[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 43 (Wednesday, March 11, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3006-S3010]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                               The Budget

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I ask the Chair to let me know when I 
have 2 minutes remaining. I believe we have 30 minutes allocated to us 
at this stage.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair will notify the Senator.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Chair.
  Madam President, this is an important next 3 or 4 weeks for the 
United States. The President of the United States has outlined his 10-
year blueprint for our country's future in the form of a budget. The 
budget is now before the Congress, and it is our job to consider it. We 
are doing that every day in hearings, and we are looking forward to the 
details the President will send later this month. But for the next 4 
weeks, including this week, the major subject for debate in this Senate 
Chamber is this: Can we afford the Democrats' proposals for spending, 
taxes, and borrowing? And our view--the Republican view--is the answer 
is no.
  As an example, in the 1990s, President Clinton and the Congress 
raised taxes, but they raised taxes to balance the budget. This 
proposal--and we will be discussing it more as we go along--will raise 
taxes to grow the government.
  Not long ago, the President visited our Republican caucus, and we 
talked some about entitlement reform--the automatic spending that the 
government says we don't appropriate; mostly all of it is for Social 
Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--and he talked about the importance to 
him of dealing with entitlement spending. Senator McConnell, the 
Republican leader, made a speech at the National Press Club to begin 
this Congress in which he said that he was going to say to this 
President: Let's work together to bring the growth in entitlement 
spending, automatic spending, under control. We had a summit at the 
White House, which we were glad to attend, about that.
  But I say to Senator Gregg, the Senator from New Hampshire, who is 
the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, I was disappointed to 
come back from the excellent meeting we had at the White House on 
fiscal responsibility and find, for example, that in this budget we 
have $117 billion more for entitlement spending on Pell grants. So my 
question to the Senator from New Hampshire is: Does this budget 
actually reform entitlement spending, or does it not?
  Mr. GREGG. I thank the Senator from Tennessee. I know the Senator 
from Tennessee will not be surprised to learn that there is no 
entitlement reform in this budget; that this budget, regrettably, 
dramatically increases entitlement spending.
  The chart I have here reflects that increase. If you would use the 
present baseline on entitlement spending, that would be the blue. Now 
that is going up pretty fast. During this period, it would go from $1.2 
trillion up to almost $2.4 trillion. That is the baseline, if you did 
nothing. Now one would have presumed with that type of increase in 
entitlement spending, and the fact that this budget, as it is proposed, 
is going to run up a public debt which will double in 5 years and 
triple in 10 years, that it will create a deficit this coming year of 
$1.7 trillion and a deficit in the last year of the budget of $700 
billion--deficits which are larger in the last years of this budget 
than have historically been those that we have borne as a nation over 
the last 20 years, and a debt which will go from $5.8 trillion to $15 
trillion plus. One would have presumed that in that area where the 
budget is growing the fastest, and which represents the largest amount 
of cost, that this administration would have stepped forward and said: 
Well, we can't afford that; we have to try to slow the rate of growth 
of spending in that area, or at least not have increased it. But what 
the President's budget has done is they have proposed to dramatically 
increase the amount of spending in the entitlement accounts.
  Most of this increase will come in health care. Now, people say, and 
legitimately so, that we have to reform our health care delivery system 
in this country; that we have to get better with health care in this 
country. But does that mean we have to spend a lot more money on it? 
No. We spend 17 percent of our national product, of what we produce as 
a nation, on health care. The closest country to us in the 
industrialized world only spends 11\1/2\ percent of their product on 
health care. So we have a massive amount of money we are spending on 
health care as an industrialized nation that is available to correct 
our health care system. We don't have to increase it even further.
  What the President is proposing is to increase health care spending. 
