Congressional Record, Volume 156 Issue 100 (Wednesday, June 30, 2010)

[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 100 (Wednesday, June 30, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5651-S5679]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

AMERICAN JOBS AND CLOSING TAX LOOPHOLES ACT OF 2010

Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, what is the pending business?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the pending business.
The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

Motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate
amendment with an amendment to H.R. 4213, an act to amend the
Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to extend certain expiring
provisions, and for other purposes.

Pending:

Reid motion to concur in the amendment of the House to the
amendment of the Senate to the bill, with Reid amendment No.
4425 (to the amendment of the House to the amendment of the
Senate to the bill), in the nature of a substitute.
Reid amendment No. 4426 (to amendment No. 4425), to change
the enactment date.
Reid motion to refer in the amendment of the House to the
amendment of the Senate to the bill to the Committee on
Finance, with instructions, Reid amendment No.4427, to
provide for a study.
Reid amendment No. 4428 (to the instructions (amendment No.
4427) of the motion to refer), of a perfecting nature.
Reid amendment No. 4429 (to amendment No. 4428), of a
perfecting nature.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.

Congratulating the University of South Carolina

Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I rise today to congratulate the
University of South Carolina men's baseball team for making history by
winning the NCAA College World Series last night.
Whit Merrifield's clutch hit in the 11th inning brought home the
winning run and gave USC its first ever national championship for any
men's team at the university.
In spite of losing their first game in Omaha, the team persevered
through multiple elimination games. They were motivated by the
courageous spirit of one young fan, Bayler Teal, who at age 7 may have
been the biggest Gamecock fan in America. He suffered from a rare form
of cancer and died last Thursday during the Gamecock's come-from-behind
victory over Oklahoma. He wore his Gamecock ball cap the day he died.
Fortunately, Bayler's parents and 5-year-old brother were able to be
in Omaha last night to see the Gamecocks win the final game of the
College World Series.
So today I join all South Carolinians and Gamcocks fans everywhere to
congratulate the players, Coach Ray Tanner, and his staff for an
outstanding victory.
Now all America knows that USC means the University of South
Carolina. Go Gamecocks.

First-time Home Buyer Tax Credit

Mr. President, I want to speak in objection to the majority's latest
attempt to secretly push through another extension of the first-time
home buyer tax credit--the third time the Senate has modified or
extended this credit since July of 2008, when it was originally
included in the majority's Housing and Economic Recovery Act.
Home buyer tax credits have several flaws, and I opposed them in the
past because I believe they are a temporary infusion of capital into
the marketplace and simply increase the government's grip on our
Nation's economic growth.
As often happens when the government becomes involved in attempting
to grow a portion of the Nation's economy, we only create a bubble that
will eventually burst. As the National Association of Realtors said in
late April, shortly before the expiring of the tax credit on April 30:

It is time for the housing market to stand on its own feet.

It is time for the government to stop picking winners and losers in
the housing market based on arbitrary dates and arbitrary
qualifications. For the people who haven't closed on their homes by
today, it is not that they won't get their house; it is only that they
won't get a taxpayer subsidy for having bought a house now rather than
later. This taxpayer subsidy has been funded by their neighbor, who may
not have had the opportunity to buy on the government time line.
We have watched this majority push through big spending bills and
targeted government credits. What we have learned is that government
spending does not grow economic prosperity; rather, government spending
grows deficits. It creates economic bubbles. Without a doubt, it
increases taxes.
For 18 months, this majority has created a false sense of hope for
consumers and markets while increasing taxes on small businesses and
the most productive and hard-working Americans. Rather than creating
tax equality and predictability for all Americans, this Congress has
tried to force taxpayers to subsidize the purchasing of cars, homes,
and even appliances.
We know what works. When American businesses have the predictability
of low tax rates, they in turn invest in job creation and create real
economic growth.
The enormous amount of spending this Congress has taken on is
unsustainable and will eventually lead to the highest tax increases in
our Nation's history.
This bill is no different. I ask my colleagues, how many times do we
need to extend this home buyer tax credit? What do we tell the people
who bought their homes just before it started, and the ones who bought
their homes right after it expired? Do we say their mortgage rates will
be higher for the whole time they own their home, and their

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taxes will be paying for their neighbor's home, who happened to buy in
the government's window of opportunity?
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has called the home buyer credit
``Washington's worst tax policy idea.'' They have estimated that the
$12.6 billion already spent on this program through February created
``close to zero'' jobs and that at least 85 percent of these buyers
would have likely purchased a home anyway.
Also, the Treasury Department's inspector general found the home
buyer credit has been riddled with fraud and chronicled over 14,000
instances of false claims. This is typical of government programs. The
report ``found as many as 67 taxpayers using the same home to claim the
credit''--the same home. It also found that over 1,000 prisoners
received credit for homes they claimed to buy while in jail.
How is it fair to subsidize Americans who purchased their first home
only because they purchased it on the government's timetable?
With this latest extension of the credit, the majority is not only
cutting defense spending to fund the credits, but now it is admitting
that taxing Americans at the highest rates in history isn't enough. Now
they are going to tax foreign visitors to pay for buying our homes in
America.
My hope is that my colleagues will use the recess next week to
finally listen to the millions of Americans who are tired of this
Congress choosing winners and losers. They are tired of the excessive
spending, and they are fearful of tax increases yet to come. They are
telling us very clearly: Stop spending, stop borrowing, stop adding to
the debt, and stop the government takeovers.
Most of all, they agree on one thing: This Congress needs to get out
of the way and let America get back to work.

Unanimous-Consent Request--H.R. 3371

Mr. President, I will now speak on the status of the Federal Aviation
Administration legislation and, hopefully, move the process along a
great deal. At the end of this, I will offer a unanimous consent
request.
As many Senators will remember, early last year a small commuter
plane crashed just outside Buffalo, NY. The accident killed all 49
people onboard and one person on the ground.
In the months following the crash, the Senate Commerce Committee and
its aviation subcommittee held a number of hearings to get a better
understanding of what exactly went wrong during Flight 3407 and what
Congress could do to help fix it.
I thank Senator Dorgan in particular for his leadership on this
issue. From those lessons we have learned and during the drafting of
the FAA reauthorization, our colleagues in the House worked with us,
and we were able to craft a number of important reforms that formed the
safety section of both the House and the Senate reauthorization bills.
Let me take a moment to outline some of them: an FAA pilots records
database. Had we had a database like the one we have in this bill, it
would be very likely that the pilot of Flight 3407 would not have been
allowed to fly that day.
Increased hourly requirements for copilots: If we had these
requirements, the copilot on Flight 3407 would have had more
experience, and we may have averted a disaster.
There are a number of improvements in the House bill, including
enhanced mentoring for pilots, increased utilization of safety
management programs, better crew management initiatives, as well as
clearer responses to NTSB safety recommendations. All of these reforms
will go a long way to improving aviation safety.

Sadly, we have yet to get this legislation across the finish line
that would implement these reforms. Parochial politics, political
payoffs, and backroom deals are keeping these important safety measures
from passing.
Some Members are trying to cut special deals for special flights to
their States. Numerous Members are looking to impose new taxes on
travelers already burdened by too much taxation. Some Congressmen are
trying to cut a special deal for their buddies in the labor unions. All
of these things are beside the point and are exactly what aviation
policy should not be about.
Since last October, the Senate has had a bill sitting before us that
will immediately implement the reforms that the families of Flight 3407
have been calling for. They have waited too long. The fights over
FedEx, taxes, and special flights aren't going to go away anytime soon.
If we let them, these controversial issues will continue to hold up the
safety provisions on which we all agree.
Let's say that enough is enough; it is time to pass the safety
improvements and let the rest of the FAA stand on its own.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on
Commerce be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 3371 and the
Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be read
the third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the
table.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Hagan). Is there objection?
Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard. The Senator from North
Dakota is recognized.
Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, might I inquire of the Senator, we have
been trying to move a 30-day extension of existing authorities for the
FAA, which is essential and very necessary. Is the Senator holding that
up? We have had objection from his side, and my information is that the
objection was the Senator's. Is that accurate?
Mr. DeMINT. Madam President, I very much support the extension, but I
have asked that this safety provision be moved along with it so that we
can get this done instead of continuing to allow it to be held hostage
to political interests on the bill.
I would be supportive of a unanimous consent request that would
extend the FAA authorization 30 days if it included my request for the
safety provisions of the bill.
Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I think this will be extended 30 days.
Failure to extend the current authority for the FAA for the next 30
days while we finish the conference report will mean that 4,000 people
at FAA will be furloughed, laid off. Don't tell me that promotes
aviation safety. That is the worst possible thing we can do--to decide
that we are not going to extend current authorities, and after July 4,
4,000 people will be furloughed at FAA.
With respect to what my colleague has just done, without consultation
with anybody else, he decided to come to the floor of the Senate and
talk about ``special deals'' and ``new taxes'' and so on.
Let me describe where we are. We have tried to keep the Senator's
staff and him involved so that he understands where we are. In the
event there is missing information, let me explain where we are.
No. 1, we passed an FAA reauthorization bill that includes
modernization of the air traffic control system, very substantial
safety provisions, far more than what the Senator suggests we adopt
today.
As the Senator knows because he is ranking member on the
subcommittee, we held a good number of hearings on the subject of the
Colgan crash and the safety provisions that need to be done as a result
of it. The things the Senator raises on the floor today include most of
what I have suggested, among other things. I appreciate the cooperation
the Senator offered when he was at the hearings we held on these safety
issues.
But following the passage of this bill by the Commerce Committee, we
have not been able to appoint conferees in this Chamber. That is
symbolic of how dysfunctional the Chamber is these days because we have
objections even to appointing conferees. Notwithstanding the
objections, Senator Rockefeller and I have been working with the House,
and we have kept the Senator involved, trying to narrow down most of
the provisions that differ between the House and Senate. There are 6 or
8 or perhaps 10 significant differences we are working on now, and the
Senator mentioned a couple: the issue of the perimeter rule, slots at
Washington National Airport, a FedEx issue, passenger facilities
charge, and other issues.
I believe there is almost no dispute at all about the majority of the
safety provisions that both the House and the Senate will include in
the bill when it is complete. We had hoped it would be complete this
week. That is not going to be the case.

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Shortly after we return, I fully expect to have a conference report
on the floor of the Senate that will include all of these safety
provisions and more, I should say--many more--because, as the Senator
knows, I chaired the hearings that helped develop these very
procedures.
It would have been nice to have gotten some notice about what the
Senator chose to do today. I do not think it is appropriate to try to
leverage an extension for 30 days for the current authorization of FAA,
which, if not extended, will result in 4,000 people being furloughed at
the FAA. To try to leverage passing a portion of the FAA
reauthorization bill that we are now negotiating with the House and we
are very close to concluding does not make any sense to me.
No one cares more about these safety issues than I do. I can speak at
length--and perhaps I will--about the Colgan crash. I understand what
happened in that cockpit. I read all the transcription. I read all the
information available about it. I sat for hour after hour in hearings.
What happened there is an enormous tragedy. Some of the things that
caused it, in my judgment, will be remedied and can be remedied and
some of it is already remedied as a result of the action by the new FAA
Administrator.
I simply want to say to the Senator from South Carolina that I think
it is very important that we extend for 30 days the current authority
of the FAA and avoid the furloughs his objections would entail. If
there is any way to quickly and immediately and dramatically injure
safety in the skies in this country, it would be to decide to have that
kind of furlough.
I did ask unanimous consent for a 30-day extension. I will do so
again this afternoon and hope that my colleague will not object to it.
I have worked with my colleague all along the way on these safety
issues. I wish perhaps he would have consulted us in terms of coming to
the floor today at 12:45 p.m. as a ranking member of a subcommittee and
saying: I am going to take this on myself and do this, for whatever
reasons he described.
Mr. DeMINT. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. DORGAN. I will be happy to yield without losing the floor, if the
Senator has a question.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
Mr. DeMINT. Madam President, we have been promised for months that
this bill, the FAA reauthorization, which the Senator from North Dakota
and I approve, would go through. The families of flight 3407 have been
here constantly. As the Senator knows, one of those families is from my
hometown. They have waited long enough. There is no reason that we need
to hold these safety provisions hostage to passing a whole bill that is
bogged down in political fights.
I ask unanimous consent to amend my unanimous consent request to
include the 30-day reauthorization of FAA. There are none of these
provisions the Senator objects to. If there are additional safety
provisions that can be in the final bill, we can do that. But nothing
in my request compromises what the Senator from North Dakota wants to
accomplish. I ask unanimous consent to amend my UC to call up and pass
H.R. 5611.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. DORGAN. Why don't we stop this sort of thing? It is unbelievable
to me how dysfunctional this place is. I say to my colleague, we have
worked on this issue for months and months. I wish it had been done in
January, but it was not. But we are very close to getting this done the
right way. We have a couple things we have to do together, and I hope
we would not be debating this. We need to extend the authorities for
the FAA--and do it now--for 30 days. I expect--and the Senator knows me
because I have had conversations with Senator Kyl, the No. 2 person on
his side. We all had conversations with the Senator from South Carolina
and his staff. He knows we have been involved in finalizing at long
last just the few remaining issues in order to get a conference report
to the floor of the Senate.
I have talked with and met with the families of the victims on the
Colgan flight many times. I do not know that anybody here has done much
more than I have done to reach out to them, to hold hearings, to listen
to them, to compliment them, to say to them: Because of what you are
doing as families of victims, other people are going to have their
lives saved because of aviation safety. I do not take a backseat to
anybody in my interest and concern about that and what I have done
about that.
I have not had the families of the victims come to me to say: Let's
decide to object to extending for 30 days the FAA reauthorization or,
by the way, let's decide to take this legislation apart and pull part
of it out and leave some of the safety provisions outside the Senator's
amendment.
What the Senator is suggesting is that we should pass legislation
that came to us from the Senate with an amendment of his that takes a
portion of the bill out that he decided he wants out.
This bill, by the way, passed the Senate 93 to 0. The Senator was not
there that day, so he did not vote. But 93 Senators voted, and no
Senators voted against it. We can get this done, but we are not going
to get this done by coming to the floor without consulting anybody;
let's take a portion of it and add it to a House provision and threaten
to have the FAA not have their authority extended and they can furlough
4,000 people in the coming weeks--that is not, in my judgment, a
thoughtful way to proceed.
My hope is that perhaps we, in a rational moment, can just decide:
Let's do the right thing. We are in conference with the House--not a
formal conference but a substantial number of meetings have gone on. We
have another one at 5 o'clock this afternoon. My hope would be that the
Senator from South Carolina would agree that there is the right way and
the wrong way to do this business. We will get all those safety
provisions done and more--much, much more--and we will not leave any
safety provisions behind that were in the legislation that passed the
Senate 93 to 0. It is going to take another week or so beyond July 4,
and we will have this done.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on
Commerce be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 3371 and the
Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be read a
third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the
table.
Let me say that this is the 30-day extension of the FAA
reauthorization bill.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mr. DORGAN. Let me withdraw that request.
Mr. DeMINT. I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator may withdraw his request.
Mr. DORGAN. 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. DeMINT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The legislative clerk continued with the call of the roll.
Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I just told my colleague that the
unanimous consent request I intend to read is a unanimous consent
request that will extend for 30 days the existing authorities of the
FAA. The House has passed it, has sent it to us, and is now awaiting
action by the Senate. I personally do not intend to support amending it
and sending it back to the House. I believe we ought to do what we
should always do; that is, try to make things work, and the way to make
things work is to give the FAA the extended authority they need while
we finish the negotiations with the House.

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I indicated that we have a meeting this afternoon. Senator
Rockefeller and I have a meeting with the House counterparts this
afternoon on these issues. We have had staff working for a long period
of time. We are down to very narrow, in my judgment, or at least a few
narrow differences that I believe we can resolve. It would be a shame,
in my judgment, if we do not, just as a matter of courtesy, decide,
yes, this is the right thing to do while we try to negotiate these
final areas in that legislation.
This issue of safety, I indicated to my colleague--I guess the
Senator was absent when the Senate voted on the bill itself. It passed
93 to 0. The Senator from South Carolina has been at the hearings. My
colleagues have been at the hearings I have called on safety. The
crafting of the provisions on safety are provisions I largely crafted
in consultation with my colleague.
It seems to me to be Byzantine to be standing here and having my
colleague come to the floor offering this without consultation with
anybody. It does not make sense to do it this way. Let's finish this
the way Congress should finish its work: negotiate with the House. We
can do that in the next week or two, get a conference report, bring it
here, and have a vote on it, and it will include all the safety
provisions my colleague wants, which I helped create, and many more.
That is the right way to legislate.
The wrong way to legislate would be for us to decide we are going to
threaten to not extend the reauthorization of the FAA and have about
4,000 people laid off sometime over the Fourth of July weekend. These
are people who work at the airports division, engineering facilities,
and equipment division. It makes no sense to do this.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent--this is H.R. 5611, the FAA
extension bill for 30 days--I ask unanimous consent that the Senate
proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 5611, which was received
from the House.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mr. DeMINT. Reserving the right to object, Madam President, I assure
the Senator I am in complete support not only of the 30-day extension
but the bill he and I passed out of the Senate. Believe me, I was here
for that and very much support it. If the Senator's colleagues will
accept it the way we passed it through the Senate, it would be done
today. But because of this holdup, what I consider safety provisions
being held up unnecessarily for political reasons, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, let me make a point very clearly. A
number of the provisions dealing with safety that relate to the Colgan
air crash are being implemented already by the FAA. Let me make that
point, No. 1.
No. 2, in order to successfully do what we really need to do to
promote aviation safety, we need to get the bill passed that promotes
modernization of the air traffic control system. That is critically
important. We are losing ground on those issues. We need to be able to
move airplanes around this country and the world with GPS capability.
It allows them to fly more direct routes, with a much greater margin of
safety for passengers. The modernization of the system is critically
important. We worked long and hard on that issue.
This comprehensive bill includes air traffic control modernization,
safety provisions, and so many other provisions that are important.
My colleague, who is the ranking member on the subcommittee that
helped produce this bill, knows and I know that we have to have a 30-
day extension. That has to be done and will be done this week. I cannot
believe my colleague would go home and decide: I don't care who is laid
off. I will tell my colleagues how to quickly diminish safety in the
skies, and that is to do that, to behave like that. That is a
nonstarter, in my judgment.
It is also the case that we are not going to have somebody come to
the floor without consultation and pull this provision, that provision,
or the next provision out of the bill and say: By the way, I want
unanimous consent to get this done. That is not serious legislating. It
just is not. Everybody knows that.
It is time for us to start working together. This place is pretty
dysfunctional these days. This is exhibit A as to why it is
dysfunctional. My hope is that in the next couple of days, we can reach
an understanding to fix some of the issues that affect the Senator.
Madam President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.

