introduced a bill. Some of my colleagues in the Senate have 
introduced other bills--Senator Byrd, Senator Rockefeller, Senator 
Specter, Senator Santorum. It is legislation that we will be taking up 
shortly. I believe it is time for action. All eyes of this country and 
the world are today on the Senate. The question is, Will we respond to 
this crisis?
  Certainly a good first step would be the adoption of the bill before 
us, Senator Byrd's steel emergency loan guarantee program. This loan 
program is designed to help troubled steel producers that have been 
hurt by the record levels of illegally imported steel. For many 
companies, this program is the only hope they have to keep their mills 
alive and their workers working.
  Specifically, the program would provide qualified U.S. producers with 
access to a 2-year $1 billion revolving guarantee loan fund. In order 
to qualify, steel producers would be required to give substantive 
assurances that they would repay the loans.
  A strong and healthy steel industry is absolutely vital to our 
country. It is vital to our national defense. This bill has a lot to do 
with national defense. It is essential, if we are going to have the 
national defense we want--if we are going to have the security we want 
in this country--that we always have a vibrant, energetic, tough steel 
industry. This bill speaks to that issue.
  This bill also has to do with an even bigger issue; that is, whether 
or not in this country we are going to continue to make things and 
manufacture things and be producers.
  There are some people who have been quoted--some people even in this 
administration who have been quoted--saying things which would give you 
the impression they really do not care if we produce things anymore, 
that being a service-driven economy and an information-driven economy 
is enough. While service is good and information is good, and they 
produce jobs, we still have to produce. We still must be a 
manufacturing country, if we are going to retain our greatness.
  Fortunately, today, our steel industry is a highly efficient and 
globally competitive industry. It wasn't too many years ago that the 
critics of the steel industry, sometimes very correctly, would 
criticize the industry. They would say: You are fat, you are flabby, 
you are not tough enough, you are not lean enough, you have to invest, 
you have to modernize, and you have to do things differently.
  As a result of that, and as a result of some very tough times in the 
1970s and 1980s, the steel industry in this country did that. They did 
it. They invested billions of dollars. They modernized. They made the 
tough and the hard decisions that they had to make to be efficient. 
Yes, the workers made sacrifices as well. The unions made sacrifices as 
well. Everyone knew they had to pull together. It was not always easy, 
but the result is that we have a steel industry today in this country 
that is better than any steel industry in the world.
  If you strip away the subsidies by other countries that are 
subsidizing their steel industries, you will find that we can compete 
with any company in the world--with any country in the world--in the 
production of steel.
  Yet, despite all of this great effort, despite this modernization, 
our steel producers face a number of unfair trade practices and market 
distortions that are having devastating impacts in Ohio and other 
steel-producing States. That is not just Mike DeWine speaking. Those 
are the findings that have been made.
  I have heard about this crisis firsthand from industry and labor 
leaders. In fact, I have looked into the eyes of steelworkers, whether 
it be in Steubenville, OH, or in Cleveland, OH, or in other places. All 
they want is a fair chance to compete and a fair chance to recover from 
the illegal dumping that has already taken place.
  One of the things I point out is that one of the reasons for this 
bill, despite our other bills that we hope to pass in this session, is 
they do not in any way stop the illegal dumping that has already taken 
place, and has taken place for well over a year. So this bill is needed 
to rectify some of the problems that have been created by this illegal 
dumping.
  Many steel companies are in serious trouble and are in desperate need 
of immediate assistance. The short-term loans that would be provided 
under this program will provide that very assistance without burdening 
taxpayers, because if steel plants close, if workers lose their jobs, 
taxpayers would be forced to pay for unemployment compensation, food 
stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, Medicare, and on and on and on, 
all of which will certainly exceed the total cost of this program.
  Again, the steel companies are required to repay the loan within 6 
years, provide collateral, and pay a fee to cover the cost of 
administering the program.
  I am a free trader. I believe free trade, though, does not exist 
without fair trade. Free trade does not mean free to subsidize. Free 
trade does not mean free to dump. Free trade does not mean free to 
distort the market. That is exactly what has been taking place month 
after month after month.
  Our trade laws are designed to enforce these basic principles. 
However, the current steel crisis underscores flaws and weaknesses in 
our current laws. I am, therefore, pleased the majority leader has 
indicated he has reserved time within the next several weeks to deal 
with many of these other problems, and to look at some of the remedies, 
proposed remedies that I and some of my colleagues have proposed.
  The House has already acted. I believe it is time for us to act. 
Today we have an opportunity to help an industry that throughout its 
long and illustrious history has been there for our country, has been 
there for our national defense. We should pass this bill and commit to 
adopting meaningful legislation to deal with the steel import crisis.

  I thank my colleague, Senator Domenici, for his leadership on this 
bill, Senator Byrd for his tireless efforts, Senator Rockefeller and 
the other members of the Senate steel caucus who have worked on this 
issue.
  This bill will help. This bill will save jobs. This is about our 
national security.
  I emphasize how important I think it is as our colleagues consider 
the merits of this bill that they remind themselves of one basic fact: 
We are in the Senate today to consider this bill because illegal 
dumping took place and it took place month after month after month 
after month.
  The steel companies, the steelworkers did nothing wrong; they did 
everything right. They modernized, they made the sacrifices. They want 
the opportunity to compete. Given that free opportunity, they will not 
only compete, they will win.
  I thank my colleague for yielding time to me.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Under the order, I am to proceed. I note the presence 
of Senator Rockefeller and I will yield to him in 1 minute.
  In my case, on behalf of oil patch--not Exon and Texaco; these loans 
do not apply to them--the question has been asked: Why them? As if the 
United States and the Congress of the United States has not helped 
businesses that are in bad shape, that are regional or national in 
nature. And I have no complaints about that help.

[[Page S7189]]

  Let me suggest that since 1993 we have, under supplemental 
appropriations as an emergency measure, appropriated $12.8 billion for 
agriculture assistance. That is not oil patch. I voted for agriculture 
and I live in a modest agriculture State. I was told that it would 
help, so I voted for it.
  Natural disasters, the kind that you can hardly avoid calling a 
disaster, but I think oil patch is a disaster. I will explain that 
further in my remarks following Senator Rockefeller.
  Let me talk about natural disasters. People wonder whether emergency 
designations are useful in this country. In the same period of time, 
1993 through 1998, we have spent $36.1 billion for natural disasters 
without batting an eye. Some of them cost $5 billion.
  We are concerned about oil patch, especially the small people whose 
businesses are right down at rock bottom, and the patch isn't 
flourishing so the bankers are wondering whether they should loan to 
them. We want them to know we are concerned.
  I will discuss the numbers. Oil patch, oil rig, oil well drilling, 
and related activities in America have lost more jobs in the past 10 
years than any American industry. Our dependence continues to come 
down. We are starting to close wells off so they cannot ever be used, 
because they are too small and too expensive because the price is too 
low. The companies that work them are going to go broke. We think some 
are viable and banks might look at them and say with this kind of 
approach, although the banks will have to risk something under the new 
approach, we think it might help a few.
  We have had $36.1 billion in declared emergencies for related damage 
in natural disasters, $12.7 billion for agriculture, and some Senators 
think it should have been double that already.
  I have not been called upon to vote on whether that is enough or not. 
I listen when we are presented with problems and I do what I can for a 
part of America's economic sector. That is why I said if we are going 
to help steel--and I think we ought to do that; I have heard some 
wonderful Senators discuss why we should--I thought we ought to say 
something to the oil patch of the United States, since the same kinds 
of problems are occurring in Hobbs, NM, Eunice, NM, medium and small 
towns in Texas, Oklahoma and elsewhere, and across the oil patch States 
of this land.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. I thank my friend from New Mexico.
  Mr. President, in a sense what we have now is the torch being passed. 
Any number of Senators have described--and I will not, therefore, try 
to repeat any of that--how this whole steel crisis, not to mention the 
oil patch crisis, has developed.
  It started in 1997. In the history of recorded trade statistics, as 
long as our country has been keeping trade statistics, there has never 
been an import surge of the magnitude, in any commodity at any time, as 
there has been in the last 2 years in steel. It started off with three 
countries; it is now all over the world.
  The Secretary of Commerce put out a release saying it is wonderful 
the steel crisis is over. I wonder where he has been.
  We should understand that the steel crisis is deep. If you take the 
first quarter of 1999, the first 3 months of 1999, and compare that to 
the worst possible months of the steel crisis, the first quarter of 
1998, last year, the total improvement which the administration keeps 
trying to talk about--I think they know it is wrong and the 
administration realized it hasn't done anything about this problem and 
it will be paying a price for it--the total decline from the 1998 first 
quarter to the 1999 first quarter is a total of 5 percent worldwide on 
all steel. That is going from the worst steel statistics in history and 
a 5-percent decrease. That could go right back up.
  The torch has to pass from the administration protecting our national 
trade laws, protecting free and fair trade, to us. Now we have to do 
something about it because they have declined to.
  I have been to everybody all the way up to the President and Vice 
President on a number of occasions. Expressions of interest but no 
results, no action taken.
  This affects the lives of my people; it affects the lives of people 
in many States. I hate to see that.
  I used this analogy on the Finance Committee. Football is a rough 
sport, as is international trade. International trade is a rough sport. 
Everybody is trying to get the advantage of everybody else and 
undersell. In football, you can get hurt--any individual player, a 
large or small player. They have rules. That is why we have rules. That 
is why they have referees.
  If you are a linebacker and you charge through the line and you get 
through and you hit the quarterback on the helmet with your elbow, you 
are penalized. You know that beforehand and you may get thrown out of 
the game for that.
  If you are inbounds and you are a pass catcher and you run out of 
bounds, that is no good. You jump offside, you get penalized.
  Everybody knows the rules. The more they play the game, the more they 
know what the rules are. That is what has kept the integrity of the 
game, because of its predictability. Secondly, it kept a lot of people 
from getting their heads taken off and knees broken. Football is tough 
anyway, as is international trade.
  So, there are rules. We have rules in international trade too. And we 
set them; the Congress set them and the administration set them in 
previous years. It is the Trade Act of 1974. It sets out a whole series 
of these rules. The administration keeps saying we are going to abide 
by the rules; we are abiding by the rules; we plan to abide by the 
rules. Of course, they are not. So the torch is passed to us. And there 
are a couple of points there I need to make.
  The bill is incredibly important. There is also a bill going to be 
taken up on a cloture vote next week, on steel quotas, which is 
incredibly important. It is very important for my colleagues and their 
staffs to understand; the vote this afternoon on this excellent bill of 
Senator Byrd and Senator Domenici and the bill next week which deals 
with imports are totally separate and different; that if you vote for 
this one, it does not mean it solves the import problem, or if you vote 
for that one, it doesn't solve the financial problem that this bill 
helps with. They are separate bills.
  So anybody who says, I voted today for Byrd-Domenici; therefore, I do 
not have to worry about next week because we have taken care of the 
problem, does not understand there are two totally different subjects. 
I cannot make that point strongly enough. This one is about the 
finances of companies that are going under, giving them a chance at 
commercial rates, repayable--to go to banks, because they cannot now 
borrow, and to be able to borrow a little bit, to survive a little bit 
longer--whether it is the steel mill or the oil patch. That is terribly 
important for the viability of those industries.
  Then, equally important, since this bill has nothing to do with the 
import problem which created all of this--that is what next week's vote 
has to do with, the problem of the imports and how do we adjust the 
import problem on a short-term basis to bring some fairness to what we 
like to call free trade but which is practiced virtually only by us. It 
used to be practiced by Hong Kong. I don't know how they are on it now. 
But it is practiced by nobody else in the world. So all the steel comes 
into us: India, up 72 percent; Indonesia, 60-something--it doesn't 
matter where you go, the numbers are up, because they know, the word is 
out, if you want to dump subsidized or underpriced steel in the United 
States, they will take it. So it puts people out of work. It does not 
matter to them. They will go ahead and take it.
  That is what I call the best way to destroy the possibility of a 
national coalition for a trading system, which I believe in. I am 
somebody who has always voted for fast track and somebody who believes 
in engaging the world. I have worked very hard within my own State--
which is not particularly an international State in its viewpoint, 
being landlocked in the mountains, so to speak--to make my people 
understand the global economy is part of their economy, we are all part 
of each other's economies, and we can sell products to other countries 
and they can invest in West Virginia, and this is all good; so we are 
all part of an international trading system.

[[Page S7190]]

  But there have to be rules in that. If you allow the quarterback to 
have his head given a concussion, it is very important the referee be 
there. But the referee usually does not have to be there, because 
people know what the price will be: You will get tossed out of the game 
or you will get a penalty of 15 yards. So all kinds of fair play is 
carried on on the football field, because people know what the rules 
are.

