[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 174 (Tuesday, November 25, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S15922-S15926]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       ACCOMPLISHMENTS THIS YEAR

  Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I commend the chairman of the Energy 
Committee and the Senator from Idaho for their fine work on the Energy 
bill. While we are not going to get that bill passed before we leave 
for the holiday break, it is something that I know the Senator from New 
Mexico and the Senator from Idaho and others are going to work on and 
diligently try to accomplish for the reasons they outlined.
  Mr. President, I wanted to run down and put into the Record a summary 
of some of the things we have been able to accomplish this year.
  We go out on the accomplishment of delivering to the American people 
what has been asked now for several years by our seniors, and not just 
by seniors but by the children of seniors and the grandchildren of 
seniors, who see the fiscal strains that have been put on their parents 
and grandparents as a result of, in many cases, not having prescription 
drug coverage or having prescription drug coverage that is very 
expensive. Particularly for lower-income individuals, it can be quite a 
drain on their resources, as well as diminishing their quality of life 
in their senior years.
  So we go out on somewhat of a high here. And as it should be, because 
we have accomplished a lot this year.
  If you go back to when this session started, and the Senator from 
Tennessee became the majority leader in the transfer of power, if you 
will, here in the Senate, the first thing he said we would do was clean 
up the mess that did not get accomplished last year.
  We had no budget last year, which meant we could not really pass any 
of our appropriations bills. The Government spending was locked into 
last year's level, and we did not have a whole lot of new initiatives 
at the time, when we were looking at a whole new Department of Homeland 
Security, a war on terror, and a war on the horizon in Iraq.
  There was a lot of uncertainty going on here, and we did not have the 
fiscal discipline in place to be able to get our fiscal house in order 
here in Washington, DC.
  So the first thing we said we would do was we would clean up that 
mess and pass the spending bills, and fight off repeated attempts, in 
almost $1 trillion in amendments on the other side, of adding spending 
to these appropriations bills and then subsequently to the budget that 
we passed after we passed the appropriations bills from the prior year.
  So we passed the appropriations bills from the prior year. On top of 
that, we put a new budget in place, and we passed a budget. We thought 
that was important. Many here thought another budget could never pass 
in the Senate because of the practice of last year and the difficulty 
in trying to get a budget into the framework of seeing really slow 
growth compared to what we have seen in the past 7 or 8 years.
  That was accomplished. It was tough, and a lot of tough votes. We 
were able to stand tall and fight back amendments from many on the 
other side of the aisle. And some on the other side of the aisle joined 
us. I thank those Members who have stood up, just as many did today, to 
what appears to be, from the Democratic leadership point of view, 
obstructionist tactics that are used here in the Senate on almost--I 
almost want to go back and maybe reconsider the term ``almost''--I will 
say almost everything, but it is almost everything to the point where 
you think it is everything. But we have had some cooperation from many 
Democrats, and certainly enough to get some of the more important bills 
that we considered here done. I thank those who participated in that 
bipartisan cooperation.

  We were able to accomplish a budget. We were able to accomplish, as a 
result of the budget, a tax plan, again, done in a bipartisan way, here 
on the floor of the Senate. And the effects of that tax plan have been 
really some of the most startling economic news we have seen in a long 
time.
  Just today, it was announced for the last quarter growth--which was 
really the first full quarter that was able to get the impact of the 
President's tax reduction and jobs growth proposal--we saw it now not 
at 7.2 percent growth but 8.2 percent growth, the best in 20 years in 
this country. That is an enormous feather in the cap of this 
administration's policy of stimulating growth in the economy by 
reducing taxes, particularly targeted at investors and small- and 
medium-sized businesses.
  We were able to accomplish that because we had a budget we passed in 
the Senate that allowed for a tax reduction that has been put in place. 
As a result of that tax reduction, which in part was reducing capital 
gains tax, but also reducing the double taxation of dividends, it has 
caused a $2 trillion increase--a $2 trillion increase--in valuations of 
equities in this country. That is an enormous turnaround.
  I was watching the news this morning, and someone was talking about 
their retirement savings having been eroded, and the impact on seniors, 
and the impact on those who are approaching those seniors years and 
their ability to have a stable retirement. When you add $2 trillion 
back to the value of those equities, you do a lot to stabilize people's 
retirement and give them the peace of mind they are going to be able to 
get through their retirement years with a fair--hopefully, good--
standard of living.
  That was as a result of the budget, the leadership here in the Senate 
and of the Senate Republicans, and ultimately the tax reduction that 
was passed as a result of the great leadership of our President.
  We were able to provide resources for, obviously, the war on 
terrorism and homeland security, which is a new appropriation. The 
Senator from Mississippi, Mr. Cochran, who chairs that subcommittee, 
was just in the Chamber. We passed that bill in a timely