Unanimous-Consent Request--S. 3462

Mrs. SHAHEEN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the
Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S.
3462, a bill to provide subpoena power to the national commission on
the British Petroleum oilspill in the Gulf of Mexico, and that the
Senate then proceed to its consideration; that the bill be read three
times, passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table;
that any statements relating to the measure be printed in the Record,
with no further intervening action or debate.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mr. DeMINT. Madam President, on behalf of other Members of the
Republican conference, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from New Hampshire.

Unanimous-Consent Request--H.R. 5481

Mrs. SHAHEEN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the
Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 442, H.R.
5481, a bill to give subpoena power to the National Commission on the
BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling; that the bill be
read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon
the table, with no intervening action or debate.
This is legislation that passed the House 420 to 1.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mr. DeMINT. Madam President, on behalf of other members of the
Republican Conference, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from New Hampshire.
Mrs. SHAHEEN. Madam President, I think we are witnessing exhibit B to
Senator Dorgan's exhibit A about what the problems are in this Chamber.
I don't understand what is so objectionable. In the House, 169
Republicans voted in favor of giving the Presidential commission
subpoena power. They understand how important that is because this
commission begins their investigation in the next few weeks. This
should not be a partisan issue. I don't understand why my colleagues on
the other side of the aisle are turning this into a partisan issue.
I find it unbelievable that after everything the people of the gulf
region have endured, and that this entire country has witnessed for
over 2 months now, that anyone is still standing with the oil company
that caused this disaster instead of the victims who are suffering from
it.
We recently learned that while BP was publicly telling us that the
Deepwater Horizon rig was leaking an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil a
day, internal BP documents showed, in a worst-case scenario, up to
100,000 barrels of oil could actually leak into the Gulf of Mexico.
What that says to me is that we need to make sure when we are
investigating this oilspill, whether it be with employees of BP or
anyone else, that they are being straight with the American people.
That is what subpoena power would do. If we want to get to the bottom
of what happened so we can stop it from happening again, the
Presidential commission needs the authority to compel people to provide
documents and to testify under oath.
The full devastation of this catastrophic spill is far from being
known, but surely we know now that it will be one of the worst, if not
the worst, economic and environmental disasters in American history. We
need to make sure this never happens again. The Presidential commission
needs subpoena power to get the job done for the American people. The
House moved quickly to pass this legislation and the Senate should now
pass this important legislation also. I can't understand why anyone is
objecting to this.
Madam President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Madam President, I want to rise in support of what my
distinguished colleague from New Hampshire is trying to accomplish
here,

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which is simply to give the oilspill commission the subpoena power it
needs to be able to do its job--to bring those individuals before it
who might be reticent to come forth.
What we have seen here on the floor--and what we have seen in the
last few minutes--is a whole process that I hope the American people
understand is a clear contrast between who stands on their side and who
stands on the side of special interests. How is it possible that
Members of this Chamber find it difficult to even proceed, when the
House of Representatives, in a near unanimous vote, could say that the
subpoena power is necessary for the commission to be able to get to the
bottom of what happened? The House voted unanimously, save for one
vote. Yet we cannot even proceed.
This isn't rocket science. It is common sense to most Americans. We
need to fully learn the lessons of this disaster with a thorough
investigation, not to protect oil companies from having their
negligence exposed. We need to get answers from BP and Transocean and
Halliburton and everyone else, including the Federal agencies, not to
give apologies to them, as I have seen Republicans suggest that we
should apologize to BP for making sure the residents of the gulf region
are held whole. We need to know the truth, and the commission needs
subpoena power to get the truth. So who are you protecting? What are we
hiding here?
In addition to holding information and blocking data collection, BP
has seemingly misrepresented the magnitude of the spill. We need the
truth. Let's go through a little bit of remembering a very short period
of time how this Congress and the American people were deceived. That
is why there is a need for subpoena power, to get to the truth and to
bring people to testify under oath.
We were told after the Deepwater Horizon burst into flames and then
sank onto the ocean floor that there was no spill. Anybody remember
that? Can you believe it? The next day, they estimated that an absurdly
low flow rate of 1,000 barrels per day was taking place. Then, on May
20, BP said they were siphoning off 5,000 barrels of oil a day from
what they claimed was a 5,000-barrel-a-day spill--meaning that they
were capturing all of it. Can you believe it?
Then, video feed released under pressure from Congress on May 21
showed a very different story, with a heavy flow of oil still spilling
from the well. In response, only after that pressure and that video
feed could be measured, the company adjusted their siphon estimate down
from 5,000 to 2,200 barrels a day to explain why oil was still flowing.
We now know that what the video actually showed was a much heavier flow
rate. Only recently have experts begun to have access to some of the
data they need to make more credible estimates.
On June 15, the Federal Government officially estimated that the flow
may be as high as 60,000 barrels a day, which means that an estimated 3
million barrels have been spilled so far. Three million barrels. That
would amount to more than 13 Exxon Valdez spills, which took place in
Alaska.
The point of all of this is that we need the truth. That is what
Senator Shaheen is trying to accomplish--subpoena power for the
commission so they can bring in all the parties they need to make sure
we get to the truth. We need someone to swear under oath that they are
telling us, in fact, the truth about what happened and how much oil is
spilling every day into the gulf.
Common sense and good judgment demand that we pass the legislation
and move quickly to get to that truth. I can't understand, when I hear
so many of my colleagues talk about truth and honesty and transparency,
that they can oppose the very effort to give the subpoena powers that
get us there. It is a sad day.
While I have the floor, let me briefly say that something good did
happen today as it relates to this process, and I want to thank Senator
Boxer, the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator
Lautenberg, and the very supportive members of that committee, for
passing my Big Oil Bailout Prevention bill out of committee today so
that we can get an up-or-down vote on the floor to hold big oil fully
liable for the economic and environmental damage they have caused.
Frankly, it is time we have a vote, after so many Republican
objections, to this commonsense legislation. The bill that the
committee passed is simple and common sense. It asserts that we want to
protect those families, those taxpayers--and all of us as taxpayers--
not oil company profits. It asserts that oil companies should bear the
burden of the economic damages that their spill causes, not taxpayers.
As we see the images and read the stories from the gulf coast night
after night, it could not be clearer that coastal families and
taxpayers are the ones who need protection, not oil companies. With
action such as this one in the committee today, we have a lot of
momentum going right now. I think the American people have shown
clearly they want oil companies held fully accountable, and we are
working to do just that. I think we are developing a head of steam.

It seems that the only people who consistently work to protect oil
companies instead of coastal families right now are the oil companies
themselves and some colleagues who seem to, no matter what, oppose,
oppose, oppose either having subpoena power to get to the truth or
lifting the liability cap so that the oil industry will be held
responsible.
Four times my Republican colleagues have blocked the Big Oil Bailout
Prevention Act from passing quickly by unanimous consent here on the
Senate Floor, even though there is a fierce urgency of doing so now.
All but one in the committee today voted in favor of the poison pill
amendment that would have gutted the bill. And they have blocked, as I
have said, the attempts of my colleague from New Hampshire to give the
commission all the tools necessary to do a full investigation.
So I say to them, if they continue to stand in the way of our efforts
to hold oil companies fully accountable, they are going to get run over
by public opinion. I hope that now the committee has acted, we can use
this as an opportunity to finally hold big oil accountable, and in
doing so, to send a message to the industry that they are going to have
to be extremely careful; that they cannot cut corners; that they cannot
go cheap as they drill--to the extent that we are going to allow
drilling to take place. We cannot risk the kind of environmental
disaster we now have in the gulf. By the way, 11 lives were lost on
that day on that rig. We must guard against a future generation facing
this kind of environmental degradation. That is what is at stake here.
That is what is at stake here.
It is incomprehensible to me that we cannot get our colleagues on the
other side of the aisle to join us in this effort.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts is recognized.
Mr. BROWN of Massachusetts. I thank the Chair.
(The remarks of Mr. Brown of Massachusetts pertaining to the
introduction of S. 3551 are located in today's Record under
``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois is recognized.
Mr. DODD. If I may, before my colleague speaks--I will yield to him
right away.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. DODD. Before my neighbor from Massachusetts leaves the floor, let
me commend him for his comments here without getting into details of
the bill he has offered but, more importantly, the general thrust of
what he has expressed. As he is a newly arriving Member of this body
and may be here for many years, I am wrapping up three decades of
service. But I hope people will listen to what he has to say.
People come to the Chamber and to this institution with the idea of
getting things done for our country. That is so critically important.
What he has suggested, what I have heard others talk about today, is
making this institution functional so we can actually come to terms. It
is not easy. We represent different constituencies and different
interests. But if the spirit expressed by Senator Scott Brown of
Massachusetts in these brief remarks he has made this morning can carry
forward in all the debates and discussions we have, we will find a lot
more solutions. I want to say thank you.
Mr. BURRIS. I thank the distinguished Senator from Connecticut, who

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has certainly been an inspiration to me in this body, and an
inspiration to all of us. I will be leaving with him, although I
certainly did not come with him. But he has been an inspiration to all
of us. He knows what my--I will not say publicly, but I thought the
Senator would have made a heck of a Supreme Court Justice.
Madam President, as a public servant, I have long been a strong
advocate for American small businesses--especially disadvantaged and
minority-owned businesses.
And even before I sought elected office, when I was a banker, I
worked hard every day to spur investment on Main Street.
I fought to make capital available to small businesses, so
entrepreneurs and innovators could create jobs and bring prosperity to
local communities.
But in today's harsh economic climate, many of these businesses are
finding it harder than ever to stay afloat.
Credit has largely dried up, and capital investment is difficult to
come by.
And even as our economy begins to inch along the road to recovery,
small and disadvantaged businesses continue to lag behind.
I believe we need to do better.
I believe we need to place small businesses at the very center of our
response to this economic crisis. They are uniquely positioned to
create well-paying jobs and generate growth at a local level--so it is
time to make them a priority again. Because, if this Congress fails to
take action, if we neglect to pass the Small Business Lending Act, and
fall short of our commitment to America's innovators and entrepreneurs,
then I fear that our Nation will slip into a jobless recovery, and
disadvantaged businesses will continue to suffer the full effects of
this great recession.
I recognize that government cannot directly create jobs in the same
way that the private sector can. But few can deny that government has
an important role to play in setting America back on the road to
recovery.
Our job is to support and encourage responsible practices, impose
common sense regulations, and help to direct investment to the areas
that need it most. That is why I believe we need to pay special
attention to the disadvantaged and minority-owned small businesses that
have borne the brunt of this crisis.
Under current law, the Small Business Administration provides key
support to these entities through its 8-A program. This initiative
offers technical assistance, training, and contracting opportunities to
small businesses that meet specific criteria. I am a strong supporter
of this program, which has helped to keep disadvantaged businesses
viable, and made sure everyone has the chance to share in economic
prosperity. Since its inception, 8-A has made a difference in countless
communities, and eased some of the worst effects of this crisis for
those who stood to suffer the most. Yet, despite its success, this
program's impact has been artificially limited, because only a small
number of businesses are eligible for this kind of support.
As we cast about for a solution to our economic troubles, I believe
we should leave no stone unturned.
At various times since the onset of the recession, both Democrats and
Republicans have come to the table with constructive ideas. Many of
these have been passed into law--and I think they have made a real
difference. But we must not find false security in early reports of
success.
We have made progress--but the situation remains fragile. There is
still much more to be done. That is why I have introduced an amendment
that would improve and expand the 8-A program.
This measure would increase the continued eligibility amount, from
$750,000 to $2.5 million, so more small businesses could benefit from
this assistance.
It is no secret that minority-owned businesses, particularly those in
poor or urban areas, have been hit hardest by the current economic
downturn, so as we look to our recovery, these are the areas we should
target for our strongest support.
By expanding the existing 8-A program, we can increase its economic
impact, without having to reinvent the wheel. We can rely on a proven
initiative to inject new life into disadvantaged areas.
I ask my colleagues to support my amendment, as well as the
underlying bill as a whole.
On behalf of small and minority-owned businesses, I ask for their
assistance in these troubled times.
Our economic future may be uncertain, but with my proposal and the
Small Business Lending Act, we have the rare opportunity to influence
that future.
Let's pass these measures, to guarantee some degree of relief for the
people who continue to suffer the most. Let's renew our investments in
America's small businesses, and rely on them to drive our economic
recovery.
Let's do so today. Let's do it now, for tomorrow may be too late.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. DODD. Madam President, I should have noted, I will be leaving
with my friend and colleague from Illinois as well. He has been a
wonderful addition to this institution. He has done a very fine job
representing the people of Illinois. I regret we didn't get to serve
more years together, that he didn't get a chance to come here earlier.
He made a good contribution in the short time we have been here. Had
the Senator been here longer, I think he would have made a significant
contribution over the years. I thank the Senator for the time he has
served and the manner in which he served as well.

Wall Street Reform

I rise this afternoon to spend a few minutes to talk about a most
important piece of legislation facing this body and, more importantly,
our country, and that is the Wall Street reform bill. In fact, the
Presiding Officer has had a deep interest in the subject matter and in
her previous life actually worked in the area of financial services.
She not only brings an interest from the State of North Carolina, one
of the fine States that has a significant involvement in the financial
services of our country, but has also a knowledge about these
institutions, how they work, and how the financial system works. I am
very grateful to her for her thoughts and suggestions as we have been
through this rather long journey over the last couple of years in the
wake of the financial crisis that befell our Nation most dramatically
in the fall of 2008.
I think all of our colleagues here know what is at stake. We do not
need to spend a lot of time talking about the circumstances over the
last couple of years. We know it, and more importantly, and more
poignantly, our constituents know it, because they are living it.
All of us have jobs here. We are fairly well compensated, to put it
mildly, by any standard. We have good health care. We own our homes or
are not worried about whether we can afford the rent in the places we
live--whatever the circumstances. We are in some ways insulated from
the day-to-day agonies our fellow citizens go through and have gone
through over these last couple of years.
But I also have a deep appreciation of the fact that my colleagues,
despite not personally going through these terrible times as their
constituents are, understand the importance of this issue. I am deeply
grateful to each and every Member of this Chamber over the last 2 years
and almost everyone in this Chamber has been involved in this debate or
discussion to one degree or another. The fact is we have come as far as
we have in this bill because there is that interest and because there
is that concern that we need to address the architecture, the financial
structures of our Nation so as to avoid the kind of problems we have
seen our Nation go through over these last several years.
Again, the numbers have been repeated so often I am almost hesitant
to repeat them this afternoon. Certainly we will know better tomorrow.
I guess the unemployment numbers will come out again.
But well over 8\1/2\ million jobs have been lost. Frankly, I think
that number is an underestimation of what has happened. Some people
have found part-time work, falling back in and out of it. But the
number, 8.4 million, is used. It is certainly no less than that and, I
suspect, as I said, far more than that.