  Again, the torch is passed to us, and I think we have two duties. One 
is, we have to pass this excellent bill this afternoon. We should have 
passed it much earlier when it was the subject of earlier 
consideration. Then it got done in, in conference. I am terribly glad 
Senator Byrd, my senior colleague, and Senator Domenici, have combined 
forces to help on this.
  Frankly, it is important to combine forces sometimes on bills around 
here, because there are only 16 States that are major producers of 
steel. I do not know how many States produce oil, but I suspect there 
are not that many. So this is a very good opportunity for us to give 
those companies a chance to go to the bank, to get some money to be 
able to exist for a few more months or another year or so. It is not 
going to do anything about the import problem, which is the real cause 
of the devastating human crisis in steel.
  So we, as a legislature, as a Congress, have to decide, as the House 
has already decided by an overwhelming margin, that steel is important 
to America. This is not just a question of West Virginia or Ohio or 
Minnesota or other places; this is a national crisis. Senator Domenici 
has said, I don't know how many times: When Members on my side of the 
aisle--the other side of the aisle--come up to me and say I have this 
milk support problem, I have this farm support problem, I have this 
food support problem, I have whatever it is, I am always there. I am 
always there, because I believe it is as if you built the interstate 
system in this country and, because Pennsylvania is bigger than West 
Virginia, you made it four lanes in Pennsylvania but you only made it 
two lanes in West Virginia and then it went back to four lanes in Ohio. 
That would not be very smart. No. 1, it wouldn't fulfill the work of a 
national defense highway system. No. 2, it would cause massive traffic 
jams.
  So we understand we are all part of each other's destiny. West 
Virginia, insofar as I have been able to determine, has no oceans on 
our boundaries, but we pay taxes to support the Coast Guard. That is as 
it should be, because we have an obligation to each other, as West 
Virginia does to those who use the Coast Guard on coastal areas in 
different parts of the country. So that is part of our compact in 
America. It is part of our contract with each other, that when a region 
needs help, when an industry needs help, if there is a reason and 
possibility of doing so, you try to do that.
  This one is particularly good because it helps companies get money 
they cannot otherwise get. The international trade situation is more 
complex and, in the longer run, will probably do more to solve the 
problem, because it actually deals with the level of imports. It says 
to other nations, we are not going to be Uncle Sucker forever, or, in 
this case, at least for a period of 3 years. It is not radical. People 
think, what are we doing this for?
  What is interesting is that over the years the average foreign 
imports of steel into the United States--over the last 30 years, let's 
take it--is probably less than 20 percent. Less than 20 percent is 
usually what foreign countries export into this country, what we 
therefore import into this country; less than 20 percent of all the 
steel we use comes from other countries. That is the way it has been. 
That is perfectly acceptable as a figure.
  Interestingly enough, in the bill coming up next week, that figure 
can range as high as 23 percent, certainly no lower than 18 or 19 
percent. It is only for 3 years. But it is a way of saying we in 
America, if we are going to get into this, deeper and deeper into the 
international trading system, we really do care about our rules. We 
really do think about our quarterback's head. We think the chop 
blocking, which can break a young man's knees or legs, is wrong, and 
there are rules about that. We actually passed those rules in the 
Congress, and the President signed them all in a previous era, and they 
apply today, and we all live by them--except that we do not.
  So, in closing, I want to say these are two distinctly important 
decisions we are going to be making in separate weeks on separate 
bills. The one today is filled with merit. It is tremendously 
important. It is part of the comprehensive solution to the problem.
  But, then again, the one next week is the one that deals with 
imports, and it is the only one that deals with imports. So we need to 
do both of those so no Senator thinks that, because that Senator has 
made a particular vote on one day, he does not have to face up to the 
same situation on another day, because they are entirely different 
problems that each bill addresses.
  This is a matter of high urgency in the part of the country I come 
from. I was Governor of West Virginia for 8 years, and I dealt in 1982 
and 1983 with 21-percent unemployment. That is not a whole lot of fun, 
when 1 out of every 5 people you pass does not have work. There is not 
a family in West Virginia that is not accustomed to not having work or 
has not dealt with it.
  We are on the way back, but we are going to get knocked down if this 
steel import crisis continues. I do not want that to happen to Ohio. I 
do not want that to happen to Pennsylvania. I do not want to have that 
happen to Arkansas, Utah, Texas, or any other State. I do not want that 
to happen. It does not have to happen, and it is not even a budget 
matter. It is a matter of fair trade, fair play, rules that we have 
passed and by which we should live.
  I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I thought I had reserved under my UC 
request my right to speak, but I was mistaken. As we called on other 
people, I did not repeat my request. There is no unanimous consent 
agreement recognizing me. I understand the Senator from Arizona wants 
to offer an amendment, so I yield the floor.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I will be glad to wait until Senator 
Domenici finishes his remarks.
  Mr. DOMENICI. I have finished my remarks, I say to the Senator.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                           Amendment No. 685

  (Purpose: To restrict the spending of any money for these programs 
    until they are authorized by the appropriate Committees and the 
               authorization bill is enacted by Congress)

  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask 
for its consideration.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Arizona [Mr. McCain] proposes an amendment 
     numbered 685.

  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading 
of the amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:

       On page 48, between lines 17 and 18, insert the following:
       (c) Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, no 
     amount appropriated or made available under this Act to carry 
     out chapter 1 or chapter 2 of this Act shall be available 
     unless it has been authorized explicitly by a provision of an 
     Act (enacted after the date of enactment of this Act) that 
     was contained in a bill reported by the Committee or 
     Committees of the Senate with jurisdiction over proposed 
     legislation relating primarily to the programs described in 
     section 101(c)(2) and 201(c)(2), respectively, under Rule XXV 
     of the Standing Rules of the Senate or the equivalent 
     Committee of the House of Representatives.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, this amendment is pretty straightforward. 
It restricts the expenditure of funds for loan guarantee programs until 
the appropriate committees have authorized the expenditures for these 
programs and these authorizations have been approved by the Congress.

[[Page S7191]]

  In other words, with this amendment, we carry out what is supposed to 
be the procedures of the Senate, and that is, before taxpayers' dollars 
are expended, they are authorized.
  All of my colleagues know that this loan program for steel, oil and 
gas companies has been inserted into the appropriations bill, and it 
has not gone through the authorizing committee process.
  The legislation creates an unnecessary and unwarranted loan program 
for steel, oil and gas industries. Once again, Congress is seizing an 
opportunity to engage in the all-too-common game of pork barrel 
politics. The bill was originally intended to address the President's 
request of $6 billion for the war in Kosovo but quickly became a 
vehicle for a hasty and ill-conceived program to subsidize the steel, 
oil and gas industries.
  The bill creates a $1 billion loan guarantee program to support the 
domestic steel industry and a $500 million loan guarantee program for 
oil and gas companies. These programs will provide loan guarantees of 
up to $250 million for any domestic steel company, $10 million for any 
oil and gas company that ``has experienced layoffs, production losses, 
or financial losses.''
  I do not take lightly the value of these industries to our Nation, 
nor do I disagree that in the case of steel imports, illegal dumping of 
foreign steel has occurred. However, I question the wisdom of creating 
an emergency loan program to subsidize an industry that finds itself in 
trouble. We set a dangerous precedent by opening the Federal Treasury 
to industries facing economic difficulties.
  Specifically, I have three problems with this measure. There is no 
need for these substantial loan programs. The legislation is 
fundamentally flawed, and using the appropriations process to enact 
this measure circumvents the normal authorization process. These 
elements are common in all three loan programs. I will focus my 
comments on the steel loan program because I believe it is the driving 
force behind this matter and the most egregious.
  First, I seriously question the need to create such a substantial 
loan guarantee program. During today's debate, I am certain my 
colleagues will forewarn and have forewarned the dire consequences to 
the steel industry if we fail to enact this legislation. As my 
colleagues hear these predictions, I ask you to keep a few facts in 
mind.
  In 1998, the U.S. steel industry produced 102 million tons of steel. 
This was only slightly below the record of 1997 of 105 million tons, 
making it the second highest production year since 1980. This record 
production year resulted in earnings of $1.4 billion. Furthermore, 11 
of the 13 largest steel mills were profitable. These numbers make it 
difficult for me to understand the need to create a $1 billion loan 
program.
  Even if there were a steel crisis, it is certainly over. Citing 
Commerce Department statistics, the White House recently stated that 
during the first quarter of 1999, overall steel imports returned to the 
traditional pre-crisis levels. In fact, imports were down 4 percent in 
comparison to 1997. Again, the need for this program at this point 
eludes me.

  My second concern is that the bill will result in the needless loss 
of taxpayers' funds. Supporters argue that this measure is paid for 
with budget cuts and administrative fees. They point out the program 
guarantees loans and does not actually lend money. This assertion 
ignores the history of such loan programs.
  In the mid-1970s, the Economic Development Administration operated a 
similar program for the steel industry. The result of that program was 
disastrous for the taxpayers. Steel companies defaulted on 77 percent 
of the dollar value of their guarantees. An analysis of that loan 
program by the Congressional Research Service concluded that loans to 
steel companies represent a high level of risk. Nevertheless, we are 
poised today to provide an additional $1 billion in guarantees. I find 
it ironic that at a time when the American public is demanding reform 
of our public institutions, we offer them the failed economic policies 
of the 1970s.
  The measure also fails to require that losses triggering access to 
the loans relate to the so-called steel crisis. Therefore, companies 
that lost production as a result of the 54-day GM strike will also be 
eligible for the loan program.
  Furthermore, the program could benefit companies that suffer losses 
after the steel crisis was over. Companies that suffer losses or 
layoffs in 1999 or even the year 2000 are eligible for the program. 
Many of the losses suffered by steel companies are the normal result of 
operating in a competitive global market.
  The measure also fails to set terms, conditions, or interest rates 
for the guarantees. Instead, it leaves these critical decisions to the 
discretion of the board making the loans. The only guidance given to 
the board is that the terms should be reasonable. These provisions are 
problematic and will likely result in taxpayers guaranteeing bad loans.

  Finally, I have serious concerns about how this provision was brought 
to the Senate floor. I will remind my colleagues that our forebears 
intended the Senate to be a forum for reasoned and informed debate. 
Unfortunately, some Members choose to legislate complex and 
controversial matters in appropriations bills. The result is a hasty 
review of legislation with very little time to identify and discuss its 
implications. It also denies the committee of jurisdiction the ability 
to review these important measures, which will require the commitment 
of millions of taxpayer dollars.
  The amendment that is at the desk will restrict the expenditure of 
funds for the loan guarantee programs until the appropriate committees 
have explicitly authorized the expenditure for these programs.
  Authorizing on an appropriations bill has become an all too common 
event in the Senate. However, this is one of the most egregious 
examples of legislating on an appropriations bill I have seen since I 
have been in Congress. Out of the more than 20 pages of text in the 
bill, only 23 lines contain appropriations language. The rest of the 
bill goes on to authorize a $1 billion loan guarantee program for steel 
companies and a $500 million loan guarantee program for oil and gas 
companies.
  These programs will place at risk hundreds of millions of taxpayer 
dollars. It will do so without a hearing, without testimony from those 
affected by it, and without the consideration of those who have the 
most experience with loan guarantee programs.
  I point out also that this legislation is complex and controversial. 
My colleagues will offer amendments today which attempt to resolve some 
of these issues, but this process is inadequate and is not a 
substitution for the authorization process.
  The appropriate authorizing committee should be allowed to examine 
the provisions of this bill. They can most appropriately determine what 
remedies, if any, should be taken to help the domestic steel, oil, and 
gas industries. Instead, these loan guarantee programs are simply being 
rushed upon us on the Senate floor without proper consideration.
  This amendment requires that the measure go through the normal 
authorization process that every other measure should go through. I 
hope my colleagues will support the amendment.
  I listened carefully to the words of the Senator from West Virginia, 
who is an individual I admire and appreciate. He is a person of great 
compassion. I believe I share that compassion, whenever there are 
changes or layoffs in industries that for one reason or another are 
unable to compete in what is now becoming increasingly a global 
marketplace.
  I also am happy to say I will support job training programs, ways for 
workers to make a transition into other lines of business and work, 
retraining, and other public-private partnerships, of which there are 
many in America today.
  But there should be one lesson that the 1970s and 1980s and early 
1990s have taught us, and that is the economy of the world is 
undergoing a profound and fundamental change. We are changing from what 
once was an economy based on the steel industry, the oil industry, the 
railroads, the automobile industries, the product of the industrial 
revolution, to one which is rapidly evolving into a high-tech 
information, technology-based economy.

