[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 155 (Monday, October 15, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12833-S12835]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  CHILDREN'S HEALTH INSURANCE PROGRAM

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I believe midweek this week the House will 
take up the veto override of the President's veto on the Children's 
Health Insurance Program. There has been a lot of discussion about what 
this Congress has or has not done. I think despite all of the obstacles 
and roadblocks we have made progress in a wide range of areas. But the 
one in which we have made significant progress, which I am very proud 
of, is expanding children's health insurance coverage.
  Regrettably, we have a lot of children in this country who have no 
health insurance coverage at all. So the question of whether when they 
are sick they have a doctor to go to is a function, in many cases, of 
whether the parents have any income or any money in their checkbook or 
in their pockets. Many times those children get no health care.
  In 1997, we put in place the Children's Health Insurance Program. We 
know it works because we have had it for 10 years. In my State, for 
example, the Children's Health Insurance Program is not a government 
program that has created more bureaucracy. It is a block grant to my 
State that is used by State government to purchase health insurance 
from Blue Cross/Blue Shield and cover children who have no health 
insurance. Most States do that.
  This is not a big government program. This Congress passed a 
bipartisan piece of legislation. Let me emphasize that it is a 
bipartisan piece of legislation expanding health insurance coverage for 
children. I am proud that we have done that. In the Senate, we had 67 
Senators vote in favor of it. Two Senators who were in favor of that 
bill were absent at that time, so that is 69 Senators who said, yes, 
let's expand the program. It was fully paid for. It doesn't increase 
the debt by one penny. It expands the program and would allow 3.8 
million additional children in this country to have access to health 
care coverage.
  Mr. President, I don't know what is in second or third or even fourth 
place in terms of people's priorities. I know what is in first place 
for most people: their children and their children's health.
  The President says he vetoed this legislation because it is big 
government. He vetoed this legislation because he says it would cover 
kids at the family level of income of $83,000. The President knows 
better than that. He wasn't telling the truth. Let me just, if I can, 
speak a bit of truth to this issue. This is not big government. 
Contrary to most of what the President is sending down to the Congress, 
this is paid for. Contrast this children's health insurance--a proposal 
from the Congress that is paid for--with the proposals that sit in 
front of the Congress from the President for Iraq and Afghanistan to 
prosecute the war. Right now, we have a $189 billion request by this 
President to continue funding the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not one 
penny of it is paid for.
  We send the soldiers to war, and the President says let's send them 
the bill later when they come home and they can help pay for it. 
Contrast that with what we have done with children's health insurance. 
It is $35 billion over 5 years, all of it paid for, and 3.8 million 
children, who at this point don't have access to health insurance 
coverage, will get that coverage. Is that something we ought to be 
proud of? In my judgment, it is. Now, the President, when he vetoed 
this, he said this is going to provide coverage to kids whose parents 
are at the $83,000 level. That is not the poverty level. There is no 
$83,000 level. That was a level requested by the State of New York, 
which was not approved.

  It is true that there are a number of States that cover children from 
families who have incomes above the 200-percent level of poverty, but 
let me point out that this George W. Bush administration approved these 
expansions, and I will give an example. In 2003, New Jersey applied for 
a waiver to be able to cover parents in their program. Secretary 
Thompson of the Bush

[[Page S12834]]

administration said: Absolutely. He signed the waiver saying:

       With this waiver, New Jersey will be able to expand health 
     insurance coverage to thousands of residents who otherwise 
     would be uninsured.

  California asked for a waiver. The Bush administration said:

       By giving parents of children with the CHIP program health 
     insurance, we are providing quality health care to the whole 
     family.

  This is the Bush administration that has actually approved these 
waivers, the very waivers the President seems now to be critical of.
  Let me also say this. The President campaigned--he campaigned--on 
expanding children's health insurance. In 2004, here is what he said:

       In a new term, we will lead an aggressive effort to enroll 
     millions of poor children who are eligible but not signed up 
     for the government's health insurance programs. We will not 
     allow a lack of attention or information to stand between 
     these children and the health care they need.