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Seven million of our fellow citizens have had their homes fall into
foreclosure. Every time I say that sentence it seems it is so brief to
cite the number. But imagine, as we must, that moment when, despite all
of your efforts, that dream house you have acquired for your family,
because of a lost job, the lost retirement, the closed business, all of
a sudden that which you had hoped and dreamed for that has brought
stability to your family, a great sense of joy and hope, dreams
fulfilled, is all of a sudden closed, foreclosed, lost.
Imagine coming home that night when all of the efforts to hold on to
that home are gone and facing your family and telling them the house
you have lived in--where you have played, you have eaten, you have
dreamt, you have laughed, you have cried, you have done all of the
things that building enshrines in the American family--is no longer
yours. For 7 million of our fellow citizens that night has happened.
Many more face the prospect of that occurring in the months ahead,
despite the efforts to get our economy moving again. Retirement
incomes, of course, have vanished in a flash, watching the markets
decline. Literally years of building security for those retirement
years, to contribute to a child's higher education costs, to blunt the
costs of a health tragedy to hit your family, all of those rainy days
that retirement or savings account can provide to weather those storms
have been eliminated.
So there has been a shocking loss of wealth in our Nation as well.
Trillions of dollars are gone, incomes that will never be made up. As I
mentioned, lost home values, even if you have been able to hold on to
your home, home values, on average, have declined about 30 percent. So
that equity you might have built up in that dream house, where you have
raised your family over the last 10, 15, 20 years, you paid one price
for it maybe 20 years ago and had the full expectation that property
value, while it may not skyrocket, would increase in value over the
years.
So as you became that empty nester as your kids went on to college or
marriage or jobs on their own, the hope that you would be able to sell
that home to another hopeful buyer and come out of it with some equity
that would then provide for that security that you needed to contribute
to your family's well being has been totally gone in many cases, even
if you have held on to your home.
Well, the bill I briefly want to talk about does not do anything
about what has happened. I would love to tell you if we passed this
bill that you could get your job back; that passing this financial
reform bill would give you your job back. I would love to be able to
tell you that when we pass this bill you would get your home back or
that somehow you would be able to magically replenish that retirement
account or savings account.
This bill does not do any of those things. All this bill does is to
say that when the next crisis comes--and surely it will as night
follows dawn, as tomorrow follows today we will have another economic
crisis. I never suggested this bill was going to stop that. What I hope
we are able to do with this bill is minimize the effects of that crisis
when it occurs so that it does not metastasize. That may be the best
word to use in this case, much as a cancer does.
When an economic crisis hits, if you are able to handle it when it
happens, much as you are able to handle a cancer when you discover it
before it contaminates your entire body--the crisis that will happen if
we can control it, identify it early enough, begin to address the
problems that it poses, then we might avoid the kind of catastrophic
effect this present economic catastrophe has caused, the most
significant in almost 100 years, since the Great Depression more than
80 years ago.
So I want to briefly talk about not only the process we have gone
through over the past year and a half, but also what this bill is
trying to do. Let me be the first to acknowledge and admit that it does
not do everything I would like it to do. I am not overly enthusiastic
about every provision in this bill. There are measures that I objected
to that are in the bill.
But we serve in a body of our fellow colleagues, the 100 of us who
serve here, who work with those who work down the hall from this
Chamber where 435 of our colleagues serve, with an administration and
regulators, not to mention financial institutions and their employees
and all that are involved in the financial network of our Nation, all
are impacted and affected by this bill. So it is difficult to try to
fashion a piece of legislation that accommodates the various interests
and allows us to move forward. But that is what we have tried to do.
Process is important. I will not dwell on this point, but as someone
who has spent three decades of my life at this very desk--and it is the
only desk I have ever sat at since the day I arrived. This desk was
planted over in that far corner as the 100th Senator in the body up
until I--some 20 years ago when, through seniority, you get to move
your desk around. I ended up in this seat, this spot about 20 years
ago, next to this remarkable man whose life we are going to celebrate
and are celebrating those days, Robert C. Byrd. He has been my seatmate
for the last two decades.
As I said the other day, I was an 8-year-old child sitting in the
galleries of the other body watching my father, on January 3, 1953, and
a 35-year-old new Congressman from West Virginia be sworn in as newly
minted Members of Congress. Some 6 years later, I sat in that gallery
up here, in the family gallery, watching my father be sworn in as a
Senator from Connecticut, along with a new Senator from West Virginia
named Robert C. Byrd, never imagining, as a 7- or 8-year-old or as a
14-year-old, that I would spend 20 years of my life at a desk next to
the man who has served longer than any other human being in the history
of our Nation.
Process meant a lot to Robert C. Byrd. The Constitution meant a great
deal. I carry with me, and every day I have for 20 years, the
Constitution that Robert C. Byrd gave me and autographed to me. It is
rather threadbare and worn today, but he revered this document. He
could absolutely quote it verbatim. He gave me a copy, as he did to all
new Members when they arrive, and the importance of understanding the
role of this body in our constitutional framework.
He was such a great advocate of the civility and the respect for each
other as we try to fashion answers to our Nation's problems. We have
been through two major bills in the last Congress. There have been a
lot of other bills to consider, but the health care debate and the
financial reform debate, I would argue, are the two largest in this
Congress, and they are two models of how an institution can operate.
Even though I am glad we prevailed with the health care debate and
are going to finally end up dealing with cost and access to our health
care system and making it more available to people as a result of our
actions taken, it was not a pretty process. Anyone who watched it, let
alone those of us who were involved in it, certainly would have
preferred that we arrive at the conclusion in a manner differently than
what we went through. Maybe not everyone would agree with that. I feel
that way.
The second model, if you will, is the one we just went through on
financial reform, which was about as open a process as you could ever
have. We went through literally months of listening in our committee,
the Banking Committee which I chair, to hundreds--and I am not
exaggerating--hundreds of experts who came and briefed us either
formally or informally, literally dozens and dozens of formal hearings
to dissect what had happened, how we got into this mess, who caused it,
how was it caused, and what steps we should be taking to see to it this
problem, another economic crisis, would not explode as broadly as this
one has.
I invited my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, to be involved in
all of those meetings, to see to it that they would be present, even at
White House meetings, to talk about what we needed to do. We laid out
our first ideas together a year and a half ago, even before marking up
anything close to a bill.
I presented our first discussion draft of this legislation in
November of last year, and it was a discussion draft. After that draft
was put forward, I assigned bipartisan working groups to attack the
major issues in the bill. In March of this year, I unveiled a new bill
that incorporated many of the bipartisan ideas that the working groups

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had produced. In fact, what I asked to be done in our committee, in the
Banking Committee, was divide up the labor between Democrats and
Republicans on certain large, complicated subject matters. And to their
credit, they worked very hard. It did not always come up with a final
answer in various areas, but they contributed significantly to the
product we now have before us in the form of a conference committee
report coming to this body, coming to the Senate.

So I am grateful to Richard Shelby, who is not supportive of the
bill, but was my ranking member and was the chairman of the Banking
Committee for 4 years before I took over the chairmanship in January of
2007.
I will not go down the list and mention all of the members, but the
committee members worked very hard. Even though we ended up disagreeing
with what we finally produced, I am grateful to them for the efforts
they put into the legislation. Beyond that, I have worked every day to
keep my colleagues informed every step of the process, at least I have
tried to, and if not them directly, their staffs, so there was that
sense of inclusion, the model that everyone ought to be able to have a
role and participate in the debate of a significant bill.
So the point I am making is, this bill was the product of
collaboration of many of my colleagues before the debate even began on
the floor of the Senate. On this floor, the debate lasted almost a
month, one of the longest debates in many years in the Congress of the
United States. Nearly 50 votes were cast by Democrats and Republicans
over a 4-week period.
One of the many that passed was the very second one, I think. Senator
Boxer of California offered the first amendment that said taxpayers
should never again be asked to pay for a bailout of a financial
institution. I think that passed unanimously. Then Senator Shelby and I
offered an amendment where we reached a bipartisan agreement on
measures to end all bailouts of financial institutions once and for
all, one of the most contentious areas of the bill.
From that point forward, over the next 4 weeks, with almost 60
amendments back and forth, we ended up passing the legislation by the
thinnest of margins, overcoming the procedural votes we needed to in
order to reach financial passage of the bill.
The last time the Banking Committee held a conference on any
legislation was 7 years ago. So I took my committee product, the Senate
product, and we went to what is called a conference. The House had
passed its bill in December. We had passed our bill in May. So what
normally has happened in the past is they never meet, or if they do
meet they met in closed-door sessions to work out the differences. Then
they would come back with a product.
The last time the Banking Committee had been to a conference with the
House of Representatives on any bill was more than 7 years ago. Those
meetings were held mostly in private; the public was never even invited
into the room, let alone the press, to observe and to cover the event.
We changed all of that. Our conference committee, the 42 members of
both Chambers who met, again, for a 2-week period, almost 70 hours that
we met, we considered 180 amendments in 70 hours. And 54 amendments
were offered by Senators, 34 of which were offered by my Republican
colleagues in the conference, 20 by the Democrats.
So combined, between the number of amendments we debated on the floor
of the Senate and the number of amendments we debated in conference as
Senators--forget the House Members and their amendments--there were
over 100 amendments by Democrats and Republicans to the financial
reform bill. C-SPAN and the press sat there and watched every minute of
the conference and covered every second, gavel to gavel, of the
proceedings that went on for almost 70 hours over a 2-week period. My
point is, this model of conducting our business, listening to each
other, debating and deciding what ought to be in this bill, stands in
stark contrast to how we went through the health care debate.
What is the point I am trying to make? If at the end of this process
it appears as though we still face a procedural objection to going
forward, what difference did it make, then, which course we followed if
at the end of the process it did not make any difference?
The motion to invoke cloture is a strange phrase that I suspect most
Americans do not have the vaguest idea of its meaning, or very few do.
It sounds like something a doctor may do if you are ill, to get a
cloture or something. That is what I thought it was when I first
arrived here.
Briefly, cloture is a method by which you end a filibuster. In this
Chamber, under our rules, we respect the rights of the minority,
including a minority of one.
Members can talk as long as they can stand up, under most
circumstances, and continue. Robert C. Byrd, in fact, held one of the
records. It wasn't the record--Strom Thurmond holds the record, a
former Senator I served with from South Carolina--but Robert C. Byrd
conducted a filibuster for more than 14 hours. We can do that in this
Chamber. But if we want to end the filibuster, we have to invoke
cloture. That takes 60 votes--more than a simple majority--to say: We
have had enough debate. The process has been fair. It is now time to
vote. So we invoke cloture. If we don't think the process has been
fair, that we haven't been given a chance to express ourselves, that we
have been denied the opportunity to offer amendments or contribute to
the debate, then we vote against invoking cloture.
There have certainly been many circumstances when that has been
warranted, but I don't know how anyone could make a case that a
filibuster on procedural grounds is warranted on this financial reform
bill such as we have been through. I don't know what else I could have
done to make every Member of this Chamber feel more included in the
debate on the reform of Wall Street. If there is something else I could
have done to say to a Member: You would have had additional rights or
opportunities, I would like to hear it. I don't think I could have. You
can't spend 4 weeks in this Chamber through almost 60 amendments, 54
more in a conference, virtually allowing unlimited debate on almost
anything that came up, and tell me you think you have been denied the
opportunity to fully vent your feelings, to be heard, to offer your
ideas and thoughts.
As a departing suggestion of one about to leave in 5 or 6 months,
there ought to be some value to the process we have gone through. I
have heard this morning already concerns expressed because the
institution, in the minds of some, is dysfunctional. I don't want to
believe that. I want to believe it is still a functional institution.
But if, at the end, this process of what I have tried to lead on the
banking bill causes people to believe that it doesn't make any
difference, we are still going to vote for procedural roadblocks to
this bill because we don't like some of the provisions in it or don't
like the bill, then I do despair in some ways for whether this
institution can ever function. If, at the end of all of that, we end up
with the same kinds of procedural roadblocks as we had on the health
care debate, where I would argue there was more legitimacy to invoking
those procedural roadblocks, then I think the institution is in a lot
more trouble than I would like to believe. I mention the process
because it ought to be important to people, seeing to it that we have a
chance to go forward.
At the end of that conference, we came up not only with the
compromises necessary for a bill but also how to offset the cost of
this bill. The House rules require that we demonstrate that the cost of
the bill to the overall Treasury of the United States is not going to
leave it in deeper debt than would otherwise be the case. We had to
come up with offsetting costs for the bill.
The first proposal was not met warmly. It was assessments on large
institutions primarily. But there were strong objections expressed, and
two or three of our colleagues, who have been very helpful on this bill
in offering ideas that would strengthen the bill and made significant
contributions, expressed their concerns to me that this was an
unacceptable offset, in their minds. So I took the extraordinary step
of reconvening the conference. We met yesterday to change the offsets.
We did so by two things. One we kept the same, and that was by making
permanent the insurance fund in the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation,

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making it permanent at $250,000. That requires an assessment increase
in order to meet those obligations. That was already in the bill. The
Congressional Budget Office scores that as providing about $8.5 billion
in revenues over the next 10 years. That was there.
The second piece we did is end TARP. That is something all of us have
wanted to see since the inception of the program. Can we bring this
thing to a close? Under our alternative offset, we end TARP
immediately, except for its current obligations. The Congressional
Budget Office--and I will provide letters from the CBO confirming these
numbers--scored that at about $11 billion over 10 years in savings.
That money goes into deficit reduction. This is an offset; it is not a
pay-for. What do I mean by that? If the budget of our Nation was $100
and the cost of a program was $10, you would have to make up that $10.
It doesn't go directly to pay for those programs, but it provides the
offset for the cost of those programs.
The third piece of this to make up the difference was by increasing
the reserve ratio at the FDIC, which was supported by the chairperson
of the FDIC, to go from 1.15 percent to 1.35 percent but to hold
harmless all financial institutions or banks that have assets under $10
billion and to do that not over 4 or 5 years but over the next 10 years
until 2020. That provides an additional $5.7 billion.
The CBO has thus scored the entire bill as providing an additional
$3.2 billion in deficit reduction because the amounts we will be
bringing in exceed the cost of the bill.
So, for my colleagues, ending TARP and complying with what the
Chairman of the FDIC has said is a far better suggestion.
I would be remiss at this juncture if I did not specifically thank my
colleagues from Maine, Susan M. Collins and Olympia J. Snowe. It was
Ms. Collins who said this is a better idea to look at as an offset. I
am grateful to her, as I am to her colleague from Maine and my
colleague from Massachusetts, Senator Brown, who expressed his concerns
about the assessment approach. Again, I will let them speak for
themselves on these matters.
But it is important that colleagues know that, going back to a few
moments ago talking about process, it was at the suggestion of
Democrats and Republicans that changes were made to the bill, including
the extraordinary step yesterday of opening the conference. There are
those who wanted me to go forward anyway with it. Why would I do that
if, in fact, Members have said: I can't be supportive under the present
circumstances. The opportunity to make a correction in the bill and
therefore come up with a better idea that was more acceptable to more
of our colleagues seemed the appropriate step to take. That is exactly
what we did. That is how we have offset the cost of this bill.
I will provide additional data. If I have misspoken on the numbers, I
will correct my own statement for the record. But I believe I am
approximately correct.
Again, none of this is easy. I know there is a temptation at times
like this for emotions to rise, passions to find expression. I have
great respect for all of my colleagues in the efforts they made. There
are moments of frustration when you are trying to pass a major bill,
seeking cooperation from your colleagues to get the job done. But this
is a complicated piece of legislation. More than 2,000 pages are
included in the bill. There are provisions that are not ones I would
write myself, but this is the legislative process.
I introduced a bill last November, the one I would have preferred,
but in the months since, many Members have had their opportunities to
make changes. Some changes I liked; some I didn't. But it should not be
that because you don't like one or two or several provisions of a bill,
that ought to become more important than the total impact of what you
are trying to achieve. There are those who don't like the bill, any
part of it at all or very few parts of it. Again, I understand that.
Those people are going to vote no. But when someone tells me there is
one provision or two they don't like and as a result they are going to
vote against everything, that I don't understand, candidly.
We have had our debate. We voted on hundreds of individual provisions
between the House and this body. There will be procedural votes. I have
made my case that at some point, a process that is as open as this one
has been, as inclusive as this one has been, as hospitable as I could
possibly make it, as civil as I could possibly make it--if the
procedural roadblocks are no different than the legislation that was
conducted without any civility, without any of the cooperation and
inclusiveness of this, then what is the lesson? What is the lesson for
the next major bill if, in fact, going through all of that gets you no
further in the process than what we have been through?
This bill doesn't bring back your home, your job, your retirement
income. What it does do is to try to see to it that the next crisis
will not cause the deep problems this one has.