  I refer my colleagues to the testimony of Alan Greenspan to the Joint

[[Page S7192]]

Economic Committee in the last few days. It is a very illuminating 
discussion of the transition that America's economy is undergoing.
  This transition overall has led to the strongest economic period in 
the history of this country. There is literally a kind of prosperity 
that, thank God, is affecting this country which is providing jobs and 
opportunities that we literally have never seen before in our 
lifetimes. That is the good news.
  But the bad news is there are industries which, for a broad variety 
of reasons--which we have seen throughout history, as certain 
industries have been replaced by others--either cannot compete or there 
is not a need for the product that they manufactured.
  I remember once visiting Pittsburgh, PA, once one of the heartlands 
of the steel industry in America, and seeing where there had once been 
steel mills; and there were the ensuing environmental problems 
associated with that. Now high-tech industries, that are clean 
industries, are employing people at equal or higher salaries.
  People in Pittsburgh went through a wrenching change. I remember in 
the State of California, and to a lesser extent my State, when we 
started cutting back on defense spending in the early 1990s. Literally 
hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs because of the cutbacks 
in defense spending.
  Now I travel to California and see a booming economy, an incredibly, 
unbelievably, booming economy, both in my State and the neighboring 
States. What happened? It went through a very wrenching and difficult 
experience going from a defense-dependent industrial base to now a 
high-tech information technology base.
  It was not an easy transition. Hundreds of thousands of people lost 
their jobs in California. But I know of no one who said: Keep spending 
this level of defense money and prop up these industries forever, 
because we don't want them to lose jobs because they're going through 
difficult times.
  I have the greatest sympathy for any steelworker who is out of a job. 
I will do everything I can to help in retraining, in job opportunity, 
and education for those workers. But if there should be one lesson we 
learned in the 1970s and 1980s, it is that you cannot keep industries 
in business with Government subsidies, because if they cannot compete 
without them, over time they will not be able to compete with them.
  As much as I admire and respect the Senator from West Virginia, he 
and I have a profound philosophical difference of opinion about the 
role of Government. He said we should help whatever industry is in 
trouble. Yes, we should help, by trying to take care of the displaced 
workers, but not by keeping obsolete or noncompetitive industries in 
business when we have the ability to transition into much higher-paying 
jobs and better industries that provide advancements in technological 
improvement for all of our lives.
  I often have the pleasure of debating my dear friend and colleague 
from South Carolina, Senator Hollings, who makes an impassioned plea 
for the textile industry in South Carolina, and bemoans, laments the 
great dislocation that took place there. I had the pleasure of going to 
the BMW plant which, thanks to a great degree of effort by Senator 
Hollings, located in Columbia, SC. There are more jobs, higher-paying 
jobs, expanding jobs, and much better working conditions at the BMW 
plant than there were in the textile mills.

  The transition is going on. The transition is going on at an even 
more rapid pace than any of us in this body ever anticipated, and as a 
fundamental change from an industrial-based economy to one which is now 
increasingly technological-based.
  Those that take advantage of this opportunity and make the transition 
will grow and prosper. Fifteen years ago there was hardly a Member of 
this body who new where the Silicon Valley was; now everybody in 
America knows where it is.
  Recently, in the past few weeks, a corporation called Global Crossing 
announced they were going to merge with U.S. West, one of the largest 
telecommunications companies in America. Three years ago, Global 
Crossing did not exist as a corporation. This same story can be 
repeated throughout America's economy.
  We should not be spending our time authorizing on appropriations--not 
even authorizing. We should not be spending our time appropriating 
money to subsidize companies and corporations with loans which history 
shows us had a 77-percent default the last time we did it.
  What we should be doing is making every effort we can, as a 
Government, to help them make the transition, which sooner or later 
they will inevitably go through. Because over time, the harnessmakers, 
once the automobile was invented, went out of business. It will happen 
here, too.
  Again, I want to point out that I will do everything I can to help 
any worker who is displaced. I will support Government programs that 
work. I will especially support public-private partnerships, which have 
been largely successful, to provide America with the educated workforce 
necessary to take advantage of this incredible change that is going on 
in America and the world, in which America leads.
  But to go back to a failed program of subsidized loans, in which in 
the 1970s the steel companies defaulted on 77 percent of the dollar 
value of their guarantees, and eventually ended up, by the way, in just 
as bad shape as they were in before they received those guarantees and 
defaulted on all those loans, I think is a serious mistake, a failure 
to recognize that, as societies change and industries change, and as 
evolution goes on, to try to have Government intervene and subsidize is 
not a success.

  That is why I oppose this amendment, not only on the grounds of the 
procedures involved, which I find, as an authorizing committee 
chairman, offensive, but the concept and the idea that somehow this 
will succeed, I believe, flies in the face of all historical data, and, 
by the way, also flies in the face of what we Republicans are supposed 
to stand for.
  I ask for the yeas and nays on the amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second? There is a 
sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the vote be 
delayed until the majority and minority leaders agree as to the time 
for the vote.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. DORGAN addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I rise to offer support for the 
legislation that is brought to the floor this afternoon and to make a 
few comments about the legislation itself. Let me especially comment on 
the subject of steel.
  I come from a State that doesn't produce any steel. North Dakota is 
predominantly an agriculture State. But the roots of the problems that 
confront our steel industry, in many ways, are common to the roots of 
the problems that confront a number of industries in our country today, 
especially and including family farmers.
  I haven't heard the news this afternoon, but I understand that the 
monthly trade deficit results are to be announced today. My expectation 
is that the announcement today will conclude that we have another 
record monthly trade deficit, probably the fourth in a row, probably 
$20 billion that we have gone in the hole in this country in our trade 
relations. This probably amounts to somewhere between $250- to $300 
billion a year just in trade in goods and services. The deficit in 
trade in goods will be much higher than that, perhaps over $300 
billion.
  What does that mean? It means that this country has to borrow in 
order to finance its trade deficit. It means, at least in the field of 
economics, to the extent there are any certainties, that this country 
will have to repay this trade deficit at some point in the future 
through a lower standard of living. Is it a problem? Is it of concern? 
Apparently not to many people, because there is not much discussion 
about it. I think it is a very serious concern to this country.
  People make the point that we have a good economy and we have 
prospered. That certainly is the case. Unemployment is very low. 
Inflation is almost nonexistent. Believe me, the Federal Reserve Board 
is on its hands and knees with magnifying glasses searching for signs 
of inflation. If they don't

[[Page S7193]]

exist, the Board will try to find them. They are so concerned about it. 
But homeownership is nearly at a record high; new housing starts are 
nearly at a record high. There is a lot of good news in this country's 
economy.
  But there are clouds on the horizon because of this trade deficit, a 
record high trade deficit. And it is rising rapidly. We have a trade 
deficit with China that is very substantial; an annual trade deficit 
with Japan somewhere in the neighborhood of $50- to $60 billion--in 
fact, about the same level with China. We have a trade deficit with 
Canada, a trade deficit with Mexico, and the list goes on.
  Some come to the floor and say, well, we must be required to compete. 
I say, absolutely. If the family farmers I represent can't compete with 
others in the world, then we are not going to make it. But the question 
is not, will we or shall we compete; the question is, what are the 
rules of competition? How do we compete? Are we to say, let's tie our 
hands behind our backs? Then we will see how well we do. Is that 
competition?
  For example, you run a manufacturing plant in this country, and you 
produce widgets. We say: You must compete with all other widget makers 
in the world. By the way, you have to pay a living wage, a minimum 
wage. By the way, you cannot dump your chemicals into the rivers and 
into the air. By the way, you cannot hire 10-year old kids. By the way, 
you can't pay them 14 cents an hour. And, by the way, your factory must 
be safe.
  Well, the widget maker says: Well, we know that we fought about that 
for 75 years and lost all those fights. We have to pay a minimum wage. 
We have to have safe workplaces. We have to abide by child labor laws. 
We have to abide by antipollution laws, and we don't like it. So what 
we are going to do is pole vault right over this geographical barrier 
and go to another country somewhere else in the world. We are going to 
hire kids. We are going to pay them peanuts and put them in unsafe 
plants. We intend to dump our chemicals in the air, and we intend to 
pollute the streams. We are going to produce the same widgets, and we 
are going to send them back to Pittsburgh, Fargo, Los Angeles and 
Kansas City and sell them there.

  I ask the question: Is that fair competition? Is that what people 
mean by competition? You must be able to compete, and if you can't 
compete, quit? You must be able to compete, and if you cannot compete, 
go broke? Is that fair competition?
  The answer is, of course, it is not fair competition. We have fought 
for three quarters of a century in this country over these issues. 
People died on the streets from gunfire, marching for their rights as 
workers to organize for better wages, for safer working conditions, for 
all of these issues.
  Now, some say: But it is a global economy; you just don't understand. 
Competition now is not with the rules that we would describe as 
reasonable. The rules are whatever you can find anywhere in the world 
if you are a producer. That represents fair competition?
  Where I come from, that is not fair competition.
  I frankly admitted, when I started, I do not know much about the 
steel industry. We do not produce steel in my State. I do not expect we 
will in the future ever see a strong economy that does not have 
manufacturing activities in automobiles and steel and other things that 
represent the central tenets of a strong economy. I don't think you can 
decide that you will have a strong economy if your manufacturing base 
is gone.
  I get in the car and turn on the radio and drive to work. The news 
report on the radio tells about America's economic health. It is always 
about what we consume, not what we produce. It is always about the 
economic health as measured by what we consumed last month. Consumer 
spending is up. Spending is this; spending is that.
  That is not a sign of economic health. What you produce is a sign of 
economic health. What you produce determines who you are and how you 
are doing.
  I find it interesting--I know Mr. Greenspan is on the Hill today 
testifying, and I know Wall Street will weigh every word he says for 
some nuance about what the Fed might do with interest rates. The stock 
market will rise or fall like a bobber in the ocean, based on what Mr. 
Greenspan says.
  You ask Mr. Greenspan, and he will have to admit it--so will the 
governors of the Federal Reserve Board--does a heart attack or a car 
accident represent economic growth to an economist? The answer is, of 
course. Heart attacks and car accidents represent economic growth in 
the data that economists use to determine how well our country is 
doing. Because a car accident means someone must fix a fender; a heart 
attack means someone is employed in emergency rooms.
  So you ask yourself: What do these economists tell us? What do they 
mean? What does it say about our country? What do they measure?
  Family farming is why I came to the floor today. Family farming 
suffers, too. We have steel manufacturers in trouble and going out of 
business. We have people being laid off. So the Senator from West 
Virginia says we ought to be concerned about that. We should.
  Is a steel plant like a harness for a two-hitch team, destined to be 
gone forever from the landscape of this country because it can be done 
elsewhere much less expensively? I don't think so. I don't think anyone 
in this country would suggest that our country--with the kind of 
economic power and might that we have--is a country that ought to do 
without a strong manufacturing sector or a country that ought to do 
without a strong steel manufacturing capability.
  Then what about farming? When we talk about farming, people say: 
Well, the farmer must compete. It is agriculture, some monolith called 
agriculture.
  It is not that in my State. It is families. It is not just families 
planting some wheat that they hope to harvest in the fall. It is 
families that live out on the land, that help create a small town, that 
help provide economic sustenance on that main street, that organize the 
church, that support the school, that support the charities. That is 
what family farms are all about. Some people may say that you can get 
rid of all of those families. America will be farmed. Corporate farms 
can farm America from California to Maine, hardly stopping to put some 
gas in the large tractors they would use to pull those plows. But it 
would not be the same because corporate farming isn't going to stop at 
a small town in Hettinger County to say: Let me help form that church, 
or that school, or help nurture Main Street, or help with a lifestyle 
that really breeds family values.

  I hear people stand and talk about family values all the time on the 
floor of the Senate. There is nowhere in this country that nurtures 
family values any better than on the family farm. I am not saying they 
are better than anybody else, but I am saying that families living in 
the rural reaches of our country, with a yard light illuminating that 
life, they are the ones who really do it alone--except when there is 
trouble, all of their neighbors are there to help. That is the way 
farmers in a rural neighborhood are.
  We will lose something very important in this country if we decide 
that family farmers don't matter. A North Dakota author named 
Critchfield wrote a good number of books. He was a world-renowned 
author who came from Hunter, North Dakota, a tiny town near Fargo. He 
wrote a book called ``In Those Days.'' It is the finest book I have 
ever read about small-town life and the rural lifestyle--a wonderful 
book. He wrote his next book about the rural lifestyle in a different 
way, and he said something I never really thought much about before. He 
talked about the nurturing of values, family values, the nurturing of 
shared responsibility, and caring. This country really always had its 
roots in rural America; it would roll from the farm to the small town 
to the big city as America grew. We have lost farmers who have moved to 
small towns and who have moved to big cities. We have had a 
refurbishment of the value system of our country coming from its 
seedbed in rural America. I wonder what would happen at some point if 
we decide that that seedbed of family values in rural America really 
doesn't matter, that America can as easily be farmed by large corporate 
enterprises with no lights and no homes and no stopping in small towns.
  Well, this discussion today is about steel and oil, but especially 
about

[[Page S7194]]

steel. I am talking about agriculture because I want to talk about the 
common thread that exists on these issues. I just heard my colleague 
from Arizona speak, and he is a close friend and someone whose views I 
admire. We have disagreed from time to time. On this issue of trade, we 
find ourselves in somewhat different camps, I think, because we 
probably see it a bit differently. I don't, for a moment, dispute that 
it is a global economy. The times are changed. But I also believe that 
this country has every right, on behalf of its producers, to decide it 
will fight for values such as fair wages and safe workplaces and a good 
environment--to fight for those things that we have fought for in this 
country for over 75 years. We have a right also to fight for that in 
our international trade agreements. We regrettably do not do that.
  Our country, interestingly enough, has a leadership position on trade 
matters. We go out and negotiate a lot of trade agreements. Did you 
know that we almost never enforce an agreement? My biggest complaint 
with our trade officials is that they negotiate bad agreements. If that 
weren't bad enough, they fail to enforce even the bad agreements. Go 
down to the Department of commerce, where they are required to enforce 
trade agreements, and ask yourself how many people in this Government, 
in the Department of Commerce, are around with the responsibility of 
enforcing our trade agreements with China. Does anybody know? Or Japan? 
Anybody know? I will tell you the answer. Six or seven people are 
tasked at the China desk with enforcing our trade agreements with 
China. It is the same with Japan. We have a nearly $60 billion trade 
deficit with China, and about the same with Japan, but slightly less. 
We have a handful of people whose job it is to enforce our trade 
agreements. Why? Because our mindset has always been to go negotiate 
new agreements because we want to trumpet the success in negotiating a 
new agreement, but we don't want to mess around with enforcing the old 
ones. That results is a lot of folks who are angry, because the last 
trade agreement that was negotiated was not a very good one and, in any 
event, it wasn't enforced.