As a downpayment, they are saying $600 billion, but actually what they 
are proposing is $1.2 trillion of new entitlement spending in health 
care. No control there. In addition, as the Senator from Tennessee 
noted, they are taking programs which have traditionally been 
discretionary, which have therefore been subject to some sort of fiscal 
discipline around here, because they are subject to what is known as 
spending caps on discretionary programs, and taking these programs and 
moving them over to the entitlement accounts. Why? Because then there 
is no discipline. You spend the money, and you keep spending the money, 
and there is no accountability. So they are taking the entire Pell 
program out of discretionary accounts and moving it over to entitlement 
accounts. As the Senator from Tennessee noted, this is over $100 
billion of new entitlement spending.
  If we keep this up, what is it going to do? Essentially, what it is 
going to do is bankrupt our country, but it will certainly bankrupt our 
kids. We are going to pass on to them a country which has this massive 
increase in debt--something our children can't afford, as I mentioned 
earlier--a debt which will double in 5 years because of the spending, 
and triple in 10 years. Almost all of this growth in debt is a function 
of the growth of the entitlement spending in this program. Although 
there is a considerable amount of growth in discretionary, the vast 
majority of this increase is in spending for entitlement programs.
  To put it another way, and to show how much this is out of the 
ordinary and how much this is a movement of our government to the 
left--an expansion of government as a function of our society--this 
chart shows what historically the spending of the Federal Government 
has been. It has historically been about 20 percent of gross national 
product. That has been an affordable number. Granted, we have run 
deficits during a lot of this period, but at least it has been 
reasonably affordable. But this administration is proposing in their 
budget that we spike the spending radically next year, which is 
understandable because we are in the middle of a very severe recession 
and the government is the source of liquidity to try to get the economy 
going. So that is understandable. Maybe not that much, but maybe 
understandable. It is more than I would have suggested, but I will 
accept that. The problem is out here, when you get out to the year 
2011,

[[Page S3007]]

2012, and 2013, when the recession is over. When the recession is over, 
they do not plan to control spending. They plan to continue spending on 
an upward path so it is about 23 percent of gross national products.
  What does that mean? That means we are going to run big deficits, big 
debt, and all of that will be a burden and fall on the shoulders of our 
children. Our children are the ones who have to pay this cost.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. At this point, let me ask the Senator from New 
Hampshire a question. I have heard you say, and I believe I said a 
moment ago, that in the 1990s, President Clinton raised taxes, as 
President Obama is planning to raise taxes, but that President Clinton 
used it to reduce the deficit.
  Mr. GREGG. Yes. When President Clinton raised taxes in the mid 1990s, 
and a Republican Congress came into play, we controlled spending. He 
got his tax increase, the deficit went down, because the tax increase 
was put to reducing the deficit. What President Obama is proposing is 
that he increase taxes by $1.4 trillion--the largest tax increase in 
the history of our country. Is it going to be used to reduce the 
deficit? No, just the opposite. It is going to be used to grow the 
government and allow the government to now take 23 percent of gross 
national product instead of the traditional 20 percent.
  So you can't close this gap. Basically, all the new taxes in this 
bill--and there are a lot of them. There is a national sales tax on 
everybody's electric bill, a tax which is basically going to hit most 
every small business in this country and make it harder for them to 
hire people; and a tax which limits the deductibility of charitable 
giving and of home mortgages. All these new taxes are not being used to 
get fiscal discipline in place, to try to bring down the debt, or limit 
the rate of growth of the debt, or to limit the size of the deficit. 
They are being used to explode--literally explode--the size of the 
Federal Government, with ideas such as nationalizing the educational 
loan system, ideas such as quasinationalization of the health care 
system, which is in here, and massive expansion of a lot of other 
initiatives that may be worthwhile but aren't affordable in the context 
of this agenda.
  So this budget is a tremendous expansion in spending, a tremendous 
expansion in borrowing, and a tremendous expansion in taxes. And it is 
not affordable for our children.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. I wonder if I may ask the Senator from New Hampshire 
about this. Some people may say, with some justification: You 
Republicans are complaining about spending, yet in the last 8 years you 
participated in a lot of it yourself. How would you compare the 
proposed spending and proposed debt over the next 10 years in this 
blueprint by the Obama administration with the last 8 years?