Let me briefly identify the two or three or four things that are
major in the bill. In the absence of these, if we defeat the bill, all
of this is gone and we are right back to September of 2008, right back
where we were when this body voted, with less than 40 days to go before
a national election, to ask the American taxpayer to write a $700
billion check to bail out and stabilize financial institutions. If you
reject this effort we have been involved in for almost 2 years in the
week when we come back, then we are exactly where we were in the fall
of 2008, with all of the vulnerabilities we saw our country experience
as a result of not reforming the structures to our financial system.
This bill will end taxpayer bailouts by making it tough for companies
to engage in the kind of irresponsible behavior that threatened the
economy. It sets up a way to shut down the giant, dangerous companies
that failed, through bankruptcy or through a resolution mechanism that
lays all of the cost and pain on them, not on the American taxpayer.
That is a major achievement.
We also include for the first time institutions that are financial
institutions that have operated in the shadow economy of the Nation--no
regulation, no one moderating their behavior. This bill brings them all
in. They will now be regulated and controlled, so they can't engage in
the kind of wildcat behavior that brought our Nation to the point we
have been.
The bill creates a consumer financial services protection bureau. I
get people acting as if this was the most radical idea in America. If
you buy a faulty product--a toaster, a car, a television set--and it is
a crummy product, you have a place to go to get some sort of redress.
In fact, they are required to recall the products under the Consumer
Product Safety Commission and others. If you get a crummy mortgage, a
crummy insurance policy, you get a crummy piece of stock because
someone lied about it, where do you go? Whom do you call? You get a
lawyer--I guess that is the answer--if you have the resources. This
bill sets up, for the first time in our history, a place where the
average consumer of financial services might be able to get a redress
of their grievances.
I know people are acting as if this is some wild socialistic idea,
some crazy leftwing notion, after what the country has been through,
that we could end up having a place where the average American citizen,
who wants to have faith and trust in our economic system, can go to get
some relief. God forbid they are treated as they have been in too many
instances in the past. That is part of this bill.
This bill will create an advanced warning system. Instead of one set
of eyes that, frankly, were closed most of the time, we now have what
we call sort of a risk assessment council made up of the various
Federal agencies that have prudential responsibility over financial
institutions to be meeting and looking at what is going on in the
economy, not only here in our Nation but abroad as well. Are there
things occurring within companies, within interconnected companies,
within countries that could pose a financial risk to our Nation?
Spotting them early enough to put a stop to them, to break them up, as
a last resort, or to insist that certain things be done to avoid these
metastasizing events that have contaminated every aspect of our life
because no one stood up early enough to stop them when they first
spotted them.
The bill further brings transparency and accountability to the
derivatives

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market, a $600 trillion--that is not misspeaking; that is not a
million, not a billion--a $600 trillion market. It is a phenomenal
market. Basically, it has been unregulated and out of control.
We have central clearing exchange trading with new margin and capital
requirements for large bank dealers and major swap participants. These
safeguards will ensure taxpayers are not left on the hook for Wall
Street's bets, particularly with depositors' money, as we saw happen,
or an AIG circumstance.
The bill has the so-called Volcker rule to prohibit banking
organizations from engaging in proprietary trading and strictly
limiting their sponsorship and investment in hedge funds and private
equity funds. Again, if they want to risk their own money, that is one
thing. Risking your money ought to be something else. We have expanded
the Volcker rule, with balance to it. We don't totally eliminate the
ability of a bank to hedge on things that are critically important for
them. We believe it is an important rule. Without it, we are right back
where we were before.
The bill brings transparency to the Federal Reserve. I thank Bernie
Sanders of Vermont and others who have insisted on greater auditing and
accountability out of the Federal Reserve System which under our bill
will bring transparency to it with audits of the so-called 13(3)
emergency lending that took place during the financial crisis, and a
requirement that the Fed disclose who these so-called counterparties
are and information about the amounts they are putting at risk and, in
turn, for the American taxpayer, setting conditions on how that money
can be used, putting real limitations on it, and giving this body, the
Congress of the United States, a chance to respond if, in fact, they
exceed their authority.
Further, the bill limits the emergency Fed lending through 13(3) so
it can no longer be used to prop up an individual company, as they did
with AIG.
The bill requires people to have skin in the game, requiring
companies that sell products like asset-backed securities to retain at
least 5 percent of the credit risk, so there is no longer an incentive
to sell garbage and junk loans to people who could never pay them back
thus exposing our economy and our country to further abuse.
These are all things in the bill. If we scrap it, we are right back
without any of these protections. I will tell you, it will be a
generation before the Congress comes back to deal with these issues
again because in the absence of the crisis we have been in, we would
not have gotten to this. The crisis gave us an opportunity to respond.
These were not new issues. These issues had been lingering around. But
the financial resources behind many of these operations are totally
resistant to the changes we are talking about because there is too much
money to be made for them and too much risk for the American consumer
to absorb, and it was not going to have the same kind of concerns and
interests brought to the bargaining table when these issues and this
legislation was drafted.
The bill gives shareholders, the owners of public companies, a say on
executive pay and so-called golden parachutes. We require public
companies to take back compensation awarded based on phony financial
statements. Shouldn't the owners of public companies have some say in
these matters?
Further, the bill encourages whistleblowers with a new program at the
Securities and Exchange Commission to encourage people to report
securities violations. Ask the victims of Bernie Madoff whether that
kind of provision might have made a difference, when we had the
whistleblowers writing and begging the Securities and Exchange
Commission to take note of what was happening with the Madoff scam. No
one was willing to do a darn thing about it. Literally thousands of
people were wiped out because no one bothered to listen to a
whistleblower who identified the problem.
This bill changes that. It is not to say there will not be additional
scam artists. I promise you, there will. But instead of denying the
existence of a whistleblower standing up and telling a regulatory body
their responsibilities, this bill requires them to take note and to
act.
Additionally, because of the size and the complexity of this bill, it
is almost certain there will have to be a bill with technical
corrections in the future.
So when we take the sum total--obviously, I am describing five or six
provisions in a 2,000-page bill--we have a product that I think
restores financial security and trust. Let me mention just this point
on trust because there is no financial number I could put on trust. But
it may be the most important element of all. Put aside all of those
individual provisions and titles of the bill, the one thing that has
been so severely damaged that is the most important to restore is the
trust of the American people in our financial system. Today that trust
has been shattered by what has happened.
In the absence of people trusting that the financial system is fair
and equitable, then I think we are in deeper trouble than any fix I can
write into a bill. People understand when they deposit a paycheck in a
bank, there is an assumption of risk that ought to be very little. When
they buy an insurance policy, it is a different assumption of risk.
When they buy a stock, there is an even further assumption of risk.
There are no guarantees it is going to give a great return. In fact, it
may fail.
But we ought to be able to trust the system; that it is not going to
deceive us and defraud us; that it is not going to send people out to
lure us into situations they know we cannot afford and they know they
can sell off quickly and make a fast buck on. That trust in our
financial structure, which was so important for so long, has been
severely damaged over what has occurred in these last several years.
More than any other provision of this bill, more than anything else
any of us can write into a piece of legislation, is whether we are
going to regain the confidence and the optimism and the trust of that
hard-working American family to believe that when they deposit that
paycheck, there is not going to be someone investing in a hedge fund or
some risky venture with their money--that is prohibited in this bill--
or when they buy a stock there is not going to be someone out there who
is actually scamming them in a kiting system which ruins them forever
and their families, or when they get a mortgage on a home there is
someone not sitting across the table promising to be their financial
adviser when they are anything but in the process.
That trust has been so severely hurt that our hope is, more than
anything else I have written into this bill, we will be able to bring
us back to where Americans feel confidence and trust in our country's
financial systems again. So nothing less than that is at stake.
This is a fundamental overhaul of the way our financial system is
regulated. It is the greatest change to occur since the reforms which
were invoked after the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Beyond that, of course, it is important that what we have done could
be harmonized with other nations. The American President, Barack Obama,
went to Toronto a few days ago to a meeting of the G20. The
conservative Prime Minister of Canada pointed to this legislation and
said: This is an opportunity for America to lead in helping the rest of
the world to harmonize its rules on financial services. Defeat this
bill and someone else will set the ground rules, and we will have to
harmonize with them.
If my colleagues think that is a better result, to let the European
Union or someone else write what the standards are going to be, then
have it and defeat the bill. But if my colleagues believe it is better
for the United States to lead and provide the guidelines and the
structures that the rest of the world can rally around, then get behind
us and support this effort because nothing less than that is at risk,
as well, in this legislation.
So no one is going to get everything they want in this bill. I
certainly did not. No one ever does. I have never seen a bill in 30
years that ended up becoming the prerogative of one small group. This
has been a collective effort--a truly inclusive, collective effort.
Over 100 amendments have been offered and considered by my fellow
colleagues to this bill in this Chamber in the most open process in
decades. It is the only time I have ever seen a conference conducted
with the public viewing every single second of it, with 42 Members from
the House and Senate

[[Page S5661]]

participating almost 70 hours in a 2-week period, not to mention the
month we spent on the floor of this Chamber.
So I have done everything I know how to do in trying to accommodate
my colleagues to make this as fair and as balanced and as thoughtful as
we possibly could. But now is the time to act.
I wanted to take a few minutes today before we, tomorrow, participate
in the solemn ceremony of celebrating the life of Robert C. Byrd in
this Chamber. It will be a historic moment. I know it was a desire of
his when he was alive that at the time of his passing he be recognized
in this Chamber. Then, on Friday, many of us will travel to his home
State of West Virginia, which he served so remarkably well over the 58
years of his service, to participate at his funeral services. Then we
will be gone for a week over the Fourth of July break. Shortly after we
come back, based on the schedule set by the majority leader and the
minority leader, we will vote on the financial reform package and bill.
So today I wanted to take a few closing minutes to say to my
colleagues, I do not know what else I could have done to make this more
inclusive, to provide more balance and sense to all of this, to respond
to the concerns my colleagues have raised in what we have done.
I urge you, I plead with you to give us the vote on this bill and to
understand the process we have gone through and to set a template to
say that a process followed by which everyone gets a chance to
participate ought to be the model of how the Senate conducts its
business. I hope my colleagues will not underestimate the value and
importance of that approach we have taken with this bill.
I have taken a long time, and I apologize to my colleagues. But I
wanted to explain the process of what we have done in conference.
Again, I thank the majority leader. The majority leader does not get
thanked enough. He is the captain of our Senate, as the majority leader
was under Howard Baker and Bob Dole and Bill Frist and Tom Daschle and
George Mitchell and Robert C. Byrd. Without his willingness to make
sure we are here to conduct that debate, it would not happen.
So I would be terribly remiss, at the conclusion of these remarks, if
I did not express a special thank-you to Harry Reid of Nevada, the
majority leader, for making it possible and being supportive of this
open process we have been through. Without his willingness to allow
that to happen, it would not have happened. I am deeply grateful to him
and his staff and others for making it possible for us to come to the
moment we are in; that is, to vote for this important piece of
legislation.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of New Mexico). The Senator from
Wyoming is recognized.

Health Care

Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I come to the floor today, as I have
each week since the health care bill became signed into law, to visit
with Members of this Chamber about experiences I have had, having
practiced medicine in Casper, WY, since 1983. For a long time, I was an
orthopedic surgeon taking care of families across the Cowboy State. I
come today, as I have week after week, to offer a doctor's second
opinion about the health care law because it seems every week since
this bill has become law there is some new, unintended consequence,
some new development, some new sharing of information that the American
people seem to say: That is not what I want for my health care. It is
not what I want for my family.
During the debate of the health care bill, it was the Speaker of the
House, Nancy Pelosi, who said: First you must pass the bill to find out
what is in it. Well, as the American people continue to learn about
what is in this new health care law, they continue to be disappointed
with so many broken promises that were made by Members on the
Democratic side of this body and by the President of the United States.
The initial goal of the health care bill, which is now law, was to
lower the cost of care, to increase the quality of care, and increase
the access to care. Yet in the weeks that have gone by--and the
President of the United States had a press conference last week, 90
days into the process--it seems to me this law is going to be bad for
patients, those who need medical care in this country; it is going to
be bad for payers, the patients who pay for their care, the businesses
that pay for the insurance, the taxpayers who are going to be burdened
additionally; and it is bad for providers, the nurses and the doctors
who try to take care of these patients.
So as I look at this, it seems to me this health care law is going to
result in higher costs for patients and less access and less quality.
That is why across the board still a majority of Americans want this
bill repealed, want the law repealed and replaced because, basically
and fundamentally, they do not believe this was a law that was passed
for them. They believe it was a law that was passed for somebody else.
They think, as a result, they are going to end up paying more and
getting less.
That is why today I come to the Senate floor to talk about an
additional broken promise and why the American people continue to be so
very skeptical about this new health care law.
We have heard the promises in the past by the President. He said: If
you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health
care plan. Period. He said: No one will take it away. Period.
Last week I came to the floor to talk about the fact that over half
of the people in this country who receive health care through where
they work--half of them--will lose the coverage they have, and it may
be within the next 4 years. Those are not my statistics. That is the
report that came right out of the White House just a little over a week
ago.
So the public is skeptical. I come to you as someone who has worked
with preventive medicine, who has worked as the medical director of
Wyoming Health Fairs that have provided low-cost health screenings for
people all across the Cowboy State, where thousands of people show up
at health fairs on weekends to learn what their blood sugar is and how
to help get that down; to help people with diabetes, where they get to
learn what their cholesterol levels are and how to get that better
controlled, to learn if they have thyroid problems and do screenings
for cancer as well.

So people all across this country are concerned with their care and
the quality of their care and the cost of their care.
The President has made a number of promises, and there is another one
he made that I wish to talk about today, and that is a promise the
President made to small businesses. On May 7, President Obama, on his
monthly job numbers, said:

Four million small businesses recently received a postcard
in their mailbox telling them that they are eligible for a
health care tax cut this year.

That is what the President said. He said:

Four million small businesses recently received a postcard
in their mailbox telling them that they are eligible for a
health care tax cut this year.

He went on to say:

It's worth perhaps tens of thousands of dollars to each of
these companies.

Well, on face value, that sounds pretty good. Small business owners
all across the country would welcome that sort of help. Yet I wish to
bring to the floor today an article written by one small business
owner, Charles Arp. The title of his column is ``ObamaCare's Broken
Promise: One Company's Experience.''
I talked with Mr. Arp yesterday by phone. He is in Illinois. He said
this is absolutely what has happened to his business, and he knows I am
going to be sharing it on the floor of the Senate today, because he has
concerns. He got that postcard. He was at first encouraged by the
President's words, the President's promise, but, again, it is another
broken promise to the American people. This is a letter dated June 18
of this year. He says:

A few months after the passage of President Obama's health
care overhaul, a postcard arrived which led me to believe
there may be a benefit coming to my small firm. The mailing
from the Treasury Department touted a generous 35 percent tax
credit to firms with less than 25 full-time employees
averaging less than $50,000 per year in wages, a category
which includes my company. In fact, I thought we were right
in the sweet

[[Page S5662]]

spot, with 17 full-time employees averaging slightly more
than $42,000 per year.

Well, small business needs relief. He goes on to explain about his
company:

I manage Pinney Printing Company in Sterling, Illinois. I
am the president of the firm which our family has owned for
100 years. Health care expenses are a major obstacle to
Pinney's long-term prosperity. Each year in May, our policy
renews and we are faced with double-digit premium increases--
20 to 40 percent in recent years.
Some of the increase is absorbed by the company, and some
gets passed on to the employees through higher premiums,
deductibles, and copays. We have experimented with self-
funding and high-deductible health plans. Last year we were
forced to downgrade to an HMO plan.
We are nearing the end of our rope, so I was hopeful to
learn there could be some benefit for us in the new law.

And what small business owner wouldn't?
He goes on to say:

Postcard in hand, I did a quick calculation and figured our
tax credit should be about $28,000. That is 35 percent of the
$80,000 we expect to spend this year on employee health care
premiums. I phoned our health insurance broker and inquired
whether anything special had to be done, not wanting to be
excluded by some technicality. He reported there was no
special requirement--more good news.

Aha, the next section: ``Barrier to Tax Credit.'' He said:

But there was a problem. A few weeks later I received an e-
mail with a link to the National Federation of Independent
Business's online calculator. This is a calculator designed
to help firms determine their qualifications for the tax
credit. I plugged in our numbers, and pressed ``update'' to
yield a calculation of . . . zero-zip, nada!
Double-checking, I tried again and again, finally concluded
that the 35 percent tax credit will be available only to
firms with ten or fewer employees averaging $25,000 or less
per year. Increasing either factor--either the number of
employees or the average salary--greatly diminishes the
magnitude of the tax credit. Increasing both factors yields a
parabolic reduction in the result.
Being in the graphic arts industry, I decided to create a
chart diagramming the limits of this ``generous'' tax break.

I have the chart here.
He goes on:

Not one to give up easily, I continued my pursuit--

because he had the postcard, of course.
He said:

Surely, there was some benefit in this for me, after years
and years of paying the toll for big-government programs and
receiving nothing.
The vague language on the postcard instructed readers to
learn more at www.irs.gov. There it said to exclude owners,
those having a stake of 5 percent or more, from all the input
values. I eagerly entered new numbers--subtracting myself, my
annual premium, and my salary. This brought our head count
down to 16 employees and dropped the average salary to
$40,000.
I entered the numbers, and the NFIB calculator displayed
the same result--another big goose egg.

He goes on:

Talk about unintended consequences! My firm would have to
reduce its workforce and cut employee wages to benefit from
this newly enacted Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act. Is this what the objective should be?
I would never consider taking such an action. Most of the
employees have worked at Pinney for twenty years or more. It
did get me thinking, though: Maybe we could divide Pinney
Printing Company into two smaller firms. While I'm no expert
at gaming the government, like some people, it's certainly a
possibility many will consider.
I feel foolish now, after getting my hopes up for a
government solution to our problem. Our firm is running out
of affordable options.
It is my belief that health insurance should be decoupled
from employment and bought by individuals and families in the
same way automobile insurance is purchased. It is my fear
that ObamaCare is a step in the wrong direction and matters
will get worse, not better, for Pinney Printing Company and
others like us.

