[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 122 (Tuesday, September 26, 2006)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10113-S10115]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           THE 109TH CONGRESS

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this is an interesting time as we end the 
109th Congress, at least in that portion that will start with the 
recess apparently this weekend, according to the majority leader and 
the Speaker of the House, only to return and reconvene sometime in 
November to do a lot of work that was not done earlier this year. Most 
of the appropriations bills have not been passed, and perhaps one, 
maybe two, will be done this week, but the rest will be done after the 
election.
  I know my colleague who just spoke--and others will come to the floor 
of the Senate and talk about how fruitful and how productive the 109th 
Congress has been. I wish I could say the same. I serve in this 
Congress. I am a Member of this Congress and I hope and wish we could 
end a year and say we did an unbelievably good job for the American 
people; that we addressed the things that needed to be addressed; that 
we strengthened this country; and that we helped people in many ways. I 
wish I could say that. But as Peggy Lee's song says, Is that all there 
is? Is that an appropriate response to the chart that we see trumpeting 
the 109th Congress accomplishments? Is that all there is? Yes, that is 
all there is.
  Let me describe a few of the things we ought to be dealing with and 
especially describe the things we are not dealing with.
  On health care and the issues related to health care, every business 
in this country and virtually every family in this country--and 
especially our Government--bears the cost of these dramatically 
increasing prices in health care. No one seems to be addressing it very 
much. We passed a prescription drug plan a while back for senior 
citizens on Medicare, and that actually had a little provision in it 
which prevents the negotiation of lower prices on prescription drugs. 
That is almost unbelievable to me. Health care costs are on the rise, 
led, incidentally, by prescription drug prices. This Congress seems to 
stand with the pharmaceutical industry. It wants to prevent the 
negotiation for lower prices.
  I have stood on the floor of the Senate holding up two identical 
bottles of the same pill made by the same company, both FDA approved, 
one sent to Canada, one sent to the United States. The difference is 
the one sent to Canada is half the price of the one sent to the United 
States.
  My colleague said there is a provision in Homeland Security--and 
indeed there is--dealing with prescription drug reimportation. It is 
much to do about nothing, I regret to tell you, because it will allow 
people to bring a 90-day supply as they cross over the Canadian border 
and come back. Very few Americans have the capability of driving to the 
Canadian border to access that lower cost FDA-approved drug. We are 
charged the highest prices in the world for FDA-approved prescription 
drugs. That is unfair to the American people.
  The provision in Homeland Security is going to do very little. In 
fact, we have almost always allowed exactly what that provision says we 
should allow. We have always allowed a personal supply of 90 days to 
come across the border from Canada when American consumers buy that 
prescription drug. This is nothing new. It doesn't address the issue.
  We have been blocked on the floor of this Senate for 2 years now with 
a bipartisan piece of legislation cosponsored by over 30--myself, 
Senators Snowe, McCain, Kennedy, and many others--a big bipartisan 
bill. We have been blocked from getting a vote on the floor for this 
legislation which would allow the reimportation of lower cost, FDA-
approved prescription drugs.
  Why is that the case? Because on this subject the pharmaceutical 
industry has more influence here, regrettably, than the American people 
do.
  We are not addressing the health care costs, and we are not 
addressing the issue of prescription drug costs--and we should.
  Trade and jobs, think of that. Are we addressing trade issues? The 
only thing we are doing on trade issues is to pass more incompetent 
trade agreements. We just did the Oman Trade Agreement, a country that 
by sultanic decree has said there will not be an organization of 
workers; it is illegal to form a labor union in the country of Oman by 
sultanic decree. We do a trade agreement with a country that basically 
prohibits organized workers.
  We have a $68 billion a month trade deficit, $800 billion a year. We 
are choking on red ink in international trade. Nearly 4 million jobs 
have been shipped from this country overseas in search of cheap labor, 
in search of 20-cent and 30-cent-an-hour workers working 7 days a week, 
12 to 14 hours a day. Does anybody care much about that?
  We not only have this running up and dramatic increase in the trade 
deficit, but we see the potential loss of another 40 million to 50 
million American jobs, according to some leading economists. And even 
those that do not leave are tradeable or outsourceable jobs and 
competing with others in the world who are willing to work for much 
less, causing downward pressure on wages in this country.
  Some say we see the world as it is, that it is a global economy, and 
there is nothing we can do about it. I see the world as it is and 
decide we ought to change it to what it should be--standing up for good 
jobs in this country, for American workers. Yet this Congress doesn't 
do that.
  As to deficits and fiscal policy, the President made great fanfare in 
talking about the fact that the deficit is reduced. Interestingly 
enough, take a