  Mr. GREGG. That is a good point, and that has certainly been made by 
the other side of the aisle: Well, under the Bush administration all 
this spending was done and this debt was run up.
  In the first 5 years of the Obama administration, under their 
budget--not our numbers, their numbers--they will spend more and they 
will run up the debt on the country more and on our children more than 
all the Presidents since the beginning of our Republic--George 
Washington to George Bush. Take all those Presidents and put all the 
debt they put on the ledger of America, and in this budget President 
Obama is planning to run up more debt than occurred under all those 
Presidents. It is a massive expansion in debt.
  It is also an interesting exercise in tax policy. Now, I know we are 
not talking so much about taxes today, but I think it is important to 
point out that when you put a $1.4 trillion tax increase on the 
American people, you reduce productivity in this country rather 
dramatically. One of the unique things about President Bush's term was 
that he set a tax policy which actually caused us to have 4 years--
prior to this massive recession, which is obviously a significant 
problem and a very difficult situation--but for the runup during the 
middle part of his term right up until this recession started, the 
Federal Government was generating more revenues than it had ever 
generated in its history. Why was that? Because we had a tax policy 
which basically taxed people in a way that caused them to go out and be 
productive, to create jobs, and to do things which were taxable events.
  Unfortunately, what is being proposed here, under this 
administration's tax policy, is going to cause people to do tax 
avoidance. Instead of investing to create jobs, they will go out to 
invest to try to avoid taxes, and that is not an efficient way to use 
dollars. The practical effect is it will reduce revenues and increase 
the deficit. So on your point, the simple fact is, as this proposal 
comes forward from the administration, it increases the debt of the 
United States more in 5 years than all the Presidents of the United 
States have increased the debt since the beginning of the Republic.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. I see the Senator from Arizona, who is a longtime 
member of the Senate Finance Committee and pays a lot of attention to 
Federal spending and is the assistant Republican leader. I wonder, 
Senator Kyl, as you have watched the Congress over the years, to what 
do you attribute this remarkable increase in spending? We heard a lot 
of talk last year about change, but this may be the kind of change that 
produces a sticker shock. It may be a little bit more change in terms 
of spending than a lot of Americans were expecting.
  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I appreciate the question of my colleague 
from Tennessee. I also compliment the ranking member of the Budget 
Committee, the Senator from New Hampshire, who has tried to deal with 
budgets all the time he has been in the Senate.
  If I could begin by just asking him one question: How would you 
characterize this budget proposed by the President as compared with 
others, in terms of the taxes and the spending and the debt created? Is 
there some way to compare it with all of the other budgets that you 
have worked with, including all of the Bush budgets?
  Mr. GREGG. It has the largest increase in taxes, the largest increase 
in spending, and the largest increase in debt in the history of our 
country.
  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I first would answer my colleague from 
Tennessee. We ought to be spending less and taxing less and borrowing 
less. Our minority leader asked his staff to do some calculations. Just 
from the time that the new President raised his hand and was 
inaugurated as President, how much money have we spent? They calculated 
that we have spent $1 billion every hour. That is just in the stimulus 
legislation, this omnibus bill that was just passed last night, which 
is 8 percent over the stimulus bill, and we have not even added in the 
spending that is going to occur as a result of this budget which, as 
the Senator from New Hampshire said, in just the first year is a third 
more spending than even the previous year--$3.55 trillion.
  In addition to that, it makes much of the so-called temporary 
spending in the stimulus bill permanent. Some of us predicted that 
would happen, that when they have a new program in the stimulus bill 
they surely wouldn't cut it off after 2 or 3 years. We said they will 
probably make it permanent. Sure enough, and the ranking member on the 
Budget Committee can speak to that better than I, but a great many of 
these programs are made permanent. On health care, for example, the 
Senator from New Hampshire talked about that, but there is no effort to 
control entitlements. In fact, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security 
all rise between 10 and 12 percent, Medicare itself by $330 billion. 