[[Page S15923]]

fashion so those increased resources would go out to help fight the war 
on terrorism here at home, as well as, obviously, provide resources we 
need for our men and women in uniform in Afghanistan and in Iraq to 
fight the battle on terrorism on the front line over in the Middle 
East.
  Another historic accomplishment of this Congress, which is yet to be 
fully realized is the AIDS bill. We were able to pass a bill that 
authorized money for AIDS. And now we are talking about fulfilling that 
promise to come up with the money that was in the authorization to fund 
AIDS in Africa and several countries in the Caribbean that are faced 
with outrageous, just absolutely incredible suffering and the 
destruction of the family unit in those countries, with infection rates 
of double digits in the country, with literally millions of people 
infected with this disease, and transmitting it, in some cases, to 
their children.
  We need to do something about prevention, and we need to do something 
about the transmission of AIDS. We also need to do something about 
treatment. With the appropriations bill that is now going to be filed 
in the House in about an hour and 20 minutes, we will have the 
President's AIDS proposal fully funded: $2 billion in bilateral aid and 
$400 million to meet our obligations under the Global Fund--for every 
$1 we put up, $2 of international funds. And $400 million will meet 
that obligation as of this time.
  We will have in place the commitment we made to those less fortunate 
in Africa and in the Caribbean for the needed help on prevention, 
transmission, and treatment of those who are suffering with AIDS or 
hopefully will not get AIDS. That is a huge accomplishment for this 
Senate. Candidly, it is probably one of most important things we can do 
for humanitarian relief. If you look back in history, there really 
isn't a humanitarian crisis, a health crisis that will match what is 
going on today in Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. I am glad to be part 
of a Senate which on a bipartisan fashion stood up and made a huge 
financial commitment. It is not an easy thing to do in a country that 
feels a lot of suffering here at home and wants more resources directed 
here at home, to be able to set that money aside for those who are 
literally dying by the thousands each day from this pandemic that has 
struck sub-Saharan Africa. The commitment of the President, followed up 
by the commitment here in the Congress, is something of which we should 
all be very proud.
  We passed the partial-birth abortion act. We are stopping this 
horrendous procedure from occurring anymore. There are those who are 
taking that bill to court. We expected that, but the Senate, with the 
President's leadership, has been able to pass this bill that is 
overwhelmingly supported by the American public and is a real step in 
the right direction. We haven't had very many steps in the right 
direction with respect to this culture in America. This is a step in 
the right direction to put some humanity back in the treatment of those 
innocent children in the womb.
  We passed some antispam legislation. As someone who has young kids 
and is bombarded daily with e-mails of not the most wholesome nature, 
pop-up ads and the like, this is a tool we can give to authorities to 
try to limit the amount of that kind of information falling into the 
homes of families. It is a very serious problem to have this wonderful 
tool of the Internet be infected by this disease of pornography and 
violence and other things that are marketed to our children through e-
mails and through other types of advertising. The Senate has begun the 
slow process. It will be a slow process, as maybe it should be, because 
we have to balance the rights of free speech. Freedom is something that 
needs to be used responsibly. No one who wrote the founding documents 
of this country believed freedom to be an absolute. With rights come 
responsibilities. That freedom, more properly defined as liberty, is a 
balancing of those rights and responsibilities. We need to seek to do 
that in the case of the Internet, which I find to be a wonderful tool 
but at the same time a very dangerous vehicle for information to flow 
to people who may not handle it well and may be scarred or changed for 
life as a result of some of this activity.
  As I went down that list, I think you can see it is a list of great 
accomplishment. Yet at the same time there is so much left to be done 
and so much that was blocked by the other side. So when you hear, as 
you will hear, the term ``obstructionism'' about things that could have 
been--the Senator from Idaho is here and talked eloquently about the 
Energy bill--could have been, should have been, but for the procedural 
tactics of raising the requirement to pass this bill by 60 votes 
instead of an up-or-down vote of 51. That is their right to do. But as 
the Senator from Idaho and the Senator from New Mexico said earlier, it 
is going to have severe consequences for the long-term future of our 
economy.