  So we ended up with a trade agreement called NAFTA, the North 
American Fair Trade Agreement, with Canada. A miserable agreement. It 
turned a trade surplus that we had with Mexico into a big trade 
deficit. It doubled the trade deficit we had with Canada. I know it 
will tire anybody who has heard me say it, but not long after the trade 
agreement with Canada, we had a flood of Canadian grain coming across 
our border and undermining the market for our family farmers. Our State 
university said it cost our farmers in North Dakota over $200 million 
in lost income.
  I drove up to the border with a fellow named Earl in an orange truck 
that was about 10 years old. In this 10-year-old orange two-ton truck 
we took a couple hundred bushels of durum wheat. We saw 18-wheel trucks 
coming in our direction that were full of Canadian grain coming south. 
On a windy day, the grain trucks drop a lot of grain on the road. Our 
windows were getting hit all along the way by Canadian grain dropping 
off the huge semi trucks coming south. After seeing dozens of them, we 
pulled up to the Canadian border with Earl and his orange truck and a 
couple hundred bushels of durum wheat, saying we want to take this 
North Dakota durum into Canada, knowing that millions of Canadian 
bushels are flooding into our country. Earl Jensen and I didn't get 
across the border with that durum wheat because you could not get it 
into Canada. Our border was open to the Canadian grain producers, 
flooding our country and undercutting our markets, but their border 
wasn't open to us. Another fellow who was with us brought along some 
beer. That is, after all, liquid barley. Beer comes from, in most 
cases, barley, and you liquefy barley. He was going to take barley, in 
liquid form, into Canada. No, you can't do that. How about a used 
clothes washer? Can't do that. The list goes on.
  I sat up at that border understanding firsthand why our farmers have 
a right to be so angry. Who on earth would negotiate a trade agreement 
with Canada that says let's have a one-way circumstance across the 
board? You can bring all your products south and flood us with your 
grain, but, by the way, when your little orange truck comes north with 
Earl and Byron, we are not going to let you through. That is not fair 
competition. That is not the trade relationship we expect that would 
result in fair competition. So my experience is that we have a right, 
it seems to me, in our country, to be mighty upset about the current 
circumstances that exist for family farmers and unfair trade agreements 
or in trade agreements that even if they were fair are not enforced. We 
have a right to be upset with respect to the circumstances with steel. 
My colleague who spoke previously said undoubtedly there may be dumping 
of steel. I will bet there is. I guarantee you there is dumping of 
grain in this country.
  I asked the GAO to get the data from Winnipeg and Montreal. Those 
folks thumbed their nose and said: Do you think you are going to get 
that out of us? Not in a million years. We don't intend to give you one 
figure with respect to the sales we are doing secretly in this country. 
That's the Canadian Wheat Board. That would be illegal in this country, 
selling at secret prices in this country. They said to GAO that there 
is not a chance, you are not going to get numbers out of us.
  Is there a reason for people to be angry and sore about this? Of 
course. Do American producers have a right to ask the question of 
whether this country will stand up for fair trade? I am absolutely full 
up to my neck with folks who say that anybody who speaks the way I just 
spoke is a protectionist. I want to plead guilty to saying that I want 
to protect our economic interests and demand fair competition. If that 
is what being a protectionist means, I will plead guilty. In fact, I 
demand credit. I want to protect this country's economic interests. I 
also believe in expanded trade and trade relationships that are growing 
and are healthy. I believe in and demand and expect fair trade 
relationships. I expect our trade negotiators not to go out and lose in 
the first 24 hours of every single negotiation.
  The Senator from Texas is on the floor. There is a lot of beef in 
Texas. We had a big beef agreement with Japan 20 years ago. You would 
have thought we had won the Olympics when we announced we had this beef 
agreement with Japan. Everybody celebrated. Guess what? We are getting 
more beef into Japan. More American beef is going into Japan. But there 
is now a 50-percent tariff on American beef going to Japan. They 
negotiated a 50-percent tariff. That will be ratcheted down over time, 
but it snaps back with increased quantity.
  Would anyone here ever expect we would have a 45-percent tariff on a 
product and not be ridiculed in the world community by it? That is 
exactly what we negotiated with Japan. It was declared a success. Our 
trade negotiators thought it was just great.
  We have such lowered, dimmed expectations of our trading partners 
that we don't even try. Part of that is because for the first 25 years 
after the Second World War almost all of our trade relationships were 
about foreign policy. We could beat anybody with one hand tied behind 
our back. It was easy. We negotiated trade relationships that were 
almost exclusively foreign policy initiatives. But in the second 25 
years, it was different. For that reason, as better competitors 
developed--Japan, Europe, China, and others--our trade negotiators 
didn't change much. Most of our trade negotiating is still disguised as 
foreign policy, regrettably. It is not fair to our producers.
  That is why the initiative was brought to the floor today with 
respect to steel. We don't produce steel in North Dakota, but I am well 
aware of unfair trade. I am well aware of the inability to provide 
remedies and to seek remedies for unfair trade. Certainly our producers 
understand that every day in every way they have to face unfair 
competition, and no one seems willing or able to do anything about it.
  That is the frustration. It is a frustration, in my judgment, that 
produces the kind of proposition that is brought here to the floor of 
the Senate today. Is it a reasonable, modest proposition? Yes. Is it a 
proposition that jumps over the ditch here on this? No. Of course, it 
is not. It is not that at all. It is modest, in my judgment, reasonably 
thoughtful, and is something Congress should pass.

[[Page S7195]]

  The reason I took the time to come to the floor is to say this: 
Following this legislation, we will come in next week to the floor of 
the Senate once again on the subject of family farmers. Family farmers 
are now in a circumstance where they are facing Depression-era prices 
and are going out of business in record numbers.
  It is almost impossible to go to a meeting in farm country and listen 
to those farmers, who have invested their lives and their dreams and 
their hearts in that land, who stand up and pour out their souls and 
then begin to get tears in their eyes when they talk about being forced 
off the land they love.
  I told my colleagues recently of the woman who called me and said her 
auction to sell her family farm produced on that day a circumstance 
where her 17-year-old refused to get out of bed--refused to come down 
and help her with the auction sale. She said it wasn't because he is a 
bad kid, or it wasn't because he was lazy; it was because he was so 
heartbroken that he wasn't going to be able to farm that he just could 
not bear to be present at the auction sale of their farm. His dad had 
recently died. They were forced to sell, and he simply couldn't bear to 
watch the sale of that family farm.
  A 6-foot-4-inch fellow stood up at a meeting. He had a beard. He was 
a big, burly guy. He said his granddad farmed. He farmed. He said his 
dad farmed. It was in their blood. Then his chin began to quiver, and 
his eyes began to water. But he said: I am going to have to sell out. 
He would like to continue, and he couldn't. And he couldn't continue to 
speak, because this is more than just a job. It is a lot more than just 
the term ``agriculture.''

  Again, I come to the floor to talk about family farming, because this 
question today relates to what we are going to talk about--agriculture, 
and fundamentally unfair trade policies that undermine our family 
farmers for which there is no remedy.
  You go to the trade ambassador's office to seek a remedy. You go to 
the Commerce Department to seek a remedy. I guarantee you, industry 
after industry, you can prove the dumping, and you will not get relief. 
You will not get a remedy. That is, in my judgment, the weakness and 
the shortcoming of our trade laws.
  Let me end by saying again that we must find a foreign home for 
almost half of what we produce in a State like North Dakota. I am not 
someone who wants to shut borders or restrict trade, but I darned well 
insist on behalf of the producers that I represent, just as the Senator 
from West Virginia and the Senator from New Mexico insisted today, I 
insist that this country stand up for the economic interests of its 
producers, at least demanding fairness and competition in international 
affairs. As we deal with a global economy, we ought to be able to 
provide that kind of fairness for American producers.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, you are going to hear an announcement in a 
moment from the two authors of the bill that is pending that we have 
worked out an agreement on the four amendments that were discussed 
earlier. I will leave it to them to talk about it.
  It appears we would have this vote on an extraneous matter, and then 
either accept the vote on the four previous matters discussed or have a 
rollcall vote. But before we get into all of that, I wanted to say that 
I am supportive of the amendment offered by the Senator from Arizona.
  One of the problems we increasingly have in the Senate is that it is 
so hard to pass an authorization bill that we are reaching the point 
where almost every legislative action originates in one of two 
committees--the Finance Committee, which engages in direct spending 
through entitlements, and the Appropriations Committee, which 
appropriates money.
  We have before us a bill that really should be under the jurisdiction 
of the Banking Committee. We are for all practical purposes 
appropriating without authorizing, or, one could say, authorizing 
within the Appropriations Committee. As I said to Senator Stevens, 
maybe I ought to start reporting appropriations bills to the Banking 
Committee and try to bring them to the floor of the Senate.
  But Senator McCain's amendment really brings home a very important 
point; that is, we have committees that have jurisdiction in these 
areas. We undercut the Senate when we don't recognize it.
  A policy, I think, that is ultimately quite independent of the issue 
we are talking about today but relevant to this amendment is that the 
sooner we can get back to having authorizing committees authorize and 
having appropriations committees appropriate the better off we will be.
  I am in support of this amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I am not sure of the procedure. But I 
would like to offer an amendment at this time.
  I ask unanimous consent to lay aside the pending McCain amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                           Amendment No. 686

    (Purpose: To amend the pending committee amendment to H.R. 1664)

  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I send an amendment to the desk.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Alaska (Mr. Murkowski) proposes an 
     amendment numbered 686.

  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of 
the amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:

       At the appropriate place in the bill, insert the following:
       ``Sec.   . Glacier Bay Study.--The Secretary of the 
     Interior shall, in cooperation with the Governor of Alaska, 
     conduct a study to identify environmental impacts, if any, of 
     subsistence fishing and gathering and of commercial fishing 
     in the marine waters of Glacier Bay National Park, and shall 
     provide a report to Congress on the results of such study no 
     later than 18 months after the date of enactment of this 
     section. During the pendency of the study, and in the absence 
     of a positive finding that a resource emergency exists which 
     requires the immediate closure of fishing or gathering, no 
     funds shall be expended by the Secretary to implement 
     closures or other restrictions of subsistence fishing, 
     subsistence gathering, or commercial fishing in the non-
     wilderness waters of Glacier Bay National Park, except the 
     closure of Dungeness crab fisheries under Section 123(b) of 
     the Department of the Interior and Related Agencies 
     Appropriations Act, 1999, (section 101(e) of division A of 
     Public Law 105-277).''