This is increased spending, and it is permanent programs.
  We also wondered what would happen with respect to the Federal 
Government's growth as a result. According to a March 3 Washington Post 
article, ``President Obama's budget is so ambitious, with vast new 
spending on health care, energy independence, education, services for 
veterans, that experts say he probably will need to hire tens of 
thousands of new Federal Government workers to realize his goals.'' 
According to the article, estimates are as high as 250,000 new 
Government employees will have to be hired to implement all of this 
spending.
  I know we want to create jobs in this economy, but I wonder if the 
American people intended that we create a whole bunch of new Government 
bureaucrats to spend all of this money.
  This is not responsive to my colleague's question, but the one area

[[Page S3008]]

where we do not have high unemployment is Government jobs. The 
unemployment in the country is about 8 percent now. In Government jobs 
it is between 2 percent and 3 percent, so that is not an area we needed 
to grow more jobs.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. I wonder if I might ask the Senator from Arizona, one 
might look at the chart Senator Gregg has up and say that is not too 
big an increase in Federal spending, but of course the United States 
produces about 25 percent of the world's wealth. When we go up on an 
annual basis by a few percentage points, it begins to change the 
character of the kind of country we have.
  How do you see this kind of dramatic increase in spending and taxing 
and debt affecting the character of the country as compared with, say, 
countries in Europe or other countries around the world?
  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I would say that is getting to the heart of 
the matter. We can talk about these numbers all day. They are mind-
boggling, they are very difficult to take in. But what does it all mean 
at the end of the day? I will respond in two ways.
  First of all, it makes us look a whole lot more like the countries in 
Europe that have been stagnating for years because they spend such a 
high percent of their gross national product on government. As the 
Senator from New Hampshire pointed out, we are headed in that direction 
under this budget. It is a recipe for a lower standard of living in the 
United States and makes us look a lot more like Europe.
  The second way goes back to the policy I think is embedded in this 
budget. The President has been very candid about this. He talks about 
it as his blueprint. He says this budget is not about numbers, it is 
about policies; it is about a blueprint for change. The Wall Street 
Journal on February 27 said:

       With yesterday's fiscal 2010 budget proposal, President 
     Obama is attempting not merely to expand the role of the 
     federal government but to put it in such a dominant position 
     that its power can never be rolled back.

  That is the problem. It is the growth of Government controlling all 
of these segments of our lives. That is what this spending is 
ultimately all about, as the Senator from New Hampshire said, taking 
over the energy policy, taking over the health care, taking over the 
education policy, as well as running our financial institutions. It is 
not just about spending more money and creating more debt and taxing in 
order to try to help pay for some of that. It is also about a huge 
increase in the growth of Government and therefore the control over our 
lives.
  In a way, the Wall Street Journal says, ``In a way that can never be 
rolled back.''
  Mr. ALEXANDER. I wonder if either the Senator from Arizona or New 
Hampshire would have a comment on the way that spending was 
accomplished in the stimulus bill. For example, in the Department of 
Education, where I used to work, the annual budget was $68 billion. But 
the stimulus added $40 billion per year to the department's budget for 
the next 2 years. There were no hearings. There was no discussion about 
this. No one said: Are we spending all the money we are spending now in 
the right way, and if we were to spend more would we give parents more 
choices? Would we create more charter schools? Would we, as the 
President said yesterday, of which I approve, spend some money to 
reward outstanding teachers?
  What about the way this is being spent on energy, education, and 
Medicaid, for example?