  Energy is not something you turn off and on like we do the stove or 
the thermostat. It is something that takes a long time to be developed. 
It takes investment, a lot of people, a lot of steps in the process, as 
it should, even environmental steps in the process to be able to 
extract the resources we need. We are not moving in that direction. We 
are not moving toward energy independence. For a country that is as 
much dependent upon cheap energy as this country and this economy are, 
to continue to turn a blind eye towards the needs of our economy and 
the impact on the quality of life here is a very dangerous thing.
  Again, I suggest while I understand the rights of the minority, we 
need to find a way to get the 60 votes necessary to get this piece of 
legislation moved forward for our children and for our future economy.
  We have the omnibus appropriations bill. One of the victories was the 
AIDS authorization bill we were able to pass. But more candidly, the 
most important thing is funding that program. There are a whole host of 
things: An increase in VA health care, which is in the omnibus 
appropriations bill, an increase in NIH funding is in the Labor-HHS. 
There are so many important priorities in this bill. Yet we have been 
told we are just not going to be able to get to it until January. I 
know the leader later is going to ask unanimous consent to bring up 
this bill when the House passes it. The House will pass it first, as it 
does customarily with appropriations bills. They are coming back 
December 8. We hope to reconvene the Senate shortly thereafter to bring 
up this legislation so we can pass it here. Why? Well, because if we 
don't pass it, those increases in VA health care funding, those 
increases in AIDS funding, those increases in NIH, and a whole host of 
other things in this bill simply will not go into effect until at the 
earliest the end of January.
  If you are for those increases and you are for the realignment of 
budget priorities in these appropriations bills, we should take a 
little time out of our break, come back here for a day. We will have 
had several weeks to look at this. The bill will be filed in an hour 
and 10 minutes. Take a look at it. If you have problems with it, you 
certainly have the opportunity to voice that opposition and vote no. 
But that is going to be the up-or-down vote we are going to have. We 
should take the opportunity to come back and do it in a timely fashion. 
We have been told by the other side they will object to us coming back. 
So this bill will sit there for roughly 2 months with a variety of 
different spending priorities many people in this Chamber agree with 
and that the American public has asked us for, including increased 
funding for education, DC choice, allowing students in the District of 
Columbia to have the opportunity to go to the schools of their 
choosing. All of those things will be in this bill, and we will not be 
able to have a vote because of the power--it is a wonderful thing when 
you are the minority--of individual Senators to stop things from 
happening. That is another obstruction.
  We spent 3 days here on the floor of the Senate 10 days ago, 12 days 
ago, debating the issue of judges. Here we are again. We have six 
qualified, terrific nominees--not turkeys, not lemons, not 
neanderthals. Those were words used here in the Senate to refer to 
distinguished people who are judges in their own right today, justices 
of supreme courts today, reelected by overwhelming numbers in their 
home States, gone through the ABA approval process and were considered 
to be either qualified or unanimously well

[[Page S15924]]

qualified. These folks were referred to by the people here in the 
Senate as neanderthals, as lemons, and in some respects as turkeys.
  I can understand where there may be a difference as to the 
qualifications of these judges. They have every right to suggest their 
deficiencies. But to use that kind of terminology to describe people of 
distinguished legal records and careers calls into question the 
propriety of the Senators' remarks and whether they don't in fact meet 
the standard of what is referred to as rule XIX. Rule IX refers to a 
Senator. I don't think we should be able to refer to nominees, who put 
themselves out to serve the public, in a way that is as callous and 
cavalier and disrespectful as that.