  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, less than 3 months ago this body 
adopted my amendment allowing commercial fishing and subsistence 
gathering, which consists primarily of gathering sea gull eggs in 
Glacier Bay. That issue came before this body, and passed 59 to 40.
  It went to conference, along with the issue of the steel and oil and 
gas guarantees that are under discussion before this body.
  I am here on behalf of the little people. I can't stand here and 
compete on the broad issues of steel dumping or the impact the decline 
of the price of oil has had on our stripper wells; or the economies of 
those areas dependent on steel, West Virginia and New Mexico; or oil 
and gas, as in Oklahoma. I stand here on behalf of a few of the native 
people of my State, the Huna Tlingit Indians, who have lived for 
centuries with access to an area known as Glacier Bay, which is one of 
our premier national parks.
  Clearly, this issue is not in proportion with the importance of steel 
dumping, or the decline in the price of oil. I come before this body 
representing this small group of indigenous American Alaskan Indians 
who have been dependent on a subsistence lifestyle for thousands of 
years.
  Glacier Bay is a large area in the northern end of the archipelago of 
southeastern Alaska. It is a magnificent area. Visitors in the 
summertime arrive on cruise ships. It is a great way for a visitor to 
enjoy this magnificent, scenic site. However, it is a very short 
season, roughly Memorial Day to Labor Day.
  The rest of the time, the area has been utilized by very small, 
individual fishing vessels that are bound by the resource management of 
the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
  In conference, there was a concern expressed by various House Members 
as to whether the fisheries resource in

[[Page S7196]]

Glacier Bay could be maintained and the impact commercial fishing would 
have on that resource. As a consequence, I have changed my amendment. 
My previous amendment simply allowed commercial fishing and subsistence 
gathering to remain in Glacier Bay until the court determined whether 
the State had the right to manage these waters within the State of 
Alaska.
  I have now changed the amendment to propose a moratorium for 18 
months. During that time, there would be a joint study between the 
State Department of Fish and Game and the Park Service to study the 
impact of this small amount of commercial fishing and subsistence 
gathering on Glacier Bay, and to make a determination whether there was 
any detrimental effect. If there was, obviously, it would cease.
  It is interesting to note that the matter before the Senate is 
associated with a matter of substantial cost, because we are talking 
about dumping steel, we are talking about addressing relief, we are 
talking about oil and gas, we are talking about some type of relief for 
the stripper wells. It is my understanding that steel, oil, and gas 
amendments might amount to as much as $300 million.
  I point out to my colleagues, there is zero cost associated with my 
amendment--no cost whatever. There is justice to residents of these 
communities of Alaska.
  Let me describe the communities. Gustavus has 346 residents and is 
adjacent to Glacier Bay; 55 of those residents are actively engaged in 
fishing. Elfin Cove, outside the bay, has 54 people; 47 are engaged in 
fishing. Huna, which is a Tlingit Indian village directly across from 
Glacier Bay, has 900 people; 228 are in the fisheries. Pelican City has 
187 residents; there are 86 in the fisheries.
  These communities have no alternative. They can't go anyplace else. 
What is the justification for the attitude of the Park Service? There 
has not been one public hearing held--not one. They did not advertise 
for witnesses to determine the impact. They simply made an 
administrative decision and said we are closing it.
  Let me show another chart demonstrating where commercial fishing is 
allowed by statutory law in National Parks: Assateague, in Virginia; 
Biscayne, in Florida; Buck Reef, in the Virgin Islands; Canaveral 
National Seashore, in Florida; Cape Hatteras, in North Carolina; Cape 
Krusenstern, in Alaska; Channel Islands, CA; Fire Island, NY; Gulf 
Islands, MS; Isle Royale, in Michigan; Jean Lafitte National Park, LA, 
to name several. But they have made a decision to close the fishing in 
my State of Alaska.
  It is interesting, further, to note some of the other activities they 
allow in the park, because it reflects the attitude of the Park Service 
and the manner in which they initiate an action.
  The Park Service saw fit some 3 months ago to initiate what was 
basically a raid on commercial fishing in Glacier Bay. They used Park 
Service personnel, they boarded the boats that were fishing there, they 
had sidearms, and they simply said they were going to close this area. 
The area was not, in fact, closed. Those fishermen had a right to be 
there at that time. That was a pretty heavy tactic to use, but they saw 
fit to use it.
  Our Governor indicated his wish, as did our State and our 
legislature, that commercial fishing be allowed to continue in Glacier 
Bay.
  To add insult to injury, the people of Glacier Bay have been 
dependent on the gathering of sea gull eggs since time immemorial. One 
wonders why they would need sea gull eggs. Frankly, it is very 
difficult to raise chickens in Alaska. There is a lot of rain. This is 
a typical village in Glacier Bay. This is an 1889 photo. That village 
is no longer there, but this is the kind of village they used to have. 
You see there, they are drying the fish and so forth. The Huna villages 
today are not like that by any means--but the point is these people 
still live in a subsistence lifestyle.

  What I want to say here is just the other day the Park Service 
decided to prohibit, if you will, what it had ignored previously and 
that was the gathering of sea gull eggs for harvest in Glacier Bay. 
They apprehended a Huna native for gathering sea gull eggs. I do not 
know how long they kept the sea gull eggs, but a couple of days later 
they gave them back to the Huna Indian Association. What is the 
consistency of this? I do not know that there is any, and it points out 
the Park Service is aggressively hostile to something that other 
agencies have seen fit to recognize as unique to the character of the 
subsistence lifestyle of the native people of Alaska.
  It should be remembered that Canada and the United States reached an 
agreement several years ago allowing native people to take birds and 
eggs during the spring. That agreement was recognized by an amendment 
to the Migratory Bird Treaty. It has been nearly 2 years since the 
Senate approved the amendment to the treaty. What this amendment did 
was recognize the need of the native people to take birds and eggs in 
the spring, because in the fall those birds are gone. The reason is 
very simple; cold weather has come and the birds have left.
  The State Department has not yet exchanged the instrument of 
ratification with Canada. This is the final formal exchange of 
documents necessary to put the new treaty into effect. Canada is eager 
to complete the process because the new treaty language is needed to 
comply with changes in its Constitution. I'm told the delay is due to 
the bureaucratic failure of the Department of the Interior to implement 
new regulations. Some of the State Department officials think that is 
needed before final documents are exchanged. I, personally, see no 
reason for the delay.
  The point I want to make is an obvious one. The U.S. Fish and 
Wildlife Service has recognized the necessity of the native people of 
Alaska, being dependent on subsistence, to take birds and eggs in 
spring, including sea gull eggs. But the Park Service--another branch 
of the Federal Government--has chosen to enforce a prohibition against 
taking sea gull eggs. What is the justification for that? I do not 
know, unless it is a very aggressive Park Service. But, clearly, if the 
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sees fit to allow a modest taking of 
eggs and migratory birds for subsistence purposes, you would think the 
U.S. Park Service would recognize and honor and appreciate the 
tradition of the Native Alaskans and allow this to take place. Still, 
that is not the case.
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a press 
clipping from the Juneau Empire covering the story on the apprehension 
of the individual who was accosted by the Park Service for gathering, 
for subsistence purposes, sea gull eggs.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                         Gull Eggs Confiscated

       Juneau--National Park Service officials seized several 
     dozen gull eggs from a Hoonah man in Glacier Bay National 
     Park over the weekend.
       Dan Neal, 46, his son and a family of five visiting from 
     Illinois came ashore Saturday on Marble Island. They landed 
     near two U.S. Geological Survey biologists doing research on 
     a glaucous-winged gull colony.
       The biologists informed Neal and his companions they 
     couldn't legally collect eggs there, and the group left, 
     Glacier Bay Chief Ranger Randy King said.
       Park Service employees later stopped the boat, and Neal 
     reluctantly surrendered the eggs, King said.
       Gathering gull eggs is prohibited by international treaty 
     and federal regulations throughout Alaska. However, the 
     harvest of gull eggs is an important cultural tradition for 
     Hoonah Tlingits.
       The Park Service and the Hoonah Indian Association are 
     exploring ways the tradition might continue.
       ``Our cultural and traditional uses in our ancestral 
     homeland are deeply woven into our very being,'' said Ken 
     Grant, the association's president, who urged tribal members 
     to refrain from collecting eggs until the Park Service 
     finishes its studies.

  Mr. MURKOWSKI. In my amendment I propose this joint study take place, 
and it is quite legitimate to ask, Where is the money going to come 
from? For some time now the Park Service has been generating revenue 
from cruise ship receipts from a recreation fee demonstration program. 
They have approximately $2.8 million, of which $435,000 is unencumbered 
at this time. It is my suggestion this be used for the Park Service's 
joint evaluation, along with the State of Alaska, to study the 
renewability of the fisheries resources in Glacier Bay.
  Somebody might ask, Why should a Glacier Bay moratorium be attached 
to

[[Page S7197]]

this bill--an appropriations bill? I hope the appropriators recognize 
this is a legitimate appropriations amendment. It is setting parameters 
for the expenditure of funds being appropriated. Further, the 
moratorium is a time-honored and time-tested device. This moratorium 
simply amends last year's appropriation bill which terminated the 
fishing in Glacier Bay. If fisheries can be closed on an appropriations 
bill and the field of participants can be narrowed in an appropriations 
bill, then it is not out of place to use the same process for a follow-
up measure, and that is what we have done. This is a legitimate 
appropriation amendment setting parameters for the expenditure of funds 
being appropriated.
  This belongs in this package because it went over to the House and 
Senate conferees as part of the supplemental package, along with steel 
and oil. It was a part of those issues that were considered.
  But as we look at the issue of equity here, there is no question this 
amendment is an amendment substantially different from the previous 
amendment inasmuch as it gives a moratorium of 18 months in which to 
evaluate, in a joint study, the renewability of the fisheries resource. 
As evidenced by the concern of the conferees in the House, Senator 
Stevens and I--I was given the opportunity in that conference to make a 
personal presentation. But that was a different amendment. That was 
simply to allow fishing to continue until such time as the court 
determined who had jurisdiction. This amendment sets to rest the 
concerns relative to the renewability of that resource by authorizing 
this joint study.
  It also recognizes, in a sense, there is no real trustworthy 
information on the impact of fishing or subsistence use in Glacier Bay 
on the ecosystem. Opponents have argued from time to time there may be 
some consequences, but they have offered no real proof. On the other 
side, it is impossible to prove the negative that fishing has no 
lasting impact.
  Before fishermen are permanently removed or restricted, which will 
have irreversible consequences for the fishermen, the processing 
companies and the communities affected, I think it is appropriate to 
actually test the hypothesis that fishing is detrimental in some way. 
That is why we have altered our amendment to require this 18-month 
study.
  My worst fear, as I have indicated, about the Park Service harassment 
of the Alaska Native people, was realized this last week when they 
seized several dozen sea gull eggs from a Native resident of Hoonah, 
one particular resident. This was unwarranted harassment by the Park 
Service. I think it represents an insensitive, arrogant attitude and is 
reminiscent of the Indian policies of the 1800s, where we were simply 
driving individuals off the land they had traditionally had access to. 
Only passage of my amendment will end this harassment.
  Again, this is only a few hundred people, but they have no other 
appeal. They do not want to live off welfare. They have no other place 
to go. There is no reason why they should be excluded from fishing in 
this area, as we recognize the Park Service allows fishing in the 16 
other national parks. I have had letters from local residents 
repeatedly assuring me that previously they had been under the 
assumption the Park Service had no intention to eliminate the 
traditional use, including fish and subsistence gathering.
  Why do they enforce such an action in Glacier Bay and not enforce it 
in the 16 other areas where they allow it by statute? This fishery 
consists of a small number of small vessels. They do a little salmon, 
crab, halibut, bottom fishing. It is important to the people, as I have 
indicated, of Elfin Cove, 34 people, Hoonah, 228 people, who fish.
  There have been provisions that Senator Stevens has been able to 
prevail on, allowing Federal funding for fishermen as a consequence of 
them losing the right to fish. The letters I have ask me why the Park 
Service is mandating they can no longer fish. Why isn't the Government 
more sensitive to their particular needs? Why is the Government 
singling them out when they have no place else to go? These are hard 
questions to answer.
  This is a situation of justice. These little people are crying out, 
and they are crying out in the only voice they have, and that is the 
voice of the Congress of the United States.
  That is basically where we are. It is my understanding there may be 
an effort to table this legislation. I personally cannot understand why 
the amendment would not be accepted and sent over with the rest of the 
package. Again, I appeal to fairness and equity and recognize, unlike 
the steel issue and the oil issue, this has absolutely no cost. This is 
simply an 18-month study on the merits of the resource--that is simply 
all it is--so these people can continue their rightful pursuit of their 
traditional use of fish and game.
  Mr. GRAMM. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I will be happy to yield to my friend from Texas.
  Mr. GRAMM. I know the Senator from Arizona wants to vote on his 
amendment, but I want to ask you a question, having sat here and 
listened. You are talking about Glacier Bay, and you showed a map of 
it. This is a far off place where, except for a very short period of 
the year, it is cold and frozen; right?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. That is pretty much the case; that is correct.
  Mr. GRAMM. You have Native Americans who live by fishing and 
gathering and eating sea gull eggs; right?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. They have traditionally gathered sea gull eggs in the 
spring of the year. They depend on fishing throughout the year.
  Mr. GRAMM. You have bureaucrats in Washington who may have never been 
to Glacier Bay suggesting that maybe, instead of eating sea gull eggs, 
they might raise chickens?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. It is pretty hard to do in that climate, but I am no 
expert on chickens.
  Mr. GRAMM. They have never tried going to Glacier Bay and raising 
chickens, have they?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I do not think they want to do that, with 200 inches 
of rain.
  Mr. GRAMM. To make a long story short, what you are really saying is 
you have Native Americans who are trying to eke out a living by fishing 
and by eating sea gull eggs, and you have bureaucrats in Washington who 
may have never been there, certainly would never go live there, who are 
saying that somehow they have the right to force them to change their 
way of life, with the idea that somehow it is more their business what 
happens in Glacier Bay than it is the business of people who live 
there; right?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. That is pretty much the case. They say fishing is a 
commercial activity, but if you look at this tour boat entering into 
the bay with 1,200 passengers, that obviously is a pretty significant 
commercial activity.
  There was a cruise vessel that had an accident in Glacier Bay the 
other day. It hit a rock. As far as I know, it is still on the rock. It 
leaked a little fuel--a few gallons. They are working on it. They are 
going to get it off. There is not going to be damage to the ecology or 
the environment. Nevertheless, that is a commercial activity.
  Mr. GRAMM. I intend to vote with the Senator. I hope everybody will. 
Your amendment really makes the point that there is no end to the 
arrogance of people in Washington who are trying to tell people in a 
completely different part of the country, which they know nothing 
about, how to live their lives and claiming that somehow this bay 
belongs more to them than it does to people who have lived there for a 
thousand years. Not only are you representing your constituency, but 
you are speaking out on behalf of a concern, not in as clear a way, not 
in as glaring a way, but that many people in other parts of the country 
share. The last time I looked, there was no shortage of sea gulls on 
the planet.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I have observed that as well. I thank my friend from 
Texas.
  Mr. GRAMM. I thank the Senator.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I will make one more point--I am sure 
there are others who want to be heard--relative to an inconsistency. 
That is, again, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service allows migratory 
bird taking in Alaska in the spring, and they have seen fit to do that, 
recognizing the subsistence needs of those native people, and egg 
gathering as well. But the U.S. Park Service, just within the last 2 
weeks, has indicated they will not allow sea gull egg gathering in the 
park. We have two different agencies