  Mr. GREGG. I think the Senator is absolutely right. The stimulus 
package was a massive unfocused effort by people to fund things they 
liked. I don't think it was directed at stimulus. It was more directed 
at areas where people believed there needed to be more money, people 
who served on the Appropriations Committee, and therefore they 
massively funded those areas. Between the stimulus bill and the omnibus 
bill, there were 21 programs which received on average an 88-percent 
increase in funds for 2009 compared to 2008; $155 billion more was 
spent on those programs for this year than last year. That is just a 
massive explosion in the size of the Government. It is inconsistent 
with what the purposes of a stimulus package should have been.
  The stimulus package should have put money into the economy quickly 
for purposes of getting the economy going. What this bill did was 
basically, as you mentioned earlier, build programs that are going to 
be very hard to rein in. The obligations are there. They are going to 
have to be continued to be paid for, and, as the Senator from Arizona 
pointed out, that was probably the goal: to fundamentally expand the 
size of Government in a way that cannot be contracted.
  Take simply, for example, a very worthwhile exercise which is NIH. 
They received an extra $10 billion, I believe, on the stimulus package, 
for 2 years of research. Research doesn't take 2 years. Research takes 
years and years and years, so you know if you put in that type of money 
up front you are going to have to come in behind it and fill in those 
dollars in the outyears.
  They basically said you are going to radically expand the size of 
this initiative. The same thing happening in education. The same thing 
happening in health care. That is where this number goes up so much, 23 
percent of gross national product, and it goes up from there. The only 
way you pay for it is basically taxing our children to the point they 
cannot have as high a quality of life as we have.

  Mr. ALEXANDER. I heard the Senator from Arizona say it was not just a 
$1 trillion stimulus package, that by the time you add in all these 
projected costs in the future, it might be much more.
  Mr. KYL. I think the number was $3.27 trillion. I believe that was 
the correct number over the time of the 10 years.
  The Senator from Tennessee certainly knows a bit about education. It 
all was not spent. There were some policies that actually attempted to 
reduce some costs--of a program that works very well, that thousands of 
people in the District of Columbia depend upon to send their kids to 
good schools. That is the program we put into effect to give a voucher 
of $7,500 a year to kids to attend private schools, kids who would 
never have that opportunity otherwise.
  If I could ask a question of my colleague from Tennessee, since as 
former Secretary of Education he knows something about how to make sure 
our kids have the best opportunities for education in this country, 
why, with the District of Columbia costing about $15,000 a year to 
educate children and not doing a very good job of it according to all 
of the test scores, and thousands of parents wishing their kids had an 
alternative choice, somewhere else to go--when we create a program that 
provides a few of them, less than 2,000 a year, I believe, with a 
voucher that returns only half of that much money to the private 
school--$7,500, so it doesn't cost the public anything--why, when it 
gives these kids such a great opportunity, would our colleagues on the 
other side of the aisle, and the President, whose two daughters, by the 
way, attend one of the schools that kids would have to be taken out of 
because they can't afford to go there without the voucher--why would 
they remove that school choice and the voucher program?
  Mr. ALEXANDER. It is very hard to imagine, Senator Kyl. Just to make 
the point we are not being personal about that, my son attended the 
same school that the President's daughters attend when we were here and 
I was Education Secretary.
  School vouchers may not be the solution in every rural county in 
America, but in the District of Columbia, 1,700 children who are low-
income children have a chance to choose among private schools, their 
parents are delighted with the choice, and a study is coming out this 
spring to assess what they are learning. I do not know the motive 
behind this, but I do know the National Education Association has made 
its reputation opposing giving low-income parents the same choices that 
wealthy people have. That is a poor policy and one we ought not to have 
stuck on an appropriations bill like that.
  The President has shown good instincts on education. His Education 
Secretary is a good one. But had we had a chance to debate this in 
committee and to hear from them, perhaps we could have had a bipartisan 
agreement that we need to pay good teachers more, we need more charter

[[Page S3009]]

schools, and we need to give parents some more choices like these 
District of Columbia parents.