  So I suggest that there is another area of obstructionism--changing 
the rules. For 214 years, the rule was that every judicial nomination 
that came to the Senate floor got an up-or-down vote. Since we put the 
filibuster in place in the early 1930s, 2,370 nominees have come to the 
floor of the Senate, and zero were filibustered. None. None were 
blocked.
  Now, there are several on that side of the aisle who have taken to 
putting a chart up that shows 168 to 6, as if 6 is somehow a good 
number out of 174, when zero out of 2,370 was the norm. I think the 
Senator from Georgia, Saxby Chambliss, suggested the right answer to 
that. They said they were doing a great job in approving them 95 
percent of the time. The Senator from Georgia suggested that if he went 
home to his wife and said he was faithful to her 95 percent of the 
time, that would not be adequate in her eyes. It is not adequate, when 
the Constitution requires an up-or-down vote, for those people who 
believe in the sanctity of that Constitution to say we are upholding it 
95 percent of the time. But that is what is happening on judicial 
nominations, and it is another case of obstruction.
  Mr. SESSIONS. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. SANTORUM. I am happy to yield for a question.
  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, during the debate on the judges, the 
opponents, the Democrats who were obstructing an up-or-down vote, 
asserted that these judges were ``extreme,'' and they repeated that. 
They used that word repeatedly. They really cited no specific reason 
they were extreme. I ask the Senator from Pennsylvania, who has been so 
eloquent on this issue, how he can explain, in light of the groups we 
now know are opposing these nominees, who are extreme? I think we can 
demonstrate, without any doubt, these nominees, such as Janice Rogers 
Brown of California, who got 76 percent of the vote, and Judge 
Priscilla Owen, who got 84 percent of the vote are not extreme. Is the 
Senator from Pennsylvania aware that among the groups blocking these 
judges, and actually appearing to pull the strings of Members of the 
Senate, they have views on their Web sites?
  For example, they say there should be no pornography laws, even child 
pornography. They oppose any change in abortion whatsoever, even 
partial-birth abortion, which 84 percent of the American people believe 
ought to be dealt with. Some of them believe in legalization of drugs. 
I ask the Senator, who is extreme here?
  Mr. SANTORUM. Obviously, by definition, a Republican who gets 76 
percent of the vote in a State such as California cannot be extreme. 
Certainly, if they are extreme in the State of California, the only 
chance I would think in my mind that someone could get that high a vote 
is if they were extremely liberal. California, let's admit, is a fairly 
liberal State. It is a very heavily Democratic State. So for a 
Republican ``extremist'' in California to get 76 percent of the vote--I 
don't think Republican extremists can get 76 percent of the vote in a 
State such as California. I argue that, by definition, that doesn't 
wash.
  The fact is, what the Senator said is true. When you have these 
organizations who, in these memos that have leaked out, are sort of 
giving marching orders to Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on 
the Democratic side as to what nominees to hold--and some use the term, 
referring to Miguel Estrada who was nominated for the second highest 
court in the land--a great rags-to-riches story of a Hispanic immigrant 
to this country--that he was ``dangerous'' or a ``threat.'' It was one 
of those terms. He is a real threat. Why? Because he is a superior 
intellect? Because he has tremendous qualifications? No, because he is 
Latino and we cannot have that.