So there you have it. It is a heartfelt letter written by someone who
got the postcard from the IRS, from the President, listened to the
President's statement that said you will be eligible, but what he found
out, as did many small business owners all around the country who
received this postcard, is that it doesn't apply to them, and if they
want to make it apply to them, what they are going to need to do is
actually fire employees and lower the wages of the other employees. It
makes no sense at all, and that is why I talked to Mr. Arp yesterday,
the owner of the company, who said he found this deceiving.
So that is why I come week after week to the Senate floor to say it
is time to repeal this legislation and replace it with legislation that
delivers more personal responsibility, puts patients in charge; a
patient-centered health care plan that allows Americans to buy
insurance across State lines; one that gives individuals the same tax
relief as the big companies when they buy their own personal health
insurance; one that provides individual incentives like the people who
attend the Wyoming health fairs--people who take responsibility for
their health and who try to find and detect problems early to get down
the cost of care. We need to replace it with something that deals with
lawsuit abuse and the expense of unnecessary tests due to doctors
practicing defensive medicine. We need one that allows small businesses
to join together to find less expensive insurance to their employees.
These are the things I will continue to work on. These are the things
I will continue to come to the Senate floor and share with the Members
of this body and the American public. Today, that is why I offer this
second opinion, and another reason to repeal and replace this health
care law.
Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada is recognized.
Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, I wish to talk about the extension of
unemployment benefits in the larger context of our national debt.
Allow me the opportunity to throw out a few numbers which I then will
explain in a few minutes: $30 billion, $200 billion, $13 trillion,
$114,000, and 60 percent of GDP. To many Americans, these numbers are
just that--numbers with no real meaning to them. Unfortunately, the
same can be said for many here in the Senate as well. These are just
simple numbers without consequence.
Nothing can be further from the truth. These five numbers are markers
along the road to fiscal catastrophe that we are heading down at full
speed. These five numbers together are symbols of the great threat to
the stability of our country, both today and in the future.
So the $30 billion number. Fourteen percent of Nevadans are
unemployed at this point. People are hurting across my State. We lead
the country in unemployment. Well, a lot has been said on the issue of
extending unemployment benefits, and while this issue has become one of
political fodder and partisanship, the facts on this issue have been
left out in favor of high-strung rhetoric and political opportunity.
Let me take a moment to explain to my constituents the real debate on
this issue. I, along with my Republican colleagues, believe that
extending these benefits for the unemployed should be a top priority
here in the Senate. I think both sides of the aisle agree on that. I
know we could pay to extend these benefits now by cutting spending in
other areas and redirecting some stimulus funds which have had little
impact on the economy in my State and across the country.
Despite what some of my other colleagues may say here on the floor,
there is no debate on extending the benefits for those who have fallen
victim to OUR downturned economy. The debate on this issue actually
lies with the fact that those on the other side of the aisle want to
take the easy way out, and they want to avoid paying for this important
legislation because it is tough to make cuts. Instead, we are going to
add another $30 billion on to our record-breaking national debt. I know
that $30 billion is just another number to those on the other side of
the aisle, but it is one that could easily be paid for now by adhering
to their own policy of pay-go. Each time the Senate has proceeded to
vote on extending unemployment benefits, Members in this body have had
two options: One, the Democratic option of extending these benefits and
putting the debt--adding the debt on to our children and our
grandchildren. On the other side, they have had the Republican option
of not only extending these vital unemployment benefits but also paying
for them at the same time by reducing spending in other areas. The
other side of the aisle has voted against these commonsense proposals
each time--six times, to be exact.
Let me make that more clear. Democrats have voted against paying for
the unemployment extension six times. Unfortunately, this isn't the
first time

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those on the other side of the aisle have gone against their own pay-go
policy, but it is the first time they have hurt thousands of Americans
in doing so.
I mentioned the number of $200 billion earlier. This is the number
that represents the amount of spending that has violated the Democrats'
own pay-as-you-go policy. Four months ago, there was a signing ceremony
down at the Rose Garden with the President. The Democrats decided to
heed the warnings of many here, including myself, who said that we were
literally bankrupting the future of our country with the amount of
national debt we were passing down to our children and our
grandchildren. So they came up with a policy that would mandate paying
for spending proposals now rather than later. However, there were a few
caveats to this new fiscal responsibility proposal, one of which
allowed for emergency funding to be exempt. What we have witnessed in
the last 4 months has truly been a genius way of skirting this pay-as-
you-go policy. They have deemed a grotesque amount of domestic spending
as ``emergency spending'' when, in fact, it is not an emergency.
They have done this most recently with unemployment benefits. It is
hard to argue that funding that we knew would expire to be an
emergency, but they have tried to do so anyway. The real sticking point
here is that if we are to deem every spending measure that comes to the
floor of this body as an emergency, then we are only speeding up our
path to fiscal ruin, ensuring that our record-breaking national debt
continues to be just that--record breaking.
Another number: $13 trillion. That is our national debt today that we
have reached. It is a new milestone. But it is not one that I think
many are celebrating. Our national debt broke into a new stratosphere
when it crossed the $13 trillion threshold--truly an astounding number.
But this gets much worse over the next 10 years under the President's
own budget. The debt that will be added by 2019 will be three times the
amount that was rung up over the first 232 years of this country's
history. So take all of the Presidents before President Obama, all the
way through George W. Bush, and add the total debt they added to this
country, and we are going to triple that in the 10 years from 2009 to
2019.

Just like an average family, when they delay payment on a purchase
and charge it to their credit card, they are borrowing money from the
bank, with interest added to the amount they need to pay back. The
United States, when borrowing money, is charging it on our national
credit card, so it is the same situation. However, our country isn't
borrowing the money from a bank; we are borrowing it from China,
Russia, and Saudi Arabia.
Each time the majority deems a spending bill as an emergency funding
bill, we delay paying the cost for this legislation. We are adding on
to this national credit card bill with interest we pay to China,
Russia, Saudi Arabia, and many others. At any point, these countries
could decide to up our interest rate to such a level that, when we
attempt to start paying down our debt, we are only able to pay off the
interest we owe on our credit card, not the actual debt. Further,
should our economic situation continue to decline, these countries
could revoke our borrowing privileges altogether. If that happens, this
would be catastrophic for the economy of the United States.
I mentioned $114,000 earlier. When President Obama first took office,
a child born in the United States was born with $85,000 of debt on his
or her back. In a very short period of time, that child born in the
United States today now has $114,000 of debt on his or her back. That
amount is going to continue to rise because of how fast we are adding
to the national debt. Going even farther into the future, should
President Obama receive a second term and our spending levels stay at a
high level, as they are now, a child born in the United States will owe
$196,000. As they are born, that is how much debt they will have--
$196,000 for every child born in the United States.
I have spoken a lot over the past year about the future of our
country and what this debt burden will actually mean. A new child owing
that much money means they won't be able to pay for college, buy a
house, start a small business, raise a family, and maybe retire
someday.
So this isn't just an abstract number; we actually owe these
countries the money we have borrowed from them, with interest. We have
to pay that money back. Whether these countries demand payment 5 years
from now or later, we still have to pay it back.
I mentioned 60 percent--60 percent of GDP. Let me remind you of this
final number, what it means. It is a critical milestone on the path to
fiscal ruin. Most of us remember the images we saw on the nightly news
of the riots breaking out across Greece when it was revealed that the
government was beyond bankrupt and was no longer able to guarantee
services throughout their country.
Historically, our Federal debt has been around 35 percent of GDP.
Since the Democrats have taken control of Congress, this debt has
skyrocketed.
The tipping point is what Greece found when they had so much debt on
their books that people realized they were going to be unable to pay it
back. The tipping point where the world community realized that they
should be charging a lot more to lend Greece money was when Greece
exceeded 60 percent of GDP. The United States passed that magic number
this year. Sixty percent was the tipping point for Greece. How far
behind them do you think we really are? The United States passed that
60 percent part of GDP this year with the help of the health care
bill--the $200 billion that should have been offset with pay-go, the
stimulus bill, and last year's appropriations bills, which had large
increases in each one of them.
The country of Greece is foreshadowing the possible fate of the
United States if we don't take responsibility for the fiscal mess we
have created. We have lived this year through instant-gratification
policies, and not only is the future of our country in jeopardy, so are
the next 10 years, the next 5 years, and this year.
Mr. President, $30 billion represents the amount of money the
Democrats want to add to our national debt to extend unemployment
benefits; $200 billion represents the amount of money that has been
deemed as emergency to get around the pay-go rules; and $13 trillion
represents the recordbreaking national debt we have reached just this
year. The $114,000 I mentioned is the amount each child born today in
the United States has as debt on their back. Sixty percent of GDP is
the tipping point of economic collapse that puts the United States one
step closer to Greece. To many in this body, these are just numbers. I
think we all have to face the reality that these numbers represent
markers on a path to fiscal ruin if we don't turn it around. We are
heading dangerously close to fiscal catastrophe, and our country
literally stands at a crossroads. We have to draw a line in the sand
and stop borrowing money for legislation when the option to pay for it
stands only one vote away.
Extending unemployment benefits isn't a partisan issue, and neither
is our country's impending fiscal crisis. The Senate needs to extend
these benefits by paying for them now, and we can take the first step
and move the country in the right direction toward fiscal
responsibility and economic recovery.
Why are we not reducing unnecessary and wasteful government spending
to pay for these unemployment extension benefits? Senator Coburn's
office has identified almost $4.4 billion in savings over 10 years from
reducing unnecessary printing and publishing costs of government
documents. Add up the savings from these cuts and this kind of wasteful
spending, and it could pay for unemployment extension for a short time.
How about redirecting some of the unused stimulus funds? The stimulus
bill was supposed to be an immediate stimulus. Some of the money has
still not been paid out or obligated. How about, instead of just adding
to the debt, we take that money and pay for and offset spending for the
unemployment benefits?
I don't understand the absolute refusal by the other side to extend
unemployment benefits in a fiscally responsible way. For example, the
small business lending bill, which the Senate is set to consider,
contains a number of offsets for improving tax collections

[[Page S5664]]

and changing the tax rules on retirement accounts. The so-called
Medicare doc fix was recently signed into law by the President. This
was completely offset by changes in Medicare billing and antifraud
provisions and changes in pension rules.
I don't necessarily agree with some of the offsets the other side of
the aisle has used, but the point is that the debate on the floor
regarding paying for any piece of legislation should not rest with
whether we pay for new legislation but how we should pay for it. This
is a debate we owe to the American people, our future generations, for
the continued prosperity of our great Nation.
We will soon be voting on a bill that will extend unemployment
insurance benefits. The other side of the aisle will have one that
extends those unemployment benefits, but it will just be adding to the
national debt. The Republican side will be offering an alternative that
will be completely offset. I hope this Chamber finally gets its fiscal
house in order and extends those very important unemployment benefits
that need to be given to folks who are struggling in America, but let's
do it in a fiscally responsible way.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia is recognized.
(The remarks of Mr. Webb are printed in today's Record under
``Morning Business.'')

Post 9/11 GI BILL

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, today marks the 1-year anniversary of the
implementation of the post-9/11 GI bill, landmark legislation I was
privileged to introduce on my first day in office. The idea was to
provide those who have served since 9/11 with the most comprehensive
educational benefits since World War II. We did that. We began with a
simple concept even before I decided to run for the Senate, and that
was, if we keep calling these people the ``next greatest generation,''
we should, as a Nation, express our appreciation in a proper way--by
giving them the same types of educational benefits those who came back
from World War II received: pay their tuition, buy their books, and
give them a monthly stipend. It was a formula that worked magnificently
for those who served during World War II, where 7.8 million of those
veterans, because of the GI bill, were able to have a first-class
future and make an imprint on the future of our country.
We worked very hard in my office, with a lot of staff, pushing this
legislation. We eventually achieved the key cosponsorship of three
other Senators, including Senators John Warner, my former senior
Senator, a Republican from Virginia; Chuck Hagel, of Nebraska, now
departed, another Republican; and Frank Lautenberg, of New Jersey, a
fellow Democrat. So we approached this in a way that we were trying to
show a balance. We had two World War II veterans, two Vietnam veterans,
two Republicans and two Democrats. We wanted to strip the politics out
of the issue.
Along with our colleagues on this side and also in the House and the
cooperation of the leading veterans service groups and the higher
education community and, quite frankly, despite the continued
opposition of the previous administration, which for some reason
opposed this legislation all the way to the day before they signed it,
we were able to get this bill through.
I am so proud of the fact of having accomplished that goal 2 years
ago. The bill was signed into law 1 year ago today. This bill went into
effect for those who have served this Nation so honorably and so well
since 9/11. I can report to this body that as of today, in this first
year of implementation alone, more than 550,000 veterans have applied
to receive this benefit, and more than 267,000 veterans are now
attending classes using the post-9/11 GI bill. That is more than a
quarter of a million young men and women who otherwise might not have
had the opportunity for a truly first-class future.

As my fellow Senators know, I am someone who grew up in the military.
I was privileged to serve as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. I am
very proud of my son who served as a marine in Iraq and my son-in-law
who also served as a marine in Iraq and Afghanistan and continues to
serve, and so many of my friends and compatriots over the years. I
understand what it means to be a proper steward in this body toward
those who have given this type of service. That is our duty, and this
GI bill shows a sense of responsibility and the desire of the
leadership of this country to see those who serve be able to move
forward in their lives after their service and continue to provide
great contributions to our country.
When I ran for office--also I should point out--I spoke about the
need to reclaim economic fairness in this country, particularly in
times as we see right now where our economic health is in danger. The
health of our society overall is measured by how working people are
able to make it through different barriers and achieve alongside people
who have had greater advantages. This bill today does that, just as it
did after World War II.
We should remember, as we look at the implementation of this GI bill,
what it did for those who served in World War II, very few of whom ever
thought they would be able to have a college education once they went
into the military during those dark and troubled times.
For every dollar through taxes that was put into that World War II GI
bill, our country received $7 in tax remunerations because those people
were able to go forward and have a truly first-class future. This is
what we are doing now.
We have never erred as a country when we have made sustained
investments in higher education for our people, particularly when it
comes to veterans. This is not simply an advantage for this country, it
is an obligation we have.
I want to, on this day, remember the contributions of other people in
this body and in the House of Representatives in coming together to
pass this legislation. I thank the American Legion, the Veterans of
Foreign Wars, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the
Military Officers Association of America, the American Council on
Education, the National Association of Independent Colleges and
Universities, and many others, including nearly 60 Senators and more
than 300 Members of the House who signed on as cosponsors to this
landmark effort.
We can all take pride today in saying we have been able to provide a
proper investment in the future of those since 9/11 who have given so
much to this country.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island is recognized.
(The remarks of Mr. Reed are printed in today's Record under
``Morning Business.'')
Mr. REED. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
(The remarks of Ms. Landrieu are printed in today's Record under
``Morning Business.'')
Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, I would like to talk about the
underlying bill that we are actually on today, which is the extenders
package.
The Democrats negotiated in very good faith with the Republican Party
to try to figure out a way to get tax credits, tax cuts to businesses
that we all need to make sure continue in terms of research and
development. These are credits they have relied on to keep not only
their businesses open but keep them hiring. There is a long list. They
have been well explained on the floor. They are all very popular with
both sides of the aisle. They have been negotiated over and over.
The Democrats have, in good faith, argued or debated with the
Republicans that we need to get these extended for the purpose of
stimulating our economic growth. But we have said there is one that we
are not going to pay for because, A, we don't have to pay for it; and,
B, because it is an emergency. So everything in the extenders package
is paid for. Every single item is paid for. Although some people don't
like the pay-fors, every single item to extend a tax credit--not new
spending on the part of the Federal Government through bureaucracy but
tax credits--is paid for except for the unemployment benefits because
it is an emergency.
With 15 million people out of work, it is an emergency. For anyone on
that side to come to the floor and say Democrats are big spenders and
we can't pay for anything and we don't know how to run the government,
we