  So the President vetoed this bill. The sky is the limit when it comes 
to the other spending, but this bill, which is fully paid for, gets a 
veto. There are plenty of votes in the Senate to override the 
President's veto. The question is in the House. My hope is that Members 
of the House will understand the opportunity to override this veto and 
to establish a clear priority for this Congress on a bipartisan basis. 
My hope is they will round up the votes in the House to override this 
President's veto.
  This is about priorities. The fact is 100 years from now all of us 
will be dead and gone and the record of our service here and the record 
of this President's service, the record of this Government, will be in 
the history books. They will be able to tell a bit about our value 
system by looking at how did we spend our money. They will see there 
was a time in October of 2007 that this Congress had a couple of 
choices: First of all, the President says, give me another $189 billion 
for Iraq and Afghanistan to prosecute the war; give me another $189 
billion, and by the way, I don't intend to pay for a penny of it. Just 
add it to the debt. Another priority was the Congress saying, let's 
expand health insurance for children--$35 billion over 5 years. Let's 
expand health insurance for children and, by the way, we will pay for 
it in the bill, which we did. And the President says the second 
priority is the one that is inappropriate? What can he be thinking of?
  When historians look at this value system and determine that the 
value system said children are less important, children are not the 
priority, they are going to scratch their heads and wonder how on Earth 
we came to that conclusion. I hope that is not the lesson that will 
come from this effort to override the President's veto. I hope the 
lesson will be a bipartisan Congress saying to this President: Not this 
time. Not today. Your priorities aren't square with what we ought to be 
doing in this country today. Our priority is, No. 1, expand health 
insurance coverage for America's children. My hope is at the end of 
this week that will be the result from the House of Representatives. I 
know very soon the Senate will vote and easily override the President's 
veto.


               Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

  In a moment I will talk about General Sanchez's speech this weekend, 
which I read about in the Washington Post, but before I do that, there 
is some interesting news about what is happening at the Defense 
Department in advanced research in something called DARPA--Defense 
Advanced Research Projects Agency.
  The head of DARPA, Dr. Tony Tether, came and spoke at a technology 
conference I had in Fargo, ND, last week. His speech was extraordinary. 
He is a good presenter and a wonderful public servant. I know there are 
some who wonder if the Government ever does anything right. Well, the 
Government does a lot of things to improve and help the American people 
and advance this country's interests, and I will describe one of them.
  Dr. Tether described experiments that are going on in advanced 
research in DARPA, in which they have taken a monkey, and the monkey 
sits at a console with a joystick. He sees a red ball go across in 
front of him, and he uses the joystick to touch the red ball with the 
arm of the joystick, and he is then given a treat. That is learned 
behavior for the monkey. The ball goes across the screen, the monkey 
exercises the joystick, the joystick aperture touches the red ball, and 
the monkey gets a treat. Then they took the joystick away and instead 
put on the monkey a mechanical electrical arm they are working on for 
those who have lost their limbs. They implanted electrodes in the brain 
of the monkey. Now, when the red ball goes across in front of the 
monkey, the monkey has no joystick, but the monkey thinks about 
touching the ball and getting the treat and so the electrodes capture 
the thought. Think of that--the electrodes capture the thought, which 
sends the electric impulse to the prosthetic arm that has been 
developed, and the arm reaches out and touches the ball, all because 
the monkey is thinking about touching the ball.
  This is about breathtaking new technology and research into 
approaches that will help those who have lost limbs in warfare, yes, 
and in every other area of life. There is so much going on that is 
interesting and breathtaking in the advanced research area, and again I 
say to Dr. Tether that I appreciated his coming to North Dakota and 
giving such a wonderful presentation. It was extraordinary.
  Well, that is something called DARPA. Not a lot of people know about 
DARPA at the Department of Defense.


                 Retired General Sanchez on Iraq Policy

  Now, let me go from DARPA to the issue of General Sanchez's speech on 
Iraq policy that he gave this past weekend. General Sanchez was in 
charge of the war in Iraq and he has now retired and General Sanchez 
has some very strong things to say about the war in Iraq since his 
retirement.
  He says the war began with:

       A catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war 
     plan . . . Since the start of this war, America's leadership 
     has known that our military alone could not achieve victory 
     in Iraq. Starting in July 2003, the message repeatedly 
     communicated to Washington by military commanders on the 
     ground was that the military alone could never achieve 
     victory in Iraq.