  Mr. SESSIONS. If the Senator will yield, does he think it is possible 
they saw Miguel Estrada as a threat because he is a brilliant 
mainstream lawyer, a Hispanic, who would make a highly qualified 
appointment to the Supreme Court?
  Mr. SANTORUM. That is exactly what they said. He is all of the things 
I talked about--highly qualified, very bright, and a great story of 
integrity and overcoming obstacles. It is a compelling story. As a 
result of his ethnicity, he would be a threat because he might be 
elevated to a higher court someday.
  This is the kind of activity I think really does debase this 
institution. We should not be involved in blocking people who, 10 years 
ago, would have probably not even required a vote on the floor of the 
Senate to be confirmed. We have gotten to the point where the special 
interests--you hear so much on the Medicare bill about the special 
interests that were involved in the Medicare bill. I cannot think of 
any area where special interests have had more impact that has been 
contrary to the interests of ordinary citizens in America than what we 
have seen by the special interests on this judge debate. These 
organizations support the things the Senator from Alabama just talked 
about. But they were also the ones supporting the complete removal of 
God, or any hint of God, in the public square, whether it is in Alabama 
or in the Pledge of Allegiance out in the Ninth Circuit.
  The people who made this decision in the Ninth Circuit to strike 
``under God'' from the Pledge of Allegiance--do you think they were 
nominees who would be considered to be out of the mainstream that 
President Bush supported or nominated? No. They are nominees of, 
primarily, President Clinton, who views the Constitution as a document 
to be ignored, a nice little piece of antiquity that they might want to 
look to see if it suits their purpose. But if it doesn't, we will set 
it aside and do what we think is right. That is what they do on a 
regular basis. It is called activist judges who believe we are a 
government of men, not laws. That is what many on the other side--
particularly members of the Judiciary Committee--would love to see. 
They don't want judges who take the Constitution and the words in it 
seriously and feel bound by them. So we had a huge debate.
  I think it was an important debate for the Senate on that important 
issue, and a related issue. There are several issues percolating in the 
Senate to do something about the huge cost of litigation to our 
economy--whether it is asbestos litigation, on which there have been 
tens of thousands of cases filed by people who have been ``exposed'' to 
asbestos. In the vast majority of the cases, the people who have filed 
the case, the plaintiffs, are not sick and have no indication that they 
ever will be sick. But they have been ``exposed.'' They are clogging 
the courts, consuming huge amounts of resources. I hear colleagues on 
both sides of the aisle complain about manufacturing and the problems 
with manufacturing. Well, look at the asbestos liability issue, in 
light of what we are doing to our manufacturers. Manufacturers are 
going bankrupt--I won't say every day, but every week or two--because 
of this litigation going on. It is frivolous. The worst part is, I have 
people in my State who were infected and have asbestosis, mesothelioma. 
It is a disease that comes with exposure to asbestos, and a respiratory 
disease. These people are sick and they are dying and they are not able 
to get a proper jury award. In fact, they have gotten their awards and 
it is pennies. The money was eaten up by the trial lawyers. It is a 
horrible situation.

  We need to get the people who are sick the compensation for their 
disease and the treatment for their disease, and those who are not 
sick, they need to be set aside. If they get sick, they will be 
compensated, but we are all exposed to lots of dangerous things in our 
lives. That doesn't mean you can sue for them. Only if it causes you 
harm should you be able to sue. That is another area again being 
blocked.
  Class action: I see the Senator from Delaware, Mr. Carper, here, who 
is one

[[Page S15925]]