[[Page S5665]]

have put a great package together. But there is one thing that is not
paid for, and that is unemployment because it is an emergency. That is
what this debate is about, whether they are going to vote for it. If
they don't want to vote for it, it is completely at their feet that
people in America today, who have no benefits, will not get them for
the Fourth of July. They will not get them as we celebrate the birthday
of our country. If they are not going to get them, it will be because
the Republican Party decided that we, as a Congress, are going to have
to find a way to pay for unemployment benefits, when they never paid
for even 1 year of any war they helped lead us into when their party
was in charge.
So I hope the leadership over here holds the line. We are going to
pass the extenders package the way it was presented. They can continue
to vote no on it. That is their choice. But everything in this bill--
many things very important to the State of Louisiana, such as flood
insurance--is paid for and is now being held up; for example, the
placed-in-service date which keeps four or five of our major housing
projects from being built. When I say housing, I mean neighborhoods,
really, being rebuilt. That is being held up because this side is
trying to make an issue of finding a way to pay for unemployment
benefits when it is clearly an emergency, clearly qualifies as an
emergency, and in the past was always clarified that way. That is what
part of this argument is about.
As one of the managers of the small business bill, which we are
moving to, I am very hopeful and will make sure that the extenders
debate stays separate from the small business debate. Now that the
extenders bill has been set aside, we have another bill we believe we
can move forward with more bipartisan support for, and I want to thank
the Republican Senators who helped to move this bill to the floor:
Senators Grassley, Voinovich, Snowe, Collins, LeMieux, Lugar, Bond, and
Brown of Massachusetts. These eight Senators have negotiated in
extremely good faith with both the Finance Committee and the Small
Business Committee to bring a package to the floor that will actually
help create, we hope, millions of jobs in our country.
I want to make one editorial comment before I speak about the small
businesses, and as a Senator from Louisiana, I feel compelled to do so.
I have helped to manage and craft, along with my committee members--
and I am very proud of the small business piece of this bill. There are
three pieces. There is the finance piece, there is a small business
package, and then there is a treasury piece. I will discuss all of them
briefly in just a moment.
We have worked hard over this year trying to come up with some things
that the government could do that wouldn't cost that much money but
could spur growth in small business. As the Presiding Officer knows, it
is not the big businesses that are creating jobs. They are still laying
off people or are putting in efficiencies, which means holding the
line. Even as they get more contracts, they are not hiring because it
is not what big business does. They have enough cushion to hold what
they have, but small businesses are affected immediately by
contractions and expansions. They can't afford to hold three or four
people on their payroll without a contract, so they let them go. But
the minute they get a new contract, they will hire them back. They are
immediately tied to the daily, weekly, and monthly jolts in this
economy.
That is why we see that 65 percent of all new jobs created since 1993
have been by small business. When we want to look out from 2009 to the
year we are in, 2010, and to 2011 and 2012, which the country is
depending on us to do, we should focus our attention where the jobs can
be created. Mr. President, that is in small business. So that is what
we are here this week and next week to do, and these eight Senators
have said yes, basically, to small business in America. The package
isn't going to be what all ten of these Senators would write if they
could write it themselves, but they understand this is a good package.
It is a worthy package to pass--the small business, the finance, and
the treasury package--to get small business moving again.
I feel compelled to comment, before explaining some of the pieces of
this bill, that it is concerning to me that while we are on the Senate
floor talking about a small business package, back home in Louisiana
and in Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, because of events almost beyond
the control of any of us here, we are facing a real economic challenge
with the oilspill in the gulf and the subsequent moratorium that was
laid down by the administration on deepwater drilling. I have to say
right now there are, in fact, about 50,000 to 60,000 jobs immediately
at risk while that issue is being worked out. So while I am here on the
Senate floor to help create millions of new jobs--and I believe this
bill will do that--we also want to be mindful of not losing the jobs we
have in trying to come up with some very quick, appropriate responses
to the BP spill--the Deepwater Horizon spill--and the call for safety
in the gulf. We need to be getting our people back to work.
I spent all morning in the Energy Committee on that subject, and I am
proud to be leading and helping with some suggestions in that regard.
But I have to say I want all the Members of Congress, both Democrats
and Republicans, to understand there is an economic calamity brewing in
the gulf that needs our immediate attention. We can do more than one
thing at a time here, so we are going to continue to move forward on
the small business bill because small business in Louisiana will be
helped, as well as those in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and
small businesses all over this country.

There are a couple of important components in this overall bill.
Again, I thank the members of my committee who voted these items out 17
to 1 and 18 to 0. Senator Snowe, the ranking member, did a magnificent
job of working with the Republicans on our committee. We had many
hearings and several markups. In the underlying bill, one of the most
important provisions is the Small Business Jobs Creation Access to
Capital Act. It increases 7(a) loans from $2 million to $5 million, 504
loans from $1.5 million to $5 million, and microloans from $35,000 to
$50,000. If I had my way, I would like to see that go up to $100,000.
Why? Because small businesses need access to capital. They must have
access to grow.
If we want small businesses to be able to grow, they have to be able
to expand by borrowing more money at relatively low interest rates on
favorable terms, and then they can start hiring people to get the jobs
necessary to, A, end the recession; and, B, as Senator Stabenow has
said so beautifully all week, to start paying the deficit down.
What the Republican Party doesn't understand is that one way to pay
the deficit down--not the only way but one way to chip away at it--is
to get more people working so they can pay the taxes to the local,
State, and Federal Government and we can then take that tax money and
apply it to deficit reduction. Yes, we have to cut spending. Yes, we
have to stop giving out tax cuts we cannot afford. They never want to
do the tax cut piece, and they do not do the cutting piece well either
most of the time. But what they need to understand is that creating
jobs, both private sector and public sector jobs, where it is
appropriate, generates taxes to the local, State, and Federal
governments. Then we can begin chipping away at the deficit--a deficit
they left, by the way.
When the last administration came in--when President Bush came into
office--he was handed a surplus. We handed him a surplus of $5.1
trillion and said: Mr. President, here is a world at peace and here is
$5.1 trillion in surplus; the economy is creating jobs.
When he left office 8 years later, he handed the next President a
deficit twice that big, with Wall Street in collapse, two wars that
hadn't been paid for, and a mess here at home--and they want to ask why
we haven't fixed all that in a year and a half? It is quite humorous to
me. I know President Obama is smart and good--though I don't agree with
him on everything--but I don't think any human being could fix the mess
they left in just a year and a half.
We have been plodding along trying to fix different pieces of it, but
it hasn't been pretty. All of it isn't working, but we are trying. Most
of it is working. That is what the American people expect of us. They
do not expect

[[Page S5666]]

us to get it 100 percent right every day, but they do expect us to move
forward; to say, yes, we will try not to say no and not to lecture
Democrats about deficits they created.
Having gotten that off my chest, I want to say here we are in our
small business package. I am very proud that eight of these Republican
Senators joined us to get on the discussion on the small business bill.
This is going to do a lot of good for a lot of people in many places,
let me say, not just New York and not just Wall Street. This is a Main
Street bill. This is about creating jobs in little towns in Oregon as
well as little towns in Louisiana, small towns in Washington State and
Maine. That is what this is about.
The second piece is the export piece. This is a very exciting chart
to me. I am maybe not as good as Kent Conrad is with charts, Senator
Conrad, but I like this one very much. This chart shows the potential
of small business in America. Just think about this. We have so many,
millions and millions of small businesses, but less than 1 percent of
them today are exporting. This is tragic, if you think about it. If we
can get a few percentage points, up to 3 percent, 4 percent, 5 percent
of small businesses in America exporting their products, using the
Internet, using favorable tax provisions that will help--that are in
this underlying bill--using new support and technological support from
the Small Business Administration, from volunteer organizations such as
SCORE, university-based technical support programs that can go to our
small businesses and say: You sold 50,000 pairs of shoes last year but
you sold them all down the road. We can help you sell them to China or
sell them to India. Think about the possibility of that. And it is
real.
That is what this bill does. Senator Snowe has done a tremendous
amount of work. I am extremely proud of her work on the export portion
of this bill. Again, large businesses, percent of firms that do not
export, 58 percent. This number could be increased. But the exciting
opportunity is small business. But sometimes they are intimidated, as
you can imagine. They don't know how to negotiate with foreign
governments. Some of the things we are going to do in this bill will
help them move that number up and they are going to be able to grow.
Third, the contracting piece. I know some people on both sides of the
aisle believe government is too big. Sometimes I agree with that and
think it is too. We have to shape it, make sure it is efficient and
effective and muscular, not flabby and big but bold and muscular, so it
can do things it needs to do that the private sector can't do. But one
of the things all governments do is spend a lot of money, and it is not
just money to hire their own employees, it is spending money for the
private sector. We contract out a lot of our work. When the Government
has a job to do, we do not always do it with government employees; we
contract it out. I do not have the exact numbers in front of me but it
is billions and billions of dollars. We are the largest--if you put us
in terms of a corporation--the largest corporation, potentially, maybe
in the world. So the contracting provision we have in this bill says:
OK, Federal Government, if you were a business, if you could contract
with more small businesses, meet your small business contracting goals,
then we could create a lot of jobs in America because it is, again, the
small businesses that are creating these jobs.
If you give a big company a government contract, they might absorb it
into their infrastructure. They are so big, they have millions of
employees, or hundreds of thousands. But you give a contract to a small
business, you know what happens? They might have five employees. If
they get a very nice size contract from the government, they will hire
10 people to implement that contract and they will do it right away. So
we have some contracting provisions in this bill that I am, again, very
proud of. They have broad bipartisan support.
In addition, in this bill, which is paid for, is an additional $50
million for the Small Business Community Partnership Relief Act which
gives $50 million in addition to women business centers, microloan
intermediaries. It weighs or reduces the non-Federal share of funding
so that for 1 year States all over this country can start enhancing and
improving their Women Business Owners' Center, their Minority Business
Centers, the centers that are in universities all over the country. I
am sorry I do not have a map to show what the Secretary or
Administrator of the SBA fondly calls our bone structure, because it is
a great structure in the country. It is not just isolated little
offices of the SBA.
If you can imagine, so many of our universities have small business
development centers and SCORE chapters, which is retired business
executives, senior executives who volunteer to help younger businesses.
There are hundreds of these chapters around the country.
If you could imagine a map of the United States, you could see, if I
could show where these centers are, there are centers at universities
and SCORE chapters and community banks, almost within a few miles of
any citizen. Any citizen could find a SCORE chapter or a university or
a local bank. This bill is sending funding and help to all of those
places. Again, not just on K Street here. There are lots of jobs on K
Street. In fact, there are so many buildings going up on K Street, I am
amazed how many. It never stops. There are lots of buildings going up,
maybe, on Wall Street--lots of office space. But where I represent,
there are empty spaces. There are lots of vacancy signs.
This bill is trying to push out money, not to the Federal Government
but to our universities, to our private sector partners to help them
tweak--help support small businesses to help small businesses grow. I
am very proud of that piece. The job impact analysis was something
Senator Snowe wanted. We worked with her. On everything we do, this is
going to be a way to say, in this bill, how many jobs will actually be
created, to record them so we can be accountable to the American people
for that. I am happy she put that in the bill.
Going back to the 7(a) loan program, this is the major loan program
of the SBA. As you can see, it has been sort of a happy and sad
situation here over the last couple of years since 2008.
When Congress acts and puts money in this program, loans to small
business go way up. When we dilly-dally and cannot agree and the
program expires, loans go way down. When we get our act together again,
it goes up. I wish this chart did not look like this. I wish it looked
straight up, like this. Right now it is down beneath where it was
before the stimulus act was passed. It has fallen below the ARRA
average of $172 million. It is down to $154 million.
We need to get it back up. When we initially announced that the Small
Business Administration was expanding the amount you could borrow,
reducing the fees so you did not have to pay as much, and giving you a
95-percent guarantee rate, those loans are good loans. Small businesses
need them, particularly because credit card companies are not lending
the way they used to or charging you too much for the money they do
give you. Credit lines are drying up. This is the core of the small
business bill. I hope we will see this number go straight up.
Banks all over our country want this program. Many of them--not every
bank participates, but I would say about 1,000 or 1,200 out of the
5,000 banks participate in this program, and they are very excited
about getting this funding back in place so they can begin to loan
money again to small business.
There are many other things we can do and should do. One of the
amendments I have filed--I wish I could have gotten this in the base
bill, but even as the chairman of the committee you can't get
everything you want in the base bill. So I have agreed to offer one of
these as an amendment.
I am very proud to have Senator Cochran's support, Senator Wicker's
support, Senator Vitter's support. It is a bipartisan amendment. What
it would do is provide in the small business bill interest loan relief
for the gulf coast outstanding disaster loans from Katrina and Wilma,
Gustav and Ike, from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and
Texas.
There are 13,207 loans. I will take a moment to try to explain it. I
will try to wrap up in about 5 minutes.
There are currently today 13,207 small business loans that were taken
out by businesses all along the gulf

[[Page S5667]]

coast. Some of these loans are to fishermen whose boats were destroyed
and they had just bought the new boat or fixed their net from some of
these hurricanes. They were just getting back into the water. The water
was coming back, the marsh was coming back after Katrina and Rita, and
then all of a sudden the Horizon BP disaster happened.
The same people who were affected by these hurricanes and who may be
affected by hurricanes in this season--which unfortunately promises to
be a very difficult one--these are the businesses that are struggling
to pay these loans on top of the economic disaster they are
experiencing. So I am asking the Senate to please give some
forgiveness--in the loan forgiveness, but give some special help to
this group of loans. What we are asking in the amendment is 3 years of
an interest rate reduction; not loan forgiveness, so the taxpayers will
be paid back the full principal amount of all the loans these
individuals and businesses have made. But if we could give them a
little interest relief--let me give a specific example.
I actually took Karen Mills, our Administrator of the SBA, to
Louisiana on several occasions to impress upon her the seriousness of
this situation. I took her to see the Bergerons, who run a gas station
in Lakeview. This entire neighborhood was destroyed, 8,000 families.
Three of my brothers and sisters lived in this neighborhood, with four
children each. They lost everything, their homes, their clothes,
everything was completely destroyed. That was true of their 8,000 other
neighbors. This gas station--the Bergerons came back. They operated one
of the most successful gas stations in this neighborhood. In order for
people to be able to rebuild their house, because they had fled to
higher ground hundreds of miles away, families would drive long
distances after work to come and gut their homes in Lakeview and try to
rebuild their homes. But when they went to go back, there was no gas
station for them to fill up their car so they could get back to where
they were living until they could get home.
So the Bergerons, like a lot of what I call the pioneer businesses--
the hardware stores, the gas stations--said you know, I have been here
40 years. Mr. Bergeron is in his 70s, still very active, but he said I
am going to go back and open my gas station. So he went to the SBA and
got a loan. The problem was, he did a great thing, but his business
came back so slowly. But without his business no one in the
neighborhood could come back because there was no place to get
gasoline. He is paying on his loan $1,000 a month. If this passes, his
note will go down to about $400 a month. It will give him a little bit
of relief because right now in his same neighborhood he has a lot of
people who work in the fishery industry or the seafood industry or the
oil and gas industry, so some of his customers cannot come and get as
much gas as they want to because they are being affected now by this
Deepwater Horizon.
I am begging the Members of the Senate to please help this particular
group. I wish we could afford to do for everyone in America but not
everybody in America right now is on the gulf coast. But these 13,207
people are and we need to give them a little breathing room. That is
one of my amendments.
I am going to yield the floor after I make a comment on a nominee.
But that is one of the amendments I am going to ask the Senate, when we
get an opportunity to offer amendments, to please give us a chance to
help these small businesses. It is a temporary relief for them, but I
think it is something they deserve and will help this region that has
now been hit again.

Nomination of Winslow Sargeant

Mr. President, at this time I want to talk for a minute about Winslow
Sargeant.
He is a gentleman who has been recommended by the President to serve
at the SBA, in the advocacy position at the SBA. He comes highly
regarded and highly recommended. He has a Ph.D. from the University of
Wisconsin in Madison in electrical engineering and a background as a
very successful small business owner. He is managing director of
Venture Investors, a Midwest venture capital country with a
concentration in starting up health care technology companies.
Dr. Sargeant has a great deal of support from a wide variety of
individuals and businesses that I will submit for the Record.
With more than 80 percent of job losses coming from small firms, I
believe this is someone who should be in the Office of Advocacy. For
some reason, he is being held up by the other side.
I understand there are nominations being held up on both sides of the
aisle, but I wanted to ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to
executive session to consider--I am going to wait and ask for unanimous
consent. I am not going to wait long, but I will continue talking for a
few minutes. I will wait for a few minutes, but at some point I am
going to ask for unanimous consent that he be moved ahead because here
we are on a small business bill, and here is the man whom the President
has nominated, who obviously is well credentialed, has tremendous
support, who is being held up. We do not really understand why he is
being held up, so I would like to know, and in just a few minutes, I am
going to ask for him to go by unanimous consent.
In the meantime, I will speak about one other potential amendment to
the underlying bill. This amendment is coming from Senator Boxer, and I
am so excited that she came up with this idea and this amendment. I
think it has a lot of potential, and I think many Members might support
it.
Senator Boxer called to my attention that there are many small
businesses that operate out of their homes, and if you think about it,
there are many people who operate their business out of their homes but
particularly women who are trying to raise children, they are still the
primary caregiver--not the only caregiver, but in most homes the women
are trying to balance being a good wife and a good mother and also
contributing to the bottom line of their family income. So a lot of
them might be running small businesses out of their homes.
Well, it has come to our attention that in order to take the tax
deduction that is rightfully there for anyone, man or woman, who works
out of their home--it has come to my attention through Senator Boxer
that it is not really very easy to take that deduction. In fact, it is
so complicated, to my knowledge, that many people don't take it. Think
about that.
If we are really supportive of family values, of people being
flexible; if we don't like spending a lot of gasoline traveling back
and forth to work and we are kind of trying to encourage people to stay
at home and work if they can--many women who are very well credentialed
because the government spent a lot of money on our universities getting
them the degrees they need, are home raising three, four, five kids,
and they can't travel a long time to work, so they set up a business in
their home. Senator Boxer's amendment would help them by simplifying
this deduction.
I am hoping Senator Boxer will come at some time to the floor over
the next couple of days--I am sure she will--and explain the details of
this, but I think it would be an excellent provision to add to the
small business bill because again, remember, this underlying bill is
cutting taxes for small businesses, specifically cutting taxes for
small businesses; it is supporting the small business programs to
create more of them, both in our country and their export potential;
and then it is giving--the third leg of the stool--$30 billion to banks
in America, voluntarily. It is not TARP-like, nothing about TARP; it is
$30 billion to small banks in Oregon, Louisiana, and other places to be
able to then take that money and lend it to small businesses. That is
the essence of this bill.
I am very hopeful we can add a couple of amendments to an already
very good small business package. So I am hoping Senator Boxer will
come at some point and explain this amendment.
My colleagues are here to speak, I guess, on either the extenders
package or the small business package. I see the Senator from Ohio, who
has been very supportive of small business. Of course, Ohio is one of
the States that has been hardest hit, and Michigan has been very hard
hit in the underlying economy. So I am very happy to have, hopefully,
their support on the underlying bill.