[[Page S7198]]

with two different jurisdictions, I grant you that. But it is 
definitely an inconsistency.
  Again, for those who are wondering what this issue is doing in the 
middle of steel and oil, I simply appeal to the floor managers to 
recognize the action that was taken when it was sent over to the House. 
Unlike steel and unlike oil, which did not have a vote on this floor, 
this issue had a vote. We had a good vote. As a consequence of that, it 
belongs in the package that is going back. Some may argue the 
intricacies of procedure, but a deal is a deal, and I made a commitment 
to my colleagues that I would bring this up again, and I intend to 
bring it up again and again because there is an injustice here.
  If we are able to prevail on a tabling motion, why, then we run the 
risk of what may happen to it in the House. I urge the floor managers 
to take this amendment.
  It is my intention to ask for the yeas and nays. I do not know what 
the procedure is, but it may be that the leaders want to delay voting 
on this matter until such time as they determine it is appropriate. I 
appeal to my colleagues to take the amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second? At the moment, 
there is not.
  The Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, in light of the fact the Senator from New 
Mexico wants to speak on this amendment, I ask for the regular order.
  With all due respect to my friends, we were going to vote 45 minutes 
ago.
  Mr. STEVENS. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. McCAIN. I ask for the regular order.
  Mr. STEVENS. Will the Senator yield?


                           Amendment No. 685

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The regular order is the McCain amendment No. 
685.
  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I move to table the McCain amendment and 
ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion to 
table amendment No. 685. The yeas and nays have been ordered. The clerk 
will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. NICKLES. I announce that the Senator from Pennsylvania, Mr. 
Santorum, is necessarily absent.
  Mr. REID. I announce that the Senator from Connecticut, Mr. Dodd, is 
necessarily absent.
  The result was announced--yeas 64, nays 34, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 174 Leg.]

                                YEAS--64

     Akaka
     Baucus
     Bayh
     Bennett
     Biden
     Bingaman
     Bond
     Boxer
     Breaux
     Bryan
     Byrd
     Campbell
     Cleland
     Cochran
     Conrad
     Daschle
     DeWine
     Domenici
     Dorgan
     Durbin
     Edwards
     Feingold
     Feinstein
     Gorton
     Graham
     Harkin
     Hatch
     Helms
     Hollings
     Hutchison
     Inhofe
     Inouye
     Jeffords
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     Kerrey
     Kerry
     Kohl
     Landrieu
     Lautenberg
     Leahy
     Levin
     Lieberman
     Lincoln
     Lugar
     McConnell
     Mikulski
     Moynihan
     Murray
     Reed
     Reid
     Robb
     Roberts
     Rockefeller
     Sarbanes
     Schumer
     Sessions
     Shelby
     Specter
     Stevens
     Thurmond
     Torricelli
     Wellstone
     Wyden

                                NAYS--34

     Abraham
     Allard
     Ashcroft
     Brownback
     Bunning
     Burns
     Chafee
     Collins
     Coverdell
     Craig
     Crapo
     Enzi
     Fitzgerald
     Frist
     Gramm
     Grams
     Grassley
     Gregg
     Hagel
     Hutchinson
     Kyl
     Lott
     Mack
     McCain
     Murkowski
     Nickles
     Roth
     Smith (NH)
     Smith (OR)
     Snowe
     Thomas
     Thompson
     Voinovich
     Warner

                             NOT VOTING--2

     Dodd
     Santorum
       
  The motion was agreed to.
  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.
  Mr. DOMENICI. I move to lay that motion on the table.
  The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.
  Mr. STEVENS addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Smith of Oregon). The Senator from Alaska 
is recognized.


                      Unanimous Consent Agreement

  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be 
recognized in order to offer a unanimous consent agreement regarding 
amendments; that following that I be recognized in order to make a 
short statement and move to table the Murkowski amendment No. 686, with 
no amendments in order to the amendments prior to the vote on that 
motion to table. I also ask unanimous consent that following the vote 
on the motion to table, if that amendment is tabled, the bill be read 
for the third time and the Senate proceed to a vote on passage of the 
bill, with no intervening action or debate, at 9:30 a.m. on Friday, 
June 18, and that paragraph 4 of rule XVIII be waived.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, point of inquiry. I don't mean to 
object. When does the Senator intend to have a vote on the tabling 
motion?
  Mr. STEVENS. Immediately after I make that motion.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 
another 5 minutes on the amendment, which is the pending amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. STEVENS. I do object. Would the Senator at least let me be able 
to get the other amendments out of the way first?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I have no objection, even though my amendment is the 
pending business--reserving my right to have 5 minutes on my pending 
amendment.
  Mr. STEVENS. I have no objection. I amend my request to ask that 
prior to the motion to table and my comments, my colleague be 
recognized for 5 minutes. Let's get the agreement.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. STEVENS. The total sequence is now agreed to, Mr. President?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Correct.


                           Amendment No. 687

  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The legislative assistant read as follows:

       The Senator from Alaska [Mr. Stevens], for himself, Mr. 
     Domenici, Mr. Byrd, Mr. Gramm, and Mr. Nickles, proposes an 
     amendment numbered 687.

  The amendment is as follows:

       On page 7, beginning on line 3, strike all through line 7.
       On page 10, beginning on line 23, strike all through page 
     11, line 2.
       On page 34, beginning on line 14, strike all through 16.
       On page 9, after line 17, insert the following new 
     paragraph:
       (4) Guarantee level.--No loan guarantee may be provided 
     under this section if the guarantee exceeds 85 percent of the 
     amount of principal of the loan.
       On page 36, after line 23, insert the following new 
     paragraph:
       (4) Guarantee level.--No loan guarantee may be provided 
     under this section if the guarantee exceeds 85 percent of the 
     amount of principal of the loan.
       On page 48, beginning on line 9, strike all through line 
     17.
       On page 6, line 7, strike all through line 13, and insert 
     the following:
       (e) Loan Guarantee Board Membership.--
       (1) In general.--There is established a Loan Guarantee 
     Board, which shall be composed of--
       (A) the Secretary of Commerce;
       (B) the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal 
     Reserve System, who shall serve as Chairman of the Board: and
       (C) the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
       On page 33, line 17, strike all through line 23, and insert 
     the following:
       (2) Loan guarantee board.--There is established to 
     administer the Program a Loan Guarantee Board, to be composed 
     of--
       (a) the Secretary of Commerce
       (B) the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal 
     Reserve System who shall serve as Chairman of the Board; and
       (C) the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
       On page 32, strike lines 10 and 11, and redesignate the 
     remaining subparagraphs and cross references thereto 
     accordingly.

  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, could we have a minute or two to explain 
that amendment?
  Mr. STEVENS. I withdraw the request.
  I ask unanimous consent that Senator Domenici, Senator Gramm, and 
Senator Nickles be permitted 5 minutes each to explain the amendment.

[[Page S7199]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from New Mexico is recognized.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, in the interest of time, I will explain 
only one amendment, and I will let my colleagues pick up the others. If 
they want to repeat what I have said, fine.
  Essentially, many Senators on this side have complained that this was 
an emergency measure, and that one way of looking at an emergency 
measure was that this bill might use some of the Social Security 
surplus. The emergency clause has been stricken. It is not in there 
anymore. As a consequence, this money is spent out of the regular 
allocation: Truth in budgeting, as you call it. It does not come out of 
the trust fund because it is paid for like any other program.
  If you are wondering how much for this year's appropriation, it is 
$19 million. So we have to find $19 million within the $1.8 billion 
budget of the United States. So we don't have to take any money out of 
Social Security. That is the only point I want to make.
  We fixed three other things other Senators were concerned about. I 
will let Senator Nickles or Senator Gramm explain those. I don't need 
the remainder of my time. Whatever I have left, I yield back.
  Mr. NICKLES addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized.
  Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues and, in particular, 
Senator Byrd, Senator Domenici, and Senator Stevens, for working with 
Senator Gramm, myself, and others to try to make this a better bill. 
Senator Domenici mentioned one, we strike the emergency provision. That 
basically means there is $270 million estimated cost by CBO of this 
bill, and it was declared emergency. We are striking that. That means 
we won't be raising the caps. I think that is important; I don't think 
we should be calling everything an emergency, as I stated, and busting 
the budget. I appreciate the cooperation in striking that section.
  We did a couple of other things. The bill originally said that the 
loan guarantees would be made up to 100 percent. We limited that now to 
a maximum loan guarantee of 85 percent. The lending organization, or 
bank, is going to have to put up 15 percent, with some risk. It may be 
25 or 30 percent, but they will have to put up at least 15 percent. I 
think that is a good amendment.
  We changed the composition of the board. Originally, the lending 
board was comprised of the Labor Secretary, the Treasury Secretary, and 
the Commerce Secretary.
  We changed that. We said, well, we will keep the Secretary of 
Commerce on, but we will change it and add the Chairman of the Federal 
Reserve Board and the head of the SEC--I think, again, trying to take 
politics out of it, trying to put people on the board that are more 
interested in economics and making good financial decisions, and not 
have it be so political.
  We also have another amendment that would strike out the lower loan 
limits. The bill originally said in steel the loan range would be from 
$25 million to $250 million. We dropped the $25 million lower limit. In 
other words, now a steel company can get a $5 million loan, or a $10 
million loan, or a $1 million loan; it won't have to be at least $25 
million.
  We did the same thing for ore, which had a $6 million minimum loan 
level. Now that can be smaller. For oil and gas, I believe, there was a 
$250,000 minimum. We struck that minimum as well.
  I think the combination of amendments we have had make this a better 
bill. I appreciate the fact that leaders who are promoting this bill 
have agreed to these amendments. I think it improves it. I am still 
going to vote no on final passage. I really do not think the Federal 
Government should be in the loan guarantee business for steel, or for 
oil and gas, and for the iron ore companies. But I do appreciate their 
consideration of these amendments.
  I urge my colleagues to support them.
  Several Senators addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.
  Mr. FITZGERALD. Mr. President, I have a question for the Senator from 
Oklahoma about his amendment. I am wondering if there is anything in 
his amendment that would correct one problem I see in the bill, which 
is that it occurs to me, if that a steel company, for example, has an 
existing loan with some private bank--once this program goes into 
effect and that loan is in bad shape, the bank can encourage that steel 
company to apply for a new loan under this program and get that Federal 
guarantee, and thereby you are transferring that risk, or at least 85 
percent of it, from that bank that otherwise would take the hit to the 
taxpayers.
  Is there anything in the amendment that the Senator knows of, or 
anything in the original bill, that would prevent that kind of 
shenanigan?
  Mr. NICKLES. To respond to the question of my friend and colleague--I 
think it is an excellent question--we didn't fix that problem. The 
Senator is exactly right. This bill still leaves it open where you can 
have a bad loan, or basically you are going to have that refinanced 
with the Government guaranteed loan; i.e., a steel company would have a 
$100 million loan. Maybe they are paying a high interest rate--maybe 12 
percent. Maybe that loan is in jeopardy. Maybe they are having a hard 
time making payments on it.
  We haven't fixed that yet. That is an amendment some of us have been 
talking about. It wasn't in this package we just agreed to.
  Mr. FITZGERALD. What about if there is a loan out there to one of the 
small oil and gas companies, and the president and owner of the company 
have personally guaranteed the loan? Would they be in a position now, 
with this new loan program, to apply for a new loan under this type of 
guarantee program, get that new loan issued, and replace their personal 
guarantees with the Government guarantees so the owners and major 
shareholders, who could be very wealthy individuals, would be taken off 
the hook by the taxpayers?