of the leaders in trying to get a bipartisan bill together. I give him 
a lot of credit. It is another attempt like we did with Medicare, on 
which he was involved, trying to bring the sides together. So far, we 
have not been able to get to that 60-vote threshold. We need to get 
that bill done to try to help our economy move forward.
  Medical liability, frivolous lawsuits: Again, this is plaguing the 
system when it comes to health care, driving up our cost of 
pharmaceuticals and of health care. In Pennsylvania, our doctors are 
moving to Delaware, moving to other places where the laws are more 
beneficial, where the legislatures have put caps in place to try to 
limit the amount of cases where runaway juries end up bankrupting the 
health care system.
  That is another area where we have been blocked over and over.
  Another area we have been blocked, something on which I have been 
working, is assistance to the poor. We are trying to pass a charitable 
giving bill, a bill in which I have been involved. We are talking about 
giving $10 billion over the next 2 years in incentives for people to 
give more money to charities at a time when we are still not completely 
out of the recession that hit us in 2001 and 2002.
  Again, we have not been able to get the cooperation necessary to get 
a bipartisan bill to help social service providers, to help nonprofit 
groups meet the humanitarian needs of people.
  I can go on. The bioshield bill is being blocked. There are a lot of 
other issues on which we are being obstructed. I wanted to balance the 
accomplishments we have been able to achieve in the Senate and this 
Congress, and they have been substantial. We have a lot to go back home 
and talk about as to what we have been able to work out in a bipartisan 
way in the Senate, but there is still a lot of work to be done that the 
House has accomplished and that is sitting in the Senate not being 
done. It is very important to our economy and very important to the 
future of our country.
  One further comment. The Senator from Idaho has been very patient. I 
don't know if the Senator from Idaho or the leader is going to propound 
momentarily a unanimous consent request to vote on a resolution. This 
is a resolution having to do with marriage.
  As my colleagues know, the Massachusetts Supreme Court handed down a 
4-to-3 decision that said there is now a constitutional right in the 
State of Massachusetts to same-sex marriage, which is a remarkable turn 
of events, within a few months of a case in the U.S. Supreme Court, the 
Lawrence v. Texas case, which took an act--which for 214 years in many 
States has been seen as an illegal act and in the vast majority of the 
American public's mind certainly not a moral act--an act of sodomy and 
turned that act into a constitutional right. That is what the Court 
did. It turned this act that is considered by many to be illegal in 
States and, by most Americans, immoral with no tradition of acceptance 
of the history of the United States since our Constitution was written. 
They have taken that act and turned that into a constitutionally 
protected act.
  Many of us said there would be consequences for doing so. When we 
said that, we thought it would be years down the line. It has not taken 
years; it has taken a matter of a few months for the Massachusetts 
Supreme Court to cite Lawrence v. Texas and say now that this is a 
constitutionally protected right to engage in this behavior, how can we 
discriminate two people who engage in this behavior under the equal 
protection clause, to protect everybody equally, how can we 
discriminate against these people who are practicing a constitutional 
right under the rights and privileges of marriage? It would be unequal 
treatment if we didn't treat these constitutionally protected actions 
the same way as we treat traditional marriage.
  I suggested before Lawrence v. Texas was decided that if it was 
decided in the way it was, we would be heading down a slippery slope. I 
was wrong. We are heading off a cliff. This is not a slippery slope; it 
is a cliff.
  If we do not respond to this decision, other States will be forced to 
accept the dictates of the Massachusetts Supreme Court--the court of 
appeals in this case. A couple can go to Massachusetts, get married, 
come back to Pennsylvania, Idaho, Alabama, or Delaware, and say: I 
demand under the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution that 
you recognize this marriage.
  What is the State to do, because the Constitution demands it. So we 
are in a situation where de facto, we could have that policy of 
Massachusetts by an unelected group of judges, by a vote of 4 to 3 
being forced on the entire country unless we do something in the Senate 
to act. That is a constitutional amendment which defines marriage and 
describes it in the Constitution.
  I happen to think we put a lot in the Constitution that are building 
blocks of society, certain freedoms, certain truths that we establish 
in the Constitution. I cannot imagine anything more fundamentally 
important to the stability of our society than having stable families 
in which to raise stable children, and anything that undermines that, 
to me, undermines the core of who we are as Americans.
  We will ask for a vote on the resolution. I ask unanimous consent to 
print the resolution in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                               Resolution

       Whereas, marriage is a fundamental social institution that 
     has been tested and reaffirmed over thousands of years; and
       Whereas, historically marriage has been reflected in our 
     law and the law of all jurisdictions in the United States as 
     the union of a man and a woman, and the everyday meaning of 
     marriage and the legal meaning of marriage as defined in 
     Black's Law Dictionary is ``the legal union of a man and a 
     woman as husband and wife;'' and
       Whereas, families consisting of the legal union of one man 
     and one woman for the purpose of bearing and raising children 
     remains the basic unit of our civil society; and
       Whereas, in Goodrige v. Department of Public Health, the 
     Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled four to three 
     that the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 
     prohibits the denial of the issuance of marriage licenses to 
     same-sex couples; and
       Whereas, the power to regulate marriage lies with the 
     legislature and not with the judiciary and the Constitution 
     of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts specifically states that 
     the judiciary ``shall never exercise the legislative and 
     executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a 
     government of laws and not of men;'' and
       Whereas, in 1996, Congress overwhelmingly passed, and 
     President Bill Clinton signed, the Defense of Marriage Act 
     under which Congress exercised its rights under the Effects 
     Clause of Article IV Section 1 of the United States 
     Constitution: Now, therefore, be it.
       Resolved, That it is the Sense of the Senate--
       (1) That marriage in the United States shall consist only 
     of the union of one man and one woman; and that same-sex 
     marriage is not a right, fundamental or otherwise, recognized 
     in this country; and that neither the United States 
     Constitution nor any Federal law shall be construed to 
     require that marital status or legal incidents thereof be 
     conferred upon unmarried couples or groups; and
       (2) The Defense of Marriage Act is a proper and 
     constitutional exercise of Congress's powers under the 
     Effects Clause of Article IV Section 1 and that no State, 
     territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian 
     tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, 
     record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, 
     possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between 
     persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under 
     the laws of such State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a 
     right or claim arising from such relationship.

  Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I won't read the whereases, but I will 
read the resolved clause:

     . . . it is the sense of the Senate--
       (1) That marriage in the United States shall consist only 
     of the union of one man and one woman; and that same-sex 
     marriage is not a right, fundamental or otherwise, recognized 
     in this country; and that neither the United States 
     Constitution nor any federal law shall be construed to 
     require that marital status or legal incidents thereof be 
     conferred upon unmarried couples or groups. . . .

  Second, because we already passed a statute in the Congress that 
accomplishes pretty much what I just read--it was the Defense of 
Marriage Act, supported by 90-some Senators and signed by President 
Clinton. The resolution says:

       (2) The Defense of Marriage Act is a proper and 
     constitutional exercise of Congress's powers under the 
     Effects Clause of Article IV Section 1 and that no state, 
     territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian 
     tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, 
     record, or judicial proceeding of any other state, territory, 
     possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between 
     persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage

[[Page S15926]]

     under the laws of such state, territory, possession, or 
     tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship.

  In other words, we are going to go back on record in the sense of the 
Senate--as a precursor, hopefully, to a more full debate--that no State 
should be forced to adopt the marriage laws of another State such as 
Massachusetts. It should be, as this constitutional amendment which I 
will advocate will be, the people's decision. If the people decide, by 
constitutional amendment or otherwise, we are going to change what 
marriage is, I will fight against that, but I will respect that 
decision because that is the way we decide issues in America.
  What I am concerned about is that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 
and their courts are going to create a new constitutional right; they 
are going to change the Constitution without going through the rigors 
of what the Constitution demands for change, and that is a 
constitutional amendment.
  So we will take up that mantle. We will do it the right way. We will 
try to change the Constitution in the way the Framers intended, not the 
way it has been practiced recently with the courts taking on that 
mantle themselves and changing it without the benefit of having any 
public input on the process.
  We will offer an amendment to get the constitutional majority that is 
necessary to pass it, which is two-thirds of the Members of this body 
and of the House, and then three-quarters of the States through their 
legislature, representing the people in those States, to ratify this 
amendment.
  I believe this is a fundamentally important issue, one I guarantee we 
will be discussing at length next year, and I hope the American public 
will begin to engage in this debate, not as an attempt to stop anybody 
from doing anything but as an attempt to solidify what is the basic 
building block of our society.
  This is not being done as against anybody. It is being done for 
something that we know has intrinsic value and good and is a 
stabilizing and important element of any successful society, and that 
is healthy stable families in which children can be raised in that 
environment, so we can raise the leaders of the next generation.
  This is an important debate. I hope we will not be obstructed. I hope 
we will have an opportunity to have a full and fair debate on this 
issue, that the public will have an opportunity to see the Senate at 
its finest on an issue that I believe is at the core of who we are as 
Americans.
  I thank the Senator from Idaho for his indulgence in listening to me 
go on for a while, as well as the Senator from Delaware, although he 
had to indulge less than the Senator from Idaho.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I was pleased to sit and wait and listen to 
the Senator from Pennsylvania. I appreciate his leadership and the 
accomplishments he has helped guide us through this past year in the 
first session of the 108th Congress. They are many, and there are yet 
many to accomplish.
  Yes, we have had substantial obstructionism on the part of our 
colleagues on the other side. Why? It is politics to them in many 
instances. They see those as defining lines between their party and 
ours. I do not think objecting to or obstructing judges is that. I 
think it is an act that is unconstitutional in its character. I think 
it is now broaching on a constitutional crisis in our country to 
suggest that it takes a supermajority when any one individual decides 
to confirm or at least bring to the floor the vote of a judge.

                          ____________________