[[Page S5668]]

But one more comment about the moratorium. And I started off by
saying I am proud to be the chair of the Small Business Committee
advocating for small businesses in the country. I think the small
business package, the finance and treasury package that we have on the
floor will deliver to the American people how to, in a very fiscally
responsible way, help us create the jobs we need. But one of the
points--and I am going to be very brief because I see the minority
leader here, but at the same time I want to say again that the
moratorium on the gulf coast--and the Senator from Kentucky will, I
believe, agree with me on this point--the moratorium on the gulf coast
is really hurting many small businesses now.
I know we have to get this drilling safer and it has to be very safe.
The people of my State want that. The people of the gulf coast want
that. But we hope sometime in the next few weeks to clarify or fix or
modify this. The Federal judge, as you know, has ruled that the
moratorium is lifted, because the Federal judge did not agree with the
actions taken by this administration, nor do I. So while we are
debating a small business bill, I am very hopeful that as soon as this
small business package can pass, we can get on to getting more people
back to work along the gulf coast who have been affected by both the
moratorium and this bill.

Unanimous consent Request--Executive Calendar

I ask unanimous consent for Winslow Sargeant to be Chief Counsel for
Advocacy, Small Business Administration; that the nomination be
confirmed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any
statements relating to the nominee be printed in the Record; that the
President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the
Senate then resume its regular legislative session.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Merkley.) Is there objection?
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Snowe, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from Ohio.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. President, it is unfortunate to watch what
just happened again in this institution. The chair of the Small
Business Committee, who is serving her State, is an incredible advocate
for her State, is serving this country well, wants this government to
be able to govern. And you see one after another after another where
the President of the United States has dozens and dozens and dozens of
appointees, noncontroversial. My guess is, when this nominee finally
comes to a vote--I don't know this for sure, but my guess is there will
be very few ``no'' votes. We have seen this with Federal judges, we
have seen it with U.S. attorneys, we have seen it with U.S. marshals,
and we have seen it with Under Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries
and all kinds of commission nominees.
We have never seen anything like this in this country where one party
has consistently and persistently blocked nominee after nominee after
nominee. I mean, if your goal in government--if you come to the Senate
and your goal is to block anything from happening, the Senate rules
serve you pretty well. But if you want to move this country forward and
put party aside, we would not see this kind of thing happen over and
over.
So I commend Senator Landrieu for her work on the floor today, her
passionate advocacy for small business, and her work generally in
fighting for her State. But I was disturbed to watch what just
happened. If it were the only time, I guess I wouldn't be judging of it
much, but it is not.
I come to the floor to talk about the unemployment insurance bill. I
know Senator Landrieu, in her State, and the Presiding Officer, Senator
Merkley, in his State of Oregon, have people all over who have seen
their unemployment run out. I just don't get it.
I know some of the opponents, some of the people who have voted no on
unemployment compensation extension think it is welfare. I have heard
some of them say: Well, these people don't really want to work. Why
should we give them something for nothing?
Well, these are people who deserve unemployment. They have earned the
unemployment. They deserve the unemployment insurance. They have earned
it. Again, it is not called unemployment welfare; it is called
unemployment insurance. You pay in when you are working; you get out
when you are not. So it is a lot like car insurance and health
insurance. I don't want to collect on my car insurance premium. I don't
want to collect on it. I don't want to ever have an accident that hurts
somebody or damages a car. I have been in an accident like that. I
don't want that to happen again. I don't want to have to cash in any of
my health insurance. I don't want to be sick. I don't want my children
to be sick. I don't want to be unemployed so I have to draw
unemployment compensation. Most Americans don't want to be.
I just wonder about some of my friends on the other side of the aisle
who think about this--they really think it is welfare. I just ask my
colleagues on the other side of the aisle to put themselves in another
place. I know virtually all of us get out enough that we meet people
who are unemployed occasionally, and I know we are pretty isolated here
too often. But, you know, a lot of us meet people who are unemployed,
people who have lost their insurance. These people sometimes have lost
their homes. But I think it is important that we think about what that
means and try to personalize it, try to think about a husband and
wife--one is working part time, not making much money, the other one
lost their job, and then they lost their insurance because they can't
afford the payment for COBRA.
COBRA is a bit of a cruel hoax. COBRA is the program where you can
keep your insurance after you lose your job, but you have to pay your
part as the employee and then you have to pay the employer premium. And
if you lost your job, how could you? Well, we have subsidized that. We
have actually under the Recovery Act, as the Presiding Officer knows in
his work on this bill in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
Committee, helped people to pay that COBRA so they can keep their
insurance.
But put yourself in the place--since we can't seem to get the
Republicans to go along with that, either, now--put yourself in the
place of that family. The husband has lost his job. The wife, who was
making only a little bit of money, is struggling. They lost their
insurance. Someone gets a little sick. They have these bills run up.
They are getting 2 or 3 months behind on their mortgage. They have to
sit down with their family. They have to sit down with their teenage
kids and say: You know dad lost his job. You know mom cannot find more
than part-time work. You know we do not have insurance anymore. You
know Jimmy got sick. Well, we are behind on our house payments. We are
going to have to move. We are going to have to sell our house. We are
going to get foreclosed on.
You have to explain to your kids that they are not going to have a
room to sleep in--separate rooms--anymore. They are going to have to
give away some of the stuff they have around the house or try to sell
it. They are going to have to go to a new school.
What new school, dad?
Well, I don't know what school district we are going to move to.
I just wish my colleagues, when they cast these ``no'' votes on
unemployment insurance and cast these ``no'' votes on the extension of
COBRA to help people keep health care, that they would think about what
it means to an individual family.
I mean, these are all numbers. I can give you some great numbers
here. I can give you these numbers: The number of Americans who will
lose their unemployment benefits: 1.3 million by the end of this week;
1.7 million by the end of next week; 2.1 million by the end of our
congressional recess next week; 3.2 million by the end of July. These
are pretty troubling numbers, but forget the numbers. I am going to
read from some letters of people in Ohio that will explain better than
I can what this means to individual Ohioans or individual Oregonians or
individual Floridians or Louisianians or Kentuckians.
And if you want to make it an economic argument, make it an economic
argument. Forget about the human faces for a minute. Make it an
economic argument. If people are not getting their unemployment
insurance, it means they are not spending money in

[[Page S5669]]

the community. You know what has happened when people receive
unemployment benefits. The first 6 months following the passage of the
Recovery Act, unemployment insurance pumped $19 billion into the local
economy. If we hadn't done that in this recession President Obama
inherited a year and a half ago when we were losing 700,000 jobs a
month, we would have been losing 800,000 or 900,000 because this $19
billion wouldn't have been pumped into the economy--grocery stores,
going in and buying clothes for the kids, getting medicine, stopping at
the drugstore--all of the things that keep economic activity generating
in a community and provide jobs.
The first half of this year, $6 billion went in benefits to the
States. It would have meant layoffs of librarians and mental health
counselors and teachers and police officers and firefighters and people
who are cleaning the streets and picking up garbage. There would have
been more layoffs, more unemployment, less economic activity.
So it is pretty clear, if you want to look at the economics of this
and listen to one of Senator McCain's chief economic advisers who said
that nothing more than a dollar in unemployment has a greater
multiplying effect than that. That means for every dollar in
unemployment compensation, it generates a lot of economic activity.
That dollar isn't pocketed. That dollar is spent by the unemployed
worker to take care of his or her family's needs. It is the best thing
for the economy to pump unemployment compensation into the economy.

Yet time after time over the last several weeks Republicans have
opposed extending unemployment benefits. Of all things to draw the line
on. I hear the arguments over and over. They say we can't keep adding
to the national debt. I was in the House of Representatives when they
ran up the budget deficit, when George Bush and the Republicans ran up
the debt. In 2000, when President Clinton left the White House, we had
a budget surplus projected to be trillions of dollars in the years
ahead.
What happened? War with Iraq, hundreds of billions of dollars to pay
for the war charged to our grandchildren; tax cuts for the rich,
hundreds of billions of dollars, charged to the grandchildren; a
giveaway to the drug and insurance industries in the name of Medicare
privatization, charged to the grandchildren. They don't mind spending
us into deficit for two wars, for tax cuts for the rich, and for a
giveaway to the drug and insurance companies. But now that it is time
to give about $300 a week to workers who have lost jobs and to help
them keep their insurance, they say we can't afford it. They don't want
to run up the budget deficit. What does that say about values and about
us as a country?
I don't get it. No matter how irrational or how much they want to
play to the crowd and say: I am standing up against big government,
they didn't stand up for taxpayers to pay for the wars, tax cuts for
the rich, and bailouts for drug companies and insurance companies. All
of a sudden they are standing up for taxpayers when it comes to funding
unemployment benefits and health care benefits for those workers who
lost their jobs and lost health insurance.
I will close with reading four letters from people around my State. I
get hundreds of these. I know the Senator from Oregon gets them from
Portland and all over his State. I get them from all over my State. I
will start with Mark from Wood County, just south of Toledo, home of
one of the great universities in our country, Bowling Green.
Mark writes:

I send out on average 5 resumes a week, yet I almost never
hear back from employers. I have had only one interview,
though I didn't get the job.
I am not lazy. I want to work and I am trying to find work.
I didn't quit my job, my employer quit on me and everyone
else they laid off.
We need unemployment benefits extended, please don't turn
your back on us.

These are millions of people around the country. What Mark says is
what most of them would say: Please don't turn your back on us.
Jennifer from Geauga County, southeast of Cleveland, writes:

I am a single mother of three beautiful girls. I am also an
experienced architect. But late last year, I was laid off
from a large engineering firm in Northeast Ohio.
I have been desperately seeking a job for the last six
months, but my industry has still not recovered.
What do I do now? I have been working 20 years in my field.
I am already four months behind on my mortgage.
Where do I even get the money to pay for it and the other
expenses to care for my family?
What do I do?

These are not people who don't want to work. I am sickened by some of
my colleagues who think this is welfare, who think these people really
don't want to work. Jennifer is a woman with three children, a
professional, an architect. She has been working 20 years in her field.
All of these people are required to send out resumes week after week.
They are required to make calls and try to find jobs. They can't find
them because of the economy President Obama inherited a year and a half
ago--again, 700,000 jobs we were losing a month when the President took
office. My State was lucky enough in April to have a bigger job gain
than any State in the country, 37,000 jobs. But that is not nearly
enough to make up for the hundreds of thousands of jobs lost because of
this economy, because of bad trade policy, because of outsourcing of
jobs, because of all that has happened with the financial crisis.
Jill from Franklin County writes:

I am very disappointed the Senate has not passed an
extension for those of us still facing unemployment.
I have been out of work for six months, even though I have
a Master's Degree.
I have never lived beyond my means, but without the small
check I get from unemployment, I will be losing my home at
the end of July.
Please find a way to pass this bill. Please help us.

I was not making it up when I said if somebody loses their job, they
lose their insurance. Then they too often lose their home because a
bunch of Republicans want to vote no on the extension of unemployment
benefits, crying: We have to cut spending.
I am sorry to say it over and over, but when I hear them say we can't
afford it, when they didn't say that when it was tax cuts for the rich,
paying for the war, or bailing out the drug companies and the insurance
companies in the name of Medicare privatization--they only want to do
it when it is unemployed workers. That is wrong.
The last letter I will read is from Amy from Perry County, a small
rural county southeast of Columbus:

My husband is trying very hard to find a job. For the
government not to pass extensions is beyond me.
I am a nurse and work two jobs to help make up the
difference of my husband's lost wages.
Our hard working American citizens who helped build this
country are now in need of this country's help.
Please urge other Senators to vote this bill through.

I couldn't say it better than Jennifer and Mark and Amy and Jill.
They are all typical, hard-working Americans who have done the right
thing. Some are very well educated, all are hardworking. Many have gone
back to school to improve themselves. This is the economy they have
inherited because of a whole bunch of bad policy decisions in the last
10 years. They are the ones paying for it. That is just not right.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.

Gulf oilspill

Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I have come to the floor today to talk
about the tragedy affecting my State as well as other States that
border the gulf. We are into this crisis now 72 days. On the worst
days, there is as much as 60,000 barrels of oil spewing into the gulf.
That is more than 4 million barrels of oil. That comes out to about 180
million gallons of oil that has gone into the Gulf of Mexico. We know
British Petroleum is at fault. We know they are responsible for paying
for the cleanup. But that is just half of the story. The other half is
that the Federal Government has a responsibility in times of crises to
step up, to manage the crisis, to do everything possible to bring all
available resources to address the crisis, to keep the oil from washing
up on our beaches in Florida, from getting into our coastal waterways
and estuaries.
This is not a Republican issue. This is not a Democratic issue. This
is an issue of doing the job those who wanted to be elected to these
positions in the

[[Page S5670]]

executive branch now own. When you are the President, you don't get to
pick which crisis comes. You don't get to say: I don't choose to
address this problem or not address that one. When you are the
President, your administration is responsible for trying to solve the
problems that happen on your watch. This oilspill has happened on this
administration's watch.
I want the President to succeed. All Americans do. But the truth is,
this administration is failing in keeping this oil off our shores. Why
do I say that? I don't say that without some reservation because it is
a serious charge. The facts speak for themselves. We have 2,000
skimmers in the United States. These are ships equipped to suck up oil
off of the top of the water, bring it into the ship so it can be
removed from the area that has been polluted. We got this document last
week from the Coast Guard. Admiral Allen, with whom I met with the
President weeks ago, said there were 2,000 skimmers.
I said to the President: Mr. President, if there are 2,000 skimmers,
why aren't those skimmers in the gulf? At that time there were 24
skimmers off the coast of Florida. Today we believe there are about 84.
Florida says 84. The Feds say 130. Since this started, we couldn't get
a straight answer or one that reconciled between the State and the
Feds. The good news is, it has gone up to 84 from 24. But it is still a
mere fraction of what it could be.
We are told there are 400-some skimmers in the gulf. Around the
country, there are 2,000; 1,600 or so in the continental United States.
Why are all those skimmers not in the gulf? This is something I have
been calling for for weeks. Between Texas and South Carolina there are
850. Why aren't they skimming up the oil? When I raised this issue with
the President, he and Admiral Allen said: Those skimmers need to be in
other places in case there is an oilspill. That is like me saying that
we can't send a fire truck to your house that is on fire because we may
need it for another fire. That is not a lot of solace to you if your
house is burning down, not a lot of solace to the people of the gulf
when this oil is washing up onshore, ruining their lives, keeping them
from working, hurting the ecosystem and the environment they love.
Something has happened that is good news. The day after I met with
the President, along with our Governor and other State and local
officials, on day 57 of the crisis, on day 58 Rear Admiral Watson
issued a memo, June 16, 2010.
I ask unanimous consent that this be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:

From: J.A. Watson, RADM
FOSC BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
To: NIC
Subj: FOSC Determination under 46 U.S.C. Sec. 55113
Concerning Oil Spill Response Vessels Capable of Skimming
Oil
1. Pursuant to my authority contained in 46 U.S.C.
Sec. 55113, I have determined that an adequate number of oil
spill response vessels (OSRVs), as defined by 46 U.S.C.
Sec. 2101(20a), documented under the laws of the United
States and capable of skimming oil cannot be employed in a
timely manner to recover the oil released from the BP
Deepwater Horizon spill.
2. Oil currently discharges into the Gulf of Mexico at
unprecedented levels. There are simply not enough U.S. OSRVs
capable of skimming oil available to keep up with the pace at
which oil flows from the well. Until the flow is stopped,
therefore, it is my opinion that domestic and foreign OSRVs
capable of skimming oil are needed to provide adequate and
timely protection to the Gulf Coast.
3. This determination applies only to OSRVs capable of
skimming. No foreign OSRV may avail itself of any privileges
conveyed by this determination unless its country has
accorded to vessels of the U.S. the same privileges.
4. Respectfully request that U.S. Customs and Border
Protection be notified of this determination.

Mr. LeMIEUX. This is a four-bullet point paragraph document. It reads
in part:

Pursuant to my authority, I have determined that an
adequate number of oil spill response vessels (OSRVs), as
defined by 46 U.S.C. Sec. 2101(20a), documented under the
laws of the United States and capable of skimming oil cannot
be employed in a timely manner to recover the oil released
from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill.
Oil currently discharges into the Gulf of Mexico at
unprecedented levels. There are simply not enough U.S. OSRVs
capable of skimming oil available to keep up with the pace at
which oil flows from the well. Until the flow is stopped,
therefore, it is my opinion that domestic and foreign OSRVs
capable of skimming oil are needed to provide adequate and
timely protection to the Gulf Coast.