  I know our time is running short. I wonder if the Senator from New 
Hampshire has any further thoughts about spending.
  Mr. GREGG. I thank the Senator from Tennessee for taking this time. I 
think it all comes down to these numbers. Really, what does spending 
do? Sure it does a lot of good things, but in the end, if you don't pay 
for it, it makes it more difficult for our country to succeed and for 
our children who inherit the debts to succeed. When you double the debt 
in 5 years because of the spending, and you triple it in 10 years, you 
are absolutely guaranteeing that you are passing on to our children a 
country where they will have less opportunities to succeed than our 
generation. That is not fair. It is simply not fair for one generation 
to do this to another generation. Yet that is what this budget proposes 
to do: to run up bills for our generation and take them and turn them 
over to our children and grandchildren at a rate greater than ever 
before, a rate of spending greater than has ever been seen before, and 
a rate of increasing the debt that has never been conceived of before, 
that you would triple the national debt in 10 years.
  It is not fair, it is not right, it is not appropriate, and it 
certainly is a major mistake, in my opinion.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Senator Kyl, to conclude our discussion, this is the 
beginning of a process in the Senate in which everyone in this country 
can participate. We are asking that they consider: Can you afford this 
amount of spending, this amount of borrowing, this amount of taxes? 
There is a different path we could take toward the future.
  Mr. KYL. Indeed. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Tennessee. 
As this debate unfolds, I think our colleagues will see that 
Republicans have some better ideas. We want to spend less and tax less 
and borrow less. We believe we can accomplish great results in the 
field of energy, for example, in the field of education, in the field 
of health care--much more positively, much better results in the long 
run with a lot less burden on our children and our grandchildren in the 
future.
  As this debate unfolds, we are very anxious to present our 
alternative views on how to accomplish these results.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cardin.) The Senator is notified that 28 
minutes has elapsed.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Arizona for his leadership 
and the Senator from New Hampshire for his views.
  This is the beginning of a discussion about a 10-year blueprint 
offered by our new President about the direction in which our country 
should go. We on the Republican side believe American families cannot 
afford this much new spending, this many new taxes, and this much new 
debt. We will be suggesting why over the next 3 or 4 weeks, and in 
addition to that we will be offering our vision for the future. For 
example, on energy, some things we agree with, such as conservation and 
efficiency; some things we would encourage more of, such as nuclear 
power for carbon-free electricity.
  This is the beginning of a very important debate, and the direction 
in which it goes will dramatically influence the future of this country 
and make a difference to every single family, not just today's parents 
but children and their children as well.
  I yield the floor, and 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. ALEXANDER. 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. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time 
be equally charged to each side.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Alabama is recognized.
  Mr. SHELBY. Mr. President, I rise today with great concern regarding 
the nomination of Mr. David Ogden to serve as the Deputy Attorney 
General of the United States. There is no doubt that Mr. Ogden has a 
long record of legal experience. He also, however, brings a long 
history of representation of the pornography industry and the 
opposition to laws designed to protect children from sexual 
exploitation.
  He opposed the Children's Internet Protection Act of 2000 that would 
restrict children's exposure to explicit online content. Mr. Ogden 
filed an amicus brief supporting the American Library Association in a 
case that challenged mandatory anti-obscenity Internet filters in 
public libraries. He treated pornography like informative data, writing 
that the ``imposition of mandatory filtering on public libraries 
impairs the ability of librarians to fulfill the purposes of public 
libraries--namely, assisting library patrons in their quest for 
information. . . .''
  Mr. Ogden also argued against laws requiring pornography producers to 
verify that models were over 18 at the time their materials were made. 
Think of that. He challenged the Child Protection and Obscenity 
Enforcement Act of 1988 and a companion law adopted in 1990, the Child 
Protection Restoration and Penalties Enhancement Act. Mr. Ogden argued 
that requiring pornography producers to personally verify that their 
models were over age 18 would ``burden too heavily and infringe too 
deeply on the right to produce First Amendment-protected material.''