  Mr. NICKLES. I think, again, my colleague from Illinois is pointing 
out a shortcoming that is in the bill. It has not been fixed by the 
amendments that were offered. Quite possibly, maybe the Senator from 
Illinois will have an amendment, and maybe the principals that are 
engaged in this might support it.
  I will be happy to work with the Senator to see if we can't correct 
that problem. But we haven't stopped anybody from refinancing a bad 
loan, or maybe a self-interest loan, as the Senator discussed. I 
personally think those mistakes should be corrected. We have taken four 
good steps to make it better. But we need some additional amendments to 
solve that problem.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the agreement, the amendment is agreed 
to.
  The amendment (No. 687) was agreed to.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.
  Mr. STEVENS. I ask unanimous consent that the time for Senator Gramm 
be reserved for a later time today. He is not here at this time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, if I may, I think I have some time on the 
bill to respond to the Senator from Illinois, to a certain extent.
  With Alan Greenspan on the board managing this program--if I could 
have the attention of the Senator from Illinois--and the head of the 
SEC on the program making the regulations concerning these loans, the 
fact that the Senator has raised this issue on the floor I am sure will 
not miss their attention.
  Mr. President, my colleague has 5 minutes. Then I am recognized after 
that. Is that correct?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. That is correct.
  The Senator from Alaska is recognized.


                           Amendment No. 686

  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, it is my understanding that my 
amendment on Glacier Bay is the pending amendment before the body.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I thank the Chair.
  I am disappointed to learn that my senior colleague intends to table 
the amendment. On the other hand, I know that he very much supports the 
continued fishing and subsistence harvest in

[[Page S7200]]

Glacier Bay. Nevertheless, we are faced with a situation here where the 
issue is kind of caught, if you will, between two major issues; namely, 
the guarantee on steel and the guarantee on oil. The reason it belongs 
here is because we voted on it in the supplemental in which we also had 
the steel and oil matters. We voted on it and passed it 59 to 40, and 
it went over to the conference. It was the same conference that 
addressed the Glacier Bay issue that addressed steel loan guarantees 
and the oil guarantee, which, I might mention, cost $270 million. My 
amendment costs absolutely zero.
  I hope my colleagues will accept the amendment. But they may see fit 
not to. As a consequence, I believe we have an injustice occurring in 
Alaska for those few hundred Alaska Indian people who depend, and have 
for years and years, on subsistence access in Glacier Bay. The 
bureaucrats within the Park Service moved in and simply said: We are 
going to close it, and that is it.
  We have been able, through the efforts of Senator Stevens, to get 
remuneration for the potential loss of their rights. But the fact is, 
on this chart we have 16 national parks where commercial fishing is 
allowed.
  I encourage my colleagues to reflect on the vote that prevailed, 59 
to 40, to allow fishing in Glacier Bay. But this is a different 
amendment. I changed my amendment. Previously, we were going to wait 
until there was a determination by the State to decide who had 
jurisdiction. That was going to go to the courts. My current amendment 
is simply an 18-month moratorium to allow the State to work with the 
Park Service to evaluate whether or not the resource is in danger. The 
funding for that is available within the funds for the Park Service.
  I ask unanimous consent that statements by Alaska's Lieutenant 
Governor Fran Ulmer, by Myron Naneng, a respected member of the 
Migratory Bird Treaty negotiating team, and by the Director of the Fish 
and Wildlife Service, Jamie Clark, be printed in the Record with regard 
to the specifics of allowing migratory bird hunting in the spring on 
Federal lands in Alaska, as well as egg gathering.

                         Migratory Bird Treaty


                       enforcement Inconsistency

       Unlike recent Park Service actions, the Fish and Wildlife 
     Service has had a long-standing policy that is sensitive to 
     subsistence use of migratory waterfowl, and shows that the 
     Fish and Wildlife Service understands its importance to rural 
     Alaskans.
       During a Sept. 25, 1997, Senate hearing on the Migratory 
     Bird Treaty, Alaska's Lt. Governor, Fran Ulmer, noted: ``. . 
     . much of the traditional harvest of migratory birds in rural 
     Alaska has taken place, and continues to take place, during 
     the closed-season portion of the year. In Alaska prohibitions 
     on traditional hunting practices have been enforced on a very 
     limited basis.''
       Myron Naneng, representing the Alaska Native Migratory Bird 
     Working Group, and one of the treaty negotiators, said: ``I 
     want to begin by expressing our deepest appreciation for the 
     leadership and commitment (former Fish and Wildlife Service 
     chief) Mollie Beattie demonstrated as head of the U.S. 
     negotiating team. She showed an uncommon understanding of the 
     nutritional and cultural aspects of the Native subsistence 
     way of life, and her actions showed her confidence in Native 
     people as responsible caretakers and managers of their 
     subsistence resources.''
       The current Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, 
     Jamie Clark, had this to say: ``Native people have continued 
     their traditional hunt of migratory birds in the spring and 
     summer, and neither government has rigidly enforced the 
     closed season given the realities of life in the arctic and 
     subarctic regions.''
       Elsewhere in her testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations 
     Committee, Clark called the Fish and Wildlife Service's 
     policy ``discretionary non-enforcement.'' It was--and is--the 
     only way to make the best of a bad situation until the treaty 
     amendments can be put into effect.
       If the Fish and Wildlife Service has the good sense to use 
     ``discretionary non-enforcement'' everywhere else, then that 
     option certainly is open to the National Park Service.
       Unfortunately, NPS has instead chosen to ignore both the 
     needs of the local people and Congress' clear desire to allow 
     reasonable spring harvesting.

  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, finally, I believe that as an 
authorizer I have been caught, if you will, in this continued dilemma 
of the appropriators.
  I remind you that we have not had hearings on the issue of steel, nor 
hearings on the issue of oil, as far as this guarantee package is 
concerned.
  It reminds me of an issue that occurred last year with respect to the 
appropriations process. The Clinton administration decided to acquire 
Headwaters in Northern California for $315 million and the New World 
Mine Site in Montana at a cost of $65 million. That is $380 million. It 
did not go through my committee of jurisdiction, the Energy and Natural 
Resources Committee. These decisions last year were made with no 
congressional involvement. The administration sought to bypass the 
authorizing committee entirely and have the appropriators essentially 
just write the check for the purpose. We are seeing more and more of 
this.
  As an authorizer, I think we have a job to do, and we are either 
going to do our job or we might as well give it to the appropriators.
  As chairman of the authorizing committee, I want the opportunity for 
the committee to carefully review the merits of this acquisition. 
Instead, $380 million went right out. As a consequence, we are seeing 
similar things today with regard to the merits of the loan guarantee on 
oil and steel.
  Ultimately, my arguments failed last year. The authorizations and 
funding were included in the 1998 Interior appropriations bill, much to 
the administration's delight. There were never any hearings. There was 
never any open debate for any type of public review.
  My little deal represents a few hundred Native people in Alaska, 
appealing, if you will, for 18 months to study the impact of their 
modest fishing and subsistence gathering, and they are depending upon 
the Senate in this regard because they have no other place to 
turn. Give them money if you want, but they don't want handouts. They 
are a proud people; they want the right to continue to do what they 
have done.

  I encourage my colleagues to recognize what is happening here. I hope 
some day we go to a 2-year budget process.
  I appreciate the consideration of all my colleagues.
  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I note the Senator from Texas has 
returned. I ask unanimous consent his time be restored.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. GRAMM. We have a bill before the Senate. Perhaps some believe the 
Government ought to be lending money to American industry; I don't, so 
I am not for the bill.
  We have put together an amendment which I believe improves the bill.
  No. 1, we strike the emergency designation so none of the money will 
come out of the Social Security trust fund.
  No. 2, we set up a board made up of the Secretary of Commerce, the 
Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Chairman of the 
Securities and Exchange Commission. Alan Greenspan would be Chairman. 
It is a major move towards taking politics out of the determination of 
who gets the loan.
  We require that the lender put up 15 percent of the capital, take 15 
percent of the risk, so that the Government does not end up eating the 
entire loss if there is a loss. Obviously, if you are lending money, 
you are going to have to make up part of the loss; you will do a better 
job than if you are lending somebody else's money. We take the minimums 
out of the bill, so small business can compete for the money.
  Finally, we have agreed on language that will put a focus on trying 
to make loans to maximize the chances that the loans will be paid back 
and, to the maximum extent possible, take politics out of the process.
  This does not make it a good bill, in my mind. I am not for it, but I 
think it improves it.
  I thank the two authors of the bill for working for people, who were 
not for their bill and were not going to vote for it, to try to make it 
better. I thank my colleague for giving me an opportunity.
  Mr. BYRD. I ask unanimous consent I be allowed to speak.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I was one of those who worked on the 
amendments. I thank those who participated. I thank Mr. Domenici. I 
thank Mr. Gramm and Mr. Nickles. We all met, and I agreed on the 
amendments. I think they were good proposals. I think overall they 
improved the bill.

[[Page S7201]]

  I thank all Senators who were engaged in the efforts. I thank the 
chairman of the Appropriations Committee for his fine cooperation.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.
  Mr. STEVENS. I ask that Senator Fitzgerald be added as a cosponsor to 
the amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I take the Senate back to the time we 
were in conference. We were in conference a long time on the 
supplemental appropriations bill with concerns about Kosovo and other 
vital areas of our national defense policy.
  In conference on that bill, we worked late into the night on a series 
of matters. We had a vote on the Byrd and Domenici amendments. As a 
matter of fact, the House voted to accept the Byrd version of that loan 
guarantee program and rejected the version from Senator Domenici.
  The Senate had not voted at that time. I conferred with Senate 
conferees and we told the House we insisted on our amendments. The 
House came back and voted again. At that time, it rejected both 
amendments. We were stalemated.
  We went into the night the next night and through the day. It was 
about 9:30, 10 o'clock and I asked Senator Byrd if he would consider a 
suggestion I had. We had a second supplemental in our committee, and we 
had not conferred on that. It was a bill that was passed by the House 
and is a viable bill to send back to the House as another supplemental 
appropriations bill. I asked Senator Byrd if he would consent to take 
his amendment off of the bill that was pending in conference. I assured 
him that when we reconvened after the recess I would move the committee 
to put the steel loan guarantee on that bill and report it to the 
Senate. I made the same request to Senator Domenici. Both of them 
agreed.
  We then conferred with the leadership of both the House and Senate. 
At that time, it was clear that if this proposal of having these two 
loan guarantee programs on the supplemental and sending it back to the 
House had any other amendment it would not be sent to conference in the 
House.
  I remember well Senator Byrd asked me at that time: What are you 
going to do if the bill gets to the floor and this amendment is offered 
that would not be germane to either of these two loan guarantee 
programs, which under the circumstance would lead to the bill not being 
sent to conference in the House, by the House?
  I said: Senator, as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, I will 
personally move to table any amendment that is not germane to the bill 
if it is reported by our committee.
  We are at this position now. We have adopted the germane amendments. 
I congratulate all concerned for working that out. I was constrained to 
move to table the amendment of the Senator from Arizona. I thank the 
Senate for tabling that amendment.
  The last amendment is the amendment of my colleague that I 
cosponsored when the bill was before the Senate before. I say to the 
Senate, in all sincerity, the word of a Senator has to be kept, no 
matter what the price. I know I will read in my papers in Anchorage and 
throughout Alaska tomorrow about this, which will be deemed a feud 
between me and my colleague. It is not a feud. I have a responsibility 
to keep my word.
  As chairman of the Appropriations Committee, I move to table the 
Murkowski amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There is a sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion to 
table amendment No. 686.
  The yeas and nays have been ordered.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. NICKLES. I announce that the Senator from Pennsylvania, Mr. 
Santorum and the Senator from Arizona, Mr. McCain, are necessarily 
absent.
  Mr. REID. I announce that the Senator from Connecticut (Mr. Dodd), is 
necessarily absent.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber 
desiring to vote?
  The result was announced--yeas 59, nays 38, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 175 Leg.]