[[Page S10114]]

look at what we are going to borrow in the next year--close to $600 
billion in the next fiscal year. That is the off-the-rail fiscal policy 
of red ink, up to $600 billion in budget borrowing, and $800 billion in 
trade deficits. That is $1.4 trillion in red ink on a $13 trillion 
economy. That won't last very long.
  We are going to bring additional war spending to the floor of the 
Senate. We are all going to vote for additional war spending. Some of 
us believe we ought to pay for it. This will make it, I think, 
somewhere around $400 billion in total--none of it paid for, not a 
penny paid for, all added to the debt.
  We send our soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq and say, Please serve 
your country, fight for your country, risk your lives, and when you 
come back, by the way, we will have this debt waiting for you because 
we have chosen not to be involved in fighting to pay our bills.
  That doesn't make any sense to me. That can't seriously be called an 
accomplishment.
  We have been holding some hearings on oversight with respect to 
contractors. It is controversial. I see in the newspaper today a member 
of the majority said, well, we may take the rooms away so they cannot 
hold hearings. That is an interesting response to the question of 
oversight. The reason we have held oversight hearings in the policy 
committee room is because the majority party decided not to hold 
serious oversight hearings.
  The highest ranking civilian official in the Corps of Engineers at 
the Pentagon in charge of major contracts, the sole-source, no-bid 
contracts to Halliburton and KBR that were given, has said this is the 
most blatant abuse of contracting authority she has witnessed in all of 
her career. This is a woman who is viewed as a top contracting official 
in this country in the Pentagon for these contracts. She said it is the 
most blatant abuse she has ever seen. Guess what happened to her for 
being honest. She was demoted.
  I had her twice testify. Was there any other committee in Congress 
interested in her testimony to find out how the tens of billions of 
dollars were contracted? Nobody.
  Yesterday we had an oversight hearing on the conduct of the war. We 
had a couple of generals and a colonel, all three of whom were 
distinguished folks who served in Iraq, served a combined 90 years for 
this country. General Batiste started by saying, I am a Republican, a 
lifelong Republican. It was not partisan. We invited Republicans to 
come to the hearing to talk about the conduct of the war. There have 
been no oversight hearings on that.
  All of us want the same thing, it seems to me. We want us to prevail 
and do well. We want to protect our country. We want to defeat 
terrorism. All of us want those things. But it seems to me we are 
moving in the wrong direction in some of these areas. Incidentally, 
much of the information that ought to be available is classified in 
order not to embarrass anybody.
  Let me mention that General Batiste and others who testified 
yesterday said this country is not mobilized. We send our men and women 
to war, but the country is not mobilized. They made a point I thought 
was very interesting. I read a book that was written a long while ago, 
a brilliant book called ``The Glory and The Dream,'' written by 
Manchester. He described in the Second World War what this country did 
to mobilize. This country mobilized to beat back the oppressive armies 
of Hitler, the Germans and the Japanese. We mobilized. Manchester, in 
``The Glory and The Dream,'' described what happened with American 
manufacturing capacity and what they did. At the end of the war we were 
building 50,000 airplanes a year to fight that war.
  Colonel Hammes yesterday testified there is a new armored vehicle to 
carry personnel that is much safer than the humvee. Are we producing 
those? Are we mobilizing to produce those to provide them to our 
troops? No. We built 50,000 airplanes a year at the end of the Second 
World War. This war has now lasted longer than the Second World War. 
Yet we have built a total of 1,000 of these stronger, better armored 
security vehicles in which to haul American troops. Why? Because we are 
not mobilized.
  The majority says to the American people, not only don't you have to 
pay for this war, we want you to have a big tax cut--not to everyone, 
just a few, at the top. We want to repeal the death tax. At a time when 
we are at war and we are borrowing money to prosecute that war--$400 
billion--not a penny of which has been paid for, the majority says our 
highest priority is to repeal the so-called death tax, which does not 
exist? No, there is no tax on death. That may come as news to some in 
this Chamber because they have used the moniker often. There is no tax 
on death. When someone dies, their spouse, if they are married, owns 
everything taxfree. There is a 100-percent spousal exemption. So there 
is no tax on death.
  There is, in fact, a tax on inherited wealth and the majority party 
is intent on relieving the tax burden of the wealthiest Americans at a 
time when we are at war. We are at war, we are spending hundreds of 
billions of dollars and we are not paying for any of it. It is, in my 
judgment, a Byzantine set of priorities.
  No, when people say they have a chart that shows the accomplishments 
of the 109th Congress, they might listen to what Harry Truman said to 
Steven Douglas in one of their debates. He described the Douglas 
argument:

       As thin as the homeopathic soup made by boiling a shadow of 
     a pigeon that had been starved to death.