  Among the many cases in which Mr. Ogden has advocated interests of 
the pornography industry, none is more egregious than the position he 
took in Knox v. the United States.
  The facts in the next case are straightforward. Steven Knox was 
convicted of receiving and possessing child pornography under the Child 
Protection Act after the U.S. Customs Service found in Mr. Knox's 
apartment several videotapes of partially clothed girls, some as young 
as age 10, posing suggestively. Serving as counsel on an ACLU effort, 
Mr. Ogden argued to strike down the 1992 conviction of Mr. Knox. On 
behalf of the ACLU and other clients, Mr. Ogden submitted a Supreme 
Court brief advocating the same statutory and constitutional positions 
as the Clinton Justice Department. Mr. Ogden's arguments stated that 
while nudity was a requirement for prosecution, nudity alone was 
insufficient for prosecutions under child pornography statutes. Put 
simply, Mr. Ogden argued that the defendant had been improperly 
convicted because the materials in his possession would only qualify as 
child pornography if children's body parts were indecently exposed.
  In response, on November 3, 1993, the Senate, right here, passed a 
resolution by a vote of 100 to 0 condemning this interpretation of the 
law by Mr. Ogden. President Clinton then publicly rebuked the Solicitor 
General, and Attorney General Reno overturned his position. Now the 
Senate is being asked to confirm as Deputy Attorney General someone who 
advocated the same extreme position on a Federal child pornography 
statute that the Senate unanimously repudiated 16 years ago.
  The Supreme Court has ``recognized that there is a compelling 
interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of 
minors. This interest extends to shielding minors from the influence of 
literature that is not obscene by adult standards.'' Pornography should 
not be regarded as immune from regulation simply because it is deemed 
``free speech.''
  Furthermore, child pornography in any form should not be tolerated. 
How can Mr. Ogden's clear position on the right to unfettered access to 
pornography not interfere with the Justice Department's responsibility 
to protect children from obscene material and exploitation?
  When asked about this very issue at the Senate hearing on his 
nomination, Mr. Ogden said he hoped he would not be judged by arguments 
made for clients. If we cannot judge him on his past positions, what 
can we judge him on? Past performance is a great indicator of future 
action.
  David Ogden is more than just a lawyer who has had a few unsavory 
clients. He has devoted a substantial part of his career, case after 
case for 20 years, in defense of pornography. Ogden has profited from 
representing pornographers and in attacking legislation designed to ban 
child pornography. Should a man with a long list of pornographers as 
past clients, with a

[[Page S3010]]

record of objection to attempts to regulate this industry in order to 
protect our children, be confirmed for our Nation's second highest law 
enforcement position? Is he the best choice to actively identify and 
prosecute those who seek to harm our children?
  Highlights of the Department of Justice's budget request for the year 
2010 indicate an increased focus on educating and rehabilitating 
criminals, while neglecting funding for vital child-safety programs 
such as the Adam Walsh Act. I believe Mr. Ogden's past positions, 
coupled with the Department's growing trend to prioritize criminal 
rehabilitation over child safety, cause me great concern this 
afternoon.
  There is not a quick and easy solution to the problems of child 
exploitation, but I can state unequivocally that we need a proactive 
and aggressive Department of Justice to take the steps necessary to 
attack this problem and demonstrate that protecting our children is a 
top priority. I am not certain David Ogden will bring that leadership 
to the Department; therefore, I must oppose this nomination.
  This vote is made with the belief that a person's past legal 
positions do mean a great deal. I think if most Americans knew what 
this man has worked for and whom he has willingly represented, support 
for his nomination would disappear. I do not believe his legal 
philosophy, illustrated in the clients he freely chose to represent, 
reflects the majority's views on the issue of child exploitation. I 
know certainly they do not reflect mine.