                                YEAS--59

     Abraham
     Baucus
     Bayh
     Biden
     Bingaman
     Boxer
     Breaux
     Brownback
     Bryan
     Byrd
     Chafee
     Cleland
     Cochran
     Collins
     Daschle
     DeWine
     Domenici
     Dorgan
     Durbin
     Edwards
     Feingold
     Feinstein
     Gorton
     Graham
     Gregg
     Harkin
     Hollings
     Inouye
     Jeffords
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     Kerrey
     Kerry
     Kohl
     Lautenberg
     Leahy
     Levin
     Lieberman
     Lincoln
     Lugar
     Mikulski
     Moynihan
     Murray
     Reed
     Reid
     Robb
     Roberts
     Rockefeller
     Sarbanes
     Schumer
     Sessions
     Shelby
     Smith (OR)
     Snowe
     Stevens
     Torricelli
     Warner
     Wellstone
     Wyden

                                NAYS--38

     Akaka
     Allard
     Ashcroft
     Bennett
     Bond
     Bunning
     Burns
     Campbell
     Conrad
     Coverdell
     Craig
     Crapo
     Enzi
     Fitzgerald
     Frist
     Gramm
     Grams
     Grassley
     Hagel
     Hatch
     Helms
     Hutchinson
     Hutchison
     Inhofe
     Kyl
     Landrieu
     Lott
     Mack
     McConnell
     Murkowski
     Nickles
     Roth
     Smith (NH)
     Specter
     Thomas
     Thompson
     Thurmond
     Voinovich

                             NOT VOTING--3

     Dodd
     McCain
     Santorum
  The motion was agreed to.
  Mr. BYRD. I move to reconsider the vote.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I move to lay that motion on the table.
  The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I will make one clarifying statement 
relative to the vote that was taken and a reference made by my senior 
colleague to the germaneness of my amendment.
  I would like the Record to note that the moratorium that I proposed 
simply amended last year's appropriations bill which terminated fishing 
in Glacier Bay. If the fisheries could be closed and the field of 
participants could be narrowed in an appropriation, then it was 
certainly not out of place to use the same process for the Glacier Bay 
amendment, which failed under the tabling motion. I think it was a 
legitimate appropriation amendment. It set parameters for the 
expenditure of funds to be appropriated. That is certainly a time-
honored, time-tested device.
  I recognize all my colleagues were interested in saving their own 
individual bills, those who are interested in steel, those who are 
interested in oil guarantees; and, obviously, I was interested in 
saving fishing in Glacier Bay for native people.
  But, hopefully, there will be another day. I will continue to work to 
convince my colleagues of the merits of my position. I particularly 
want to thank and recognize the explanation offered by my senior 
colleague, Senator Stevens, who had indicated to me sometime ago he 
would move to table any amendments on this pending matter. That was 
certainly addressed as well by Senator Byrd. I appreciate and respect 
their opinion.
  We will still be fighting for the native people associated with 
fishing in Glacier Bay.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, if the distinguished Senator will yield?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I am happy to yield to my good friend.
  Mr. BYRD. As the distinguished Senator from Alaska will recall, I 
voted with him previously. But as I explained earlier today, had we 
amended this bill with a nongermane amendment, it would have killed the 
iron and the oil and gas guarantee bill. It would have been dead. 
Because the Speaker made no commitment to help bring up a bill that 
would have other matters included in it. He only made his commitment 
with regard to the iron and oil and gas guarantee. So I thank the 
Senator.
  I had to vote against the Senator from Alaska on this occasion 
because I wanted to save the bill before the Senate.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I certainly accept my good friend's explanation. I 
hope I will have another opportunity to bring the issue up and garner 
his support on its merits.
  I thank the Chair. I thank my colleagues.

[[Page S7202]]

  Mr. BURNS. Mr. President, I rise today with mixed feelings. On one 
hand I desperately want to do everything possible to help out America's 
oil patch. My state has lost thousands of jobs over the last decade and 
our small independent oil and gas producers are being forced out of the 
business. Our oil towns are now ghost towns and oil development plans 
for Montana are far and few between. I would love nothing more than to 
find a way to help out this vital segment of Montana's economy.
  Unfortunately, I do not believe that the piece of legislation is the 
best course of action. With all due respect to my colleague, Senator 
Domenici, I cannot support any legislation that dips us deeper into the 
Social Security fund. We have made a stand. We will not continue to dip 
into this fund and put a further cramp on a system already strained to 
its breaking point. One step here, another there, and the next thing 
you know the pledge is gone, and along with it a promise I have made to 
my fellow Montanans.
  It is a hard, hard decision, but I know that Montanans will support 
me. I have already heard from many of them on this vote. I have called 
some of my independent producers and asked them if this is the course 
of action they need us to take right now. Some of them originally 
supported the program, but more often than not I heard an answer that 
made me even more proud to know these men and women. They told me that 
they don't want a handout, and this legislation doesn't address the 
heart of the problem. The problem in oil country is pretty simple. The 
federal government is running us off the land and ensuring we can't 
make a profit.
  If you want to help the true independents out there, the Montana 
businesses, and the other producers who live in the communities, then 
you better look at royalty relief and streamlining the process to keep 
our marginal wells in production. You need to let us get to the oil and 
gas, and you need to be there working with producers, not against them. 
The Bureau of Land Management, the Department of the Interior, and the 
United States Forest Service need to change. We don't need to set up a 
loaning bureaucracy to place more restrictions on our producers and 
rope them into more capital investment in a market of uncertainty.
  Passing this legislation without addressing the heart of the problem 
is the same as increasing someone's credit limit because they are on 
the edge of bankruptcy. You have to address the problems of price and 
access versus production cost, you can't just give them more lead rope 
and hope the market rebounds to allow them to repay their loans.
  Additionally, the legislation before us says you are only eligible 
for loans under this proposal if credit is not otherwise available, and 
you can ensure repayment. Well, that sounds like we are talking out of 
both sides of our mouths. To make matters worse, the legislation 
dictates that you have to let the General Accounting Office take a full 
look at your company's records. Not many Montanans that I know want the 
federal government having full access to their books as a bargaining 
chip in their effort to get a loan. The other big problem is that the 
Guarantee Board is made up of appointees of the Clinton-Gore 
Administration. I believe the real problems facing our producers are 
political. Would this legislation only make this problem worse? The 
administration has a known political agenda that is attempting to move 
all economic activity off our public lands. They are locking it up 
piece by piece. Will this agenda infect the decision process as to who 
gets loans? A lot of our interest is on public land and I don't want to 
have to face the possibility that some of my producers would be 
discriminated against because they operate on public land.
  I know that my colleagues who support this measure mean well, and 
they are looking for a way to respond to the pain in the oil patch as 
quickly as possible, but this is not the way to do it. We need to rally 
behind a consensus bill that gives tax relief and helps lower the cost 
of production. We need to stand firm on royalty rates, and we need to 
continue pushing our Cabinet agencies to stop running our producers off 
the land. We can extract oil and gas responsibly, and our nation 
depends on it. Unfortunately, the agenda of the current administration 
is blinded by politics and is set on completely ignoring the reality of 
what is good both for the West, and for the security of our nation.
  No matter what the outcome of the vote today, I hope it does not 
distract us from working together to find a real solution. If the 
legislation passes, I don't want to hear that we have fixed the 
problem. If it fails, I hope those of us who understand the problems 
facing our oil and gas producers can come together and work towards 
passing legislation that goes to the core of the problem.
  Mr. BREAUX. As a cochair of the Congressional Oil and Gas Forum, I 
would like to take a few minutes to discuss the importance of America's 
small, independent oil and gas producers and the importance of this oil 
and gas loan guarantee program to their survival.
  Over time, oil and gas production in the lower 48 states has become 
the province of independent producers. The so-called majors are more 
likely to operate in the offshore deepwater and in Alaska. The 
independents' share of production in the continental U.S. has increased 
from about 45 percent in the mid-1980s to more than 60 percent in 1997.
  Independents are a different element of the oil and gas production 
industry than majors. Most producers operating in the lower 48 are 
small producers. They don't have the resources of majors such as 
refineries and chemical operations to buffer them during periods of low 
oil prices, such as those over the last year and a half.
  As a result, independents finance their operations differently than 
majors. Independents generate 35 percent of their capital primarily 
from financial institutions. Low oil prices have made banks reluctant 
to make loans to the industry. This program would unlock the access to 
capital that is the lifeblood of this industry.
  Independent producers have suffered significantly from the current 
price crisis. These statistics show the impact low prices have had 
since October 1997:
  Domestic production has dropped below six million barrels per day--
from 6.4 million to 5.8 million barrels per day. That's the lowest 
production since 1951.
  More than 56,000 jobs lost out of an estimated 340,000 total industry 
jobs--that's more than 16 percent.
  Although prices are improving, an additional 20,000 oil and natural 
gas jobs are at risk of being lost.
  Since October 1997, 136,000 oil wells (25 percent of the U.S. total) 
and 57,000 natural gas wells have shut down. Many will never operate 
again.
  Mr. President, $2.21 billion in lost federal royalties and state 
severance and production taxes. In my state, falling royalty and 
severance tax revenue have caused Governor Mike Foster to order a $30 
million freeze on state government hiring and spending to head off a 
budget shortfall. The rate of growth in Louisiana sales and personal 
income taxes has fallen in recent months as laid-off energy workers 
reduce their spending.
  Mr. President, $25 billion in lost economic impact associated with 
shut down oil and gas wells.
  U.S. production down 651,000 barrels per day to 5.88 million, the 
lowest level since 1951.
  Operating rig counts have hit historic lows. From November 1997 
through April 1999, the domestic drilling rig count dropped 50 percent. 
The rig count is a quick measure of the level of activity in the 
industry. While most of this drop has been in the oil side of the 
business--about a 60 percent drop--the natural gas side of the industry 
has seen a 40 percent decline.
  Capital budgets for oil and natural gas development are down 25-30 
percent with the biggest cuts in the U.S. Most independents are 
drilling new wells.
  Faced with these stark problems, the oil and gas loan guarantee 
program provides a two-year, GATT-legal, $500 million guaranteed loan 
program to back loans provided by private financial institutions to 
qualified oil and gas producers and the associated oil and gas service 
industry (drilling contractors, well service contractors, tubular 
goods, etc.)
  The OMB estimates that the program will cost $125 million. The cost 
is fully offset by funds from the Administration's travel budget.

[[Page S7203]]

  Loan guarantees are an approach that the Federal Government has used 
to help recovery of key domestic industries or cities in times of 
severe crisis. They have been used for Chrysler Corporation and New 
York City. The Department of Agriculture operates an ongoing loan 
guarantee program for farmers that addresses their problems during low 
commodity prices. Here, the concept would provide bridge financing to 
allow independent producers and the oil industry supply business to 
recover from the current price crisis.
  Independent producers throughout the country continue to suffer 
severe economic distress. Recovery will be neither quick nor easy. This 
Emergency Oil and Gas Loan Guarantee Program will save jobs and 
businesses. It will contribute to the continued viability of the 
independent producing industry and U.S. national security.
  I urge my colleagues to support this legislation.
  Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I cosponsored the oil and gas loan 
guarantee program on the emergency supplemental because I believe this 
is an important and necessary program to ensure independent producers 
are able to continue operating in the United States. This program is 
available only to small producers who do not own refineries of any 
size. No major oil company is eligible.
  We are currently importing well over 50 percent of our oil needs. The 
Energy Information Administration projects that by 2020 we will be 
importing 65 percent of the oil we consume. The independent oil and gas 
producers, those companies eligible for this program, have remained 
committed to domestic production. They are the backbone of our domestic 
oil supply. They do not import oil, and they do not sell gasoline. 
Every barrel these independents produce generates jobs, tax and royalty 
revenues and eliminates another barrel of imports.
  Oil prices were as low as $7 per barrel in New Mexico a few months 
ago. Although prices have recovered somewhat, small producers were 
devastated. In addition to the pending loan guarantee program, I 
believe we need to implement other policy changes to protect our 
domestic production. Our tax and royalty policies need to be changed to 
ensure independent oil and gas producers have enough cash flow so they 
can avoid shutting in production again when prices fall as low as they 
were recently.
  I urge support for this bill.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will read the bill for a third time.
  The amendments were ordered to be engrossed and the bill to be read a 
third time.
  The bill was read a third time.
  Mr. LOTT addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
  Mr. LOTT. I thank my colleagues for their work in the handling of 
this legislation today. They made a lot of progress. We will vote on 
final passage first thing in the morning.
  A number of Senators have asked about the plan for tomorrow. We do 
take up the State Department authorization bill after we have final 
passage of this piece of legislation. There may be a necessary vote or 
two on amendments, but they will occur, hopefully, as early in the 
morning as possible, but none later than 11:45. So any of you who have 
plans to leave at 11:45 or 12 noon, whatever, you will be able to do 
that.
  As usual, we announced we would have a vote or votes on this Friday, 
but the votes will not occur beyond 12 noon. I hope it will be earlier 
than that.
  Several Senators addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Mr. KENNEDY. I am glad to yield.
  Mr. BYRD. I thank the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts.
  I only want to take a few seconds to thank the majority leader for 
bringing up the bill which the Senate has reached agreement on which 
will be voted on tomorrow morning, the iron and oil and gas guarantee 
bill. The leader made a commitment to bring that bill up; he did not 
make any commitment to pass it. He did not make any commitment to vote 
for it. But he made a commitment to bring it up, and he has kept his 
word. I thank him for that.
  Mr. LOTT. Thank you very much.
  Mr. BYRD. I thank my own leader, and I thank Ted Stevens, the 
chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and Senator Domenici. They 
have used their usual skill, good humor, and toughness. I think the 
Nation is better off as a result.
  Thank you.
  Mr. LOTT. Thank you very much.
  Mr. BYRD. I thank the Senator from Massachusetts.

                          ____________________