  Bring those charts out with the accomplishments of the 109th 
Congress. Those accomplishments are as thin as the homeopathic soup 
made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that has been starved to death.
  I wish it weren't so. I wish we could stand here and describe a set 
of accomplishments that makes all of us proud, but the priorities here 
can hardly be called accomplishments for the American people. The 
American people deserve, finally, to be getting what both political 
parties have t offer. Instead of getting the best of both, we are 
getting the worst of each.

  This Congress needs to come together to address these issues. We do 
not control the Congress. The majority party does. It is the way it 
works. The majority party describes what the issues are that will be 
brought to the floor of the Senate.
  Go almost any place around the world, the President says and others 
say, we will go and help. But they forget at home when people are in 
difficulty. Somehow we do not seem to find ways to say, let us help our 
citizens at home--health care costs, prescription drug prices.
  I have not mentioned energy. Energy obviously is a very important 
issue. In the year 2004, the average price of oil was $40 a barrel. At 
that price, the largest integrated oil companies had the highest 
profits in their entire history. Now the price of oil has gone from 
that level to $70, $75 a barrel. Now it is down to $60 and just under, 
and everyone thinks, Isn't that wonderful? The fact is, it is still 50 
percent higher than it was at which point the major integrated 
companies had the highest profits in history. As the money is shoveled 
into their company, it is taken from the consumers, from the farmer who 
loads the fuel, the people paying at the gas pump.
  We need to deal with energy prices. It will not last for this country 
to be a country that consumes a quarter of the oil every single day. We 
have this little planet of ours and we stick straws in this Earth; from 
those straws we suck out the oil. We suck out 84 million barrels a day 
from this Earth, and 21 million barrels a day is used in this spot of 
the planet called the United States of America.
  We use it predominantly for transportation, among other things. We 
have done nothing to change the basis of fuel use in transportation in 
nearly 100 years. We put gasoline in a 2006 Ford the same way we put 
gasoline in a 1924 Model T. I know that because I restored an old Model 
T when I was a kid. Nothing has changed. Everything else has changed. 
There is more computing power on a new car than there was on the lunar 
lander that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. 
Everything has changed about automobiles, except we have never changed 
how we fuel or power that car; just drive to the pump, stick a hose in 
and pump some gasoline.
  We need to move aggressively toward a different future--renewables, 
wind energy, biofuels, especially hydrogen and fuel cells. There are so 
many opportunities, yet so little time, and

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seemingly so little appetite on the part of this Senate and others to 
do something meaningful for the long term.
  I wish I were part of a Congress I could say has been an enormously 
productive Congress for the country. We are not. We need to get busy 
and find a way to solve this. This President, this Congress, chart the 
agenda. They describe what is going to come to the Senate floor. We 
need to begin zeroing in on things that are important.
  First, we need to win this war in Iraq in a way that satisfies our 
objectives. We need to fight the war on terrorism in a manner that 
allows us to prevail. Incidentally, this issue of cutting and running, 
we are going to leave Iraq at some point. That is not the issue. This 
country is going to leave Iraq. Our military is going to be withdrawn. 
The question is, When? When and under what conditions? It is 
appropriate to say at some point to the Iraqi people, this is your 
country, not ours. This country belongs to you, not to us. Saddam 
Hussein was found in a rat hole. He is on trial. He is not part of the 
government. Iraqis have their own government. And the question for 
those in Iraq is, do you want your country back? If so, you have to 
provide for your security. We are attempting to train and provide 
security at this point, but we are not going to provide security 
forever in the country of Iraq. We cannot do that. We must expect the 
Iraqi people to decide to take back their country, at which point we 
will be able to bring the American troops home. That, I hope, is sooner 
rather than later.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent I be allowed to 
speak for 20 minutes.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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