  General Sanchez said the ``surge,'' which he called the ``latest 
revised strategy,'' is, in his words, ``a desperate attempt by an 
administration that has not accepted the political and economic 
realities of this war and they have definitely not communicated that 
reality to the American people.''
  As a result, the American military, he says:

     finds itself in an intractable situation. The best we can do 
     with this flawed approach is stave off defeat. The war in 
     Iraq has been a ``catastrophic failure.''

  This, according to General Sanchez, who was in charge of the war in 
Iraq from mid-2003 to mid-2004. Over 20 other retired generals have 
spoken out after they have retired. General Eaton said:

       The military ethos is: Give your advice privately to those 
     in a position to make changes, not the media, but this 
     administration is immune to good advice.

  So retired General Eaton went public with his criticism of this 
administration's flawed policies.
  General Batiste--I had the opportunity to meet General Batiste--was 
one of the brightest stars in the military and was considered virtually 
certain for promotion to the highest ranks. But, he turned down his 
third star and retired rather than continue to implement a war policy 
that he felt, and that he had experienced firsthand, was flawed. He 
retired so he could ``speak out on behalf of soldiers and their 
families.''
  The point is, General Sanchez has said, and the other retired 
generals have said--in fact, I believe that most believe--there is not 
a military solution in Iraq, there is only a solution that embodies 
substantial diplomatic efforts and efforts in the political system in 
Iraq as well. The military alone cannot possibly prevail in Iraq.
  I wish to make a point I have made before. We have now apparently 
trained about 350,000 people in Iraq to be soldiers or to be in law 
enforcement. To the extent that I have numbers, this was from the 2007 
report of the General Jones Commission, we have trained 152,000 members 
of the Iraqi Army--which incidentally, is about the number of American 
soldiers in Iraq--and 194,000 members of the Iraqi police. That is 
346,000 Iraqis to be soldiers and

[[Page S12835]]

police men and women. Now, I think one can reasonably ask the question, 
after we have been in Iraq longer than we were in the Second World War, 
that if we have trained over 350,000, or roughly 350,000 police men and 
women and soldiers, when will they have the will to provide for their 
own security?
  They have a new Constitution. The people of Iraq have seen Saddam 
Hussein executed. They have a new government. And they have had nearly 
350,000 of their own trained to be law enforcement and military 
soldiers. Yet they cannot provide for their own security?
  My nephew went into the Marines about 10 months ago. He is fully 
trained and now in Iraq. We do it, and we can train 350,000 Iraqis. Yet 
they can't provide for their own security? Something is wrong with 
that.
  So, Mr. President, I only make the point that I read with interest 
General Sanchez's comments this weekend, and they mirrored comments we 
have heard previously from General Eaton, from General Batiste, from 
Colonel Hammes, and many others that the current strategy has been 
flawed all along and must change. We must understand that the solution 
in Iraq is not going to be a military-imposed solution, it is going to 
be a diplomatic solution and a solution within the political system in 
Iraq, the absence of which means there will remain in Iraq a protracted 
long-term civil war.
  While we are going door to door in Baghdad in the middle of a civil 
war with American soldiers, Osama bin Laden continues to send us 
messages over the internet and the airwaves. Our National Intelligence 
Estimate says that he is in a ``secure'' hideaway in northern Pakistan 
and has now rebuilt training camps and reconstituted the al-Qaida 
leadership.
  Now, think of that. Those who committed the acts of terror against 
our country and murdered thousands of Americans are now in a safe, more 
secure place, according to our intelligence estimates, and is 
reconstituting training camps and plotting new attacks against our 
country. We, on the other hand, have our soldiers going door to door in 
Baghdad in the middle of a civil war. I think General Sanchez's 
comments and the comments of over 20 other high-ranking military 
officers upon their retirement represent a basic body of thought most 
of us have long understood but is not understood at this point by the 
President.
  All of us want this country to succeed. We want our country to 
succeed in our war against terrorism. But the fact is we have to 
develop the right processes and the right policies to embrace that war 
against terrorism and to eliminate the al-Qaida leadership, which 
represents the greatest terrorist threat to our country. Again, the 
National Intelligence Estimate that we have all read says the greatest 
terrorist threat to our country, including to our homeland, is the 
leadership of al-Qaida and they are in a safe or secure haven and they 
are plotting additional attacks against our country and they are 
reconstituting their training camps to train the terrorists. Now, it 
should be clear to us what our obligations are.
  I yield the floor, and I 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. DORGAN. 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.

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