That is the day after we raised this issue with the President. It
comes on day 58. It should not have taken 58 days to figure out they
didn't have enough equipment, but better late than never.
Monday of this week, the EPA and Coast Guard, on day 70, issued an
order releasing these skimmers to come to the gulf from whatever legal
requirements keep them where they are, including releasing Navy
skimmers. That is good too. Now it is day 70, but it is still progress.
I am hoping, and what I am seeing is that these skimmers will come to
the gulf soon. We are tracking the skimmers. We got a list of these
2,000. We are calling folks in different places where the skimmers are,
different ports around the Southeast and the Mid-Atlantic. We are going
to check with them and say: Are your skimmers on the way? We need the
help.
I was in Pensacola Monday. I have been down there four or five times
since the incident began. The oil on the beach is profound. It breaks
one's heart to see it. It is a splattering of oil and muck and scum on
the beaches. In some places I found what I would call tar rocks about
the size of grapefruit that have washed ashore. Who knows what is
happening down below the water, how far these plumes of oil go, what it
is doing to marine life, to the turtles, to the porpoises, to the fish,
what that is going to mean for the people of the gulf coast who rely
upon fishing and the seafood industry, what it will mean for our
health.
When you stand on the beach, you can smell the oil. The people of my
State are heartbroken. I can see it in their faces and hear it in their
voices.
I talked to one woman who works at the pier. I asked her: Are people
coming to the beach.
She said: People are coming who don't often come. People are coming
who want to say goodbye, want to see the beach one last time.
That is like having a loved one who is in the hospital on their
deathbed, going to see the beach one last time.
We have these skimmers, these 2,000. Hopefully they are on the way.
That is progress. That is the domestic side of this issue.
The other side is foreign skimmers. We have been hearing from the
beginning that foreign countries have been offering assistance,
reaching out to us the way we help the world because of the goodness of
our hearts as Americans when the world has problems. When there is a
typhoon in Southeast Asia or an earthquake in Haiti or Chile, the first
country there to respond because of the goodness of our people is the
United States. We provide help and relief, military sometimes. Other
countries have also offered to help us in this, our time of need,
sometimes for free. Sometimes those companies want to get paid.
Nonetheless, they have offered to help.

In fact, there have been 64 offers, according to the U.S. State
Department's document of June 29, 2010. We have accepted 7 out of 64.
Let me read some of these to you.
On June 23, Canada offered skimmers. That is under consideration. On
May 13, the European Maritime Safety Agency, still under consideration;
on June 22, Japan, under consideration. On April 30, Norway; some have
been accepted, other offers are under consideration. On May 2, the
Republic of Korea offered skimmers--May 2--under consideration; on June
23, Turkey; on June 22, Qatar; on May 10, the UAE, the United Arab
Emirates, under consideration. Mr. President, 64 offers, 57 under
consideration.
Now, the State Department said yesterday they will accept 22 offers
of assistance from 12 countries. Good. Good. It is day 72. Why wasn't
it done sooner? I have come to the floor before and shown a picture of
a ship called the Swan that was offered on May 6 from a Dutch company.
The Swan had the capacity of soaking in thousands of pounds of oil and
water, and we never got back to them.
We now have the opportunity to bring another ship into our effort.
The Swan was a huge ship. As shown in this picture I have in the
Chamber, this is A Whale--appropriately named. It is reported to be the
largest skimmer in the world. I met with the folks who own

[[Page S5671]]

the ship yesterday, Taiwanese folks. They have no approval yet to use
this ship, but they still steamed this ship from Taiwan to the gulf--it
is just getting there now--on their own dime. Imagine what it costs to
sail this ship, 300 yards long, bigger than an aircraft carrier. It is
the largest oil skimmer ever devised. It is at least 250 times that of
these modified fishing boats we are using for skimming. It has a
capability to draw as much as 500,000 barrels of oily water per 8- to
10-hour cycle, and it does not have to stop. It puts the ship next to
it, which it offloads the oily water to, and it can keep going 24 hours
a day.
By the way, storms are not a problem either because it is so big. It
does not rock in the waves of a storm. So you hear these concerns now
with our Tropical Storm Alex in the gulf that certain ships are going
to have to stop their efforts. If this ship is allowed to work, it does
not have to stop, according to what the owners told me. It is being
tested by the Coast Guard either today or tomorrow.
Let's hope we use this incredible resource and ones like it because
when this oil washes up onshore, when we have failed to respond to the
offers of assistance from foreign countries, it is not just oil that is
washing up onshore, it is failure. We need every resource, domestic and
foreign alike, in the gulf, and we needed them yesterday. In fact, we
needed them 50 days ago. It should not have taken this long to marshal
this response.
I just watched the President of the United States on television. He
is in Racine, WI. He gave a speech, a very political speech. He likes
to blame the Republicans for everything that has gone wrong in the
country. It is all our fault. Well, let me take issue with him on this
one point. This is his job. He may not want to be in charge of the
United States of America and be the President when we have the worst
oilspill we have ever had, but that is part of the job. It is not Thad
Allen's job to run this. It is not Janet Napolitano's job. It is not
Ken Salazar's job. It is not Jane Lubchenco's job or any other folks
who work in the administration. It is the job of the President of the
United States.
When he ran for President, he said President Bush's response to
Katrina was halfhearted and it was half measures. I am not sure he
would want this same standard applied to him right now. I know it is
fun to give a political speech, but the people in the Gulf of Mexico
are suffering, and they need help and they need a President who is on
the job managing through problems.
Mr. President, being from Florida, we have had a lot of crises in the
past several years with hurricanes. In 2004, in 2005, we had 9 or 10
hurricanes come through Florida that devastated us. I got to watch a
chief executive officer of our State, our Governor at the time, Jeb
Bush, when I was in the Attorney General's Office, manage through
problems, overcome obstacles, work 12, 14, 16 hours a day to make
things happen, to get results.
That is what it takes, and there is no one like the chief executive
officer to overcome those obstacles. That is what we need from the
President of the United States in this situation. I do not want to see
him in Wisconsin giving a political speech. I want to see him in
Florida getting these skimmers there, overcoming obstacles, solving
problems, managing through this crisis, so we can protect our beaches,
protect our estuaries, and protect the way of life for the people of
Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
This crisis is not over. It may not be on your television as much as
it was, but the oil is still spewing out of this well. We hope these
relief wells work. We hope they can stop the oil from leaking in the
Gulf of Mexico at an unprecedented rate. We still do not know how much
is leaking. We hope BP is capturing at least half of that oil now,
maybe a little bit more, but we do not know.
But every day that goes by that oil leaks in the Gulf of Mexico and
washes up on the shore of my State--when I stand on the beach in
Pensacola and I cannot see a single skimmer, I wonder where our Federal
Government is. We need help. We need some urgency. We need some
purpose. I am glad they signed the order this week to let those
skimmers come. I am glad we are finally starting to accept foreign
skimmers--72 days into the crisis. But I will continue to come to the
floor every day until that oil wellhead stops leaking to talk about
this issue and bring light and attention to it, to make sure this
government is doing everything it can, marshaling every resource
possible to keep that oil from coming on our beaches and into our
coastal waterways.
I will close with this: In Florida, people love the water. It is the
reason most people come to Florida. It is not just because of the great
way of life. It is not just because of the great climate. It is because
of the water. Ninety percent of the people of our State live within 10
miles of the ocean. We have more recreational boaters than any other
State in the country. We have more coastline than any other State in
the country save Alaska. The water is a way of life to people in
Florida.
I have had grown men, men I have known and respected my whole life--
not men you would consider emotional or soft--talk about the situation
of this oil crisis with me and start to break down and cry. It is that
much of an issue for the people of Florida. I want to see our Federal
Government rise to the task and do everything possible to solve this
problem.
With that, Mr. President, I see my colleague is here and I yield the
floor to him.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Burris). The Senator from Iowa is
recognized.
Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I am sorry I was not here on the floor--
but I was watching in my office--when my colleague from Ohio, Senator
Brown, made his recent statement on the Senate floor. I think Senator
Brown pointed out very poignantly what is happening to so many people
in our country today who have exhausted their unemployment insurance
benefits. I would like to follow up on the comments made by Senator
Brown to reinforce what he said just a few minutes ago on the Senate
floor and the dire straits that so many people find themselves in going
into the Fourth of July holiday.
Recently, a national group of business economists released its 2010
economic outlook, predicting that America's economy is ``on track''
toward recovery. Well, this is encouraging news. It indicates we are
moving in the right direction under President Obama's leadership. But
we also know the recovery is very fragile.
For example, last week, we learned that sales of new homes plummeted
33 percent in May, to the least level in 40 years. Let me repeat that.
Home sales in May fell to the least level in 40 years. Banks are still
reluctant to lend to small businesses. It is not that they do not have
money. According to a new Federal Reserve report, U.S. companies are
hoarding an all-time high sum of $1.84 trillion in cash, but they
remain largely unwilling to invest, hire, and expand.
U.S. companies are hoarding an all-time high sum--$1.84 trillion in
cash--but they are not investing, they are not hiring, and they are not
expanding. So the threat of this double-dip recession is very real.
These economic warning signs are not just abstract facts and figures.
They have very real consequences for families across the country. That
is what my friend from Ohio was talking about earlier. The unemployment
report for May was very disappointing. By the official numbers, there
are 15 million hard-working people who have lost their jobs through no
fault of their own, and they are struggling to find work. Those are the
official numbers--the official numbers. Many experts in this field
agree that the real numbers are far higher.
So when you count the people who have become so discouraged that they
have stopped looking for work, or who are working part time
involuntarily because they cannot get full time work, the number of
unemployed workers is far higher, like about 30 million people.
So as shown on this chart, here is sort of the official figure of 15
million. But that is just people who are right now on the unemployment
rolls who are actively looking for work. We have enough data to show
that people have been out of work for so long--they have hunted for so
long, and they are discouraged; they are not looking right now
actively--they are not counted as

[[Page S5672]]

unemployed. The young people who have not had jobs for the first time,
who are out of school but have not had jobs for the first time, they
are not counted as unemployed. People who are working makeshift jobs
for bits and pieces here and there, part-time, who one time had a full-
time job, they are not counted either. When we add all those up, our
real unemployment in this country is right around 30 million people.
The official figures will say there are five unemployed workers for
every available job. That is not true. It is more like 10 workers. Job
openings in America: 2.69 million. That is how many jobs are in America
right now that are open--at least last month anyway. There are 30
million people out there after those 2.69 million jobs; not 1 in 5, but
1 in 10, a little over 1 in 10. It is little wonder that the average
spell of unemployment in this country has skyrocketed to 34 weeks, far
higher than in previous recessions. This chart shows that--here is the
recession of 1980, 10 weeks; in July of 1981, 14 weeks; in July of
1990, 12 weeks; March of 2001, the recession, 13 weeks. These are the
unemployment spells we had during those recessions. We are now up to 34
weeks and counting. Compare that to the recessions of the past. It is a
small wonder that a lot of people say this is not a recession, this is
a depression. People don't want to say it, but in many ways, we are on
the edge of a depression.

As a result, a record number of Americans is facing long-term
unemployment; 6.8 million Americans out of work for more than half a
year, by official numbers alone. That is the highest number of long-
term unemployed we have had since we started keeping track in 1948. Let
me repeat that. The number of Americans out of work for more than half
a year is the highest--the highest--since we have kept track of this
since 1948. The families of these long-term unemployed are hanging on
by a thread. Their savings are gone. Unemployment benefits are the only
lifeline they have to pay the rent and put food on the table.
Again, I know I am not the only Member of this body whose office has
been flooded with heartbreaking stories of families back home
struggling to make ends meet. We heard a number of those stories from
Senator Brown from Ohio. These are people trying their hardest, doing
everything they can to find work, but the jobs aren't there.
I heard from a community college professor from Sioux City who was
laid off due to budget cuts. She has applied for dozens of jobs, many
far below her skill level. She is often told she is overqualified. She
has exhausted her unemployment benefits. She and her sons, one of whom
is a special needs child, are on Medicaid and they have applied for
food stamps.
I heard from a worker in Des Moines who has been in the insurance
industry for many years. She was laid off almost a year ago and has
struggled to find work. Her benefits were cut off last week. Here is
what she writes. She says:

My concern is that my family cannot survive without the
unemployment benefits. We have depleted our savings just to
save the house and not get behind on the bills. I know there
are others far worse off. Please help pass the emergency
unemployment insurance extension.

I heard from a schoolteacher in northern Iowa who was laid off in
October of 2008. She recently ran out of unemployment benefits and had
to apply for welfare. She writes:

I have not felt so humiliated in 20 years. I have been a
productive and hard-working woman since I was 13, but now I
feel insignificant. Please do not misunderstand. I have been
trying to find full-time employment, but to no avail.

Again, these are hard-working people trying their best, who never
imagined they would be in need of Federal assistance. They paid into
the unemployment insurance system while they were working. Their
employers paid in. They ought to be able to count on it when times get
tough. To me, it is a matter of fundamental fairness and human decency.
Yet, in the face of so many families in crisis, an extension--a
short-term extension--of unemployment insurance is being needlessly,
and I would even say cruelly, obstructed here in the Senate. Time and
again we have tried to pass an extension of unemployment benefits and
time and time again that effort has been blocked by Members on the
other side of this aisle. As a result of this political gamesmanship,
as of the end of last week--at the end of last week--1,350,000
Americans exhausted their unemployment benefits because of the lapse in
this program. By the end of this week, that will go up to 1,720,000 who
will be cut off because we won't extend it here. By July 10, 2.14
million--2,140,000 Americans will have their unemployment benefits cut
off.
Blocking this bill may be a political game for some over here in the
minority party, but it is not a game to millions of Americans who have
lost their lifeline. For them, the obstruction of this bill is a
personal and family crisis of the first magnitude.
Imagine: We are about to go out of here in a couple of days for 10
days, 12 days, something like that, to celebrate our Nation's birthday,
the Fourth of July weekend. I am sure Senators will be with their
families; Congress men and women will be with their families, and all
of our staffs. We all have jobs. We have good jobs that pay us well. We
have good benefits--health benefits, retirement benefits--as does our
staff, Republican staff and Democratic staff. Republican Senators and
Democratic Senators, we have good pay. We will have a good Fourth of
July with our families. We will watch the fireworks and have hot dogs
and hamburgers, listen to patriotic speeches, maybe make a few
ourselves. How about all these people? How about these people? How
about these families? What are they thinking about on the Fourth of
July? They have lost their benefits. They don't know where to turn.
What are they going to be celebrating? What are they going to think
about their country? What are they going to think about this Congress,
that turns its back on these people?
There is no reason why we can't extend the unemployment insurance
benefits, none whatsoever. I think that is what we have to be thinking
about.
Another thing that I think hits pretty hard, I have heard political
candidates out on the stump who want to take a place in the Senate, or
maybe in the House of Representatives, out there talking about how we
shouldn't extend these benefits because this encourages people not to
go to work; it sort of encourages laziness. Well, I think that is
insulting and illogical. As I said, there are 30 million people out of
work looking for 2 million jobs. They say, Well, but if you give them
these unemployment benefits, it makes them lazy. They won't go to work.
The numbers vary from State to State, but the unemployment benefit
nationwide is about $300 a week, below the poverty line. So here is the
average income for a family of four on unemployment benefits: It is
about $15,600. It is more in some States, less in other States. That is
an average. So what is the poverty line for a family of four? It is
$22,000. That is below the poverty line. They are telling me people
don't want to go to work? These are people who had work. They are not
out of work because they walked off the job; they are out of work
because they were cut off of work. In some States, benefits are
smaller. For example, in Mississippi, the weekly maximum benefit is
$235 a week. Again, that is thousands of dollars less than the annual
salary of a full-time minimum wage worker. Again, I can't imagine
anyone who had the alternative to make more money and to have a full-
time job would say, No, I want to stay on unemployment benefits. That
is insulting. It is insulting.
I have also heard my colleagues object to this benefit extension on
the grounds that providing these benefits is too expensive. It will add
to the deficit. I understand the concern, and we are all concerned
about the deficit of this country. But, it doesn't hold water when we
are sitting in the midst of an economic crisis. We are about to pass a
supplemental appropriations bill here sometime soon, probably after we
get back from the Fourth of July break. It has about $37 billion in
there in military aid to Iraq and Afghanistan. We are building
infrastructure projects over there. We are putting people to work
there. We are continuing to lose a lot of American lives, young
Americans getting injured and killed, and that is adding to the
deficit. Yet we are not paying for that. That is adding to the deficit.

[[Page S5673]]

It seems to me if we are trying to look ahead and trying to protect
the people of this country, we want to get people back to work. We want
to get the economy going again. We need to get the recovery up and
running. Unemployment benefits cost money, yes, but think about it this
way. That money is spent here in America. It is not spent overseas and
it is not spent someplace else. It is spent here.
What do people do when they get unemployment insurance benefits? What
do they do with that money? Do they put it in a shoe box? Do they bury
it in a hole in the ground? No. They go out and they spend it. They
spend it on food and clothes and the necessities of life: housing,
rent, utilities. That money spins around in the economy. That is why
the economists all agree that one of the--this is from
moodyseconomy.com. The biggest boost for the economy in terms of
benefits from the government, the biggest bang for the buck, so to
speak, are food stamps. That is because poor people who get food stamps
spend it right away on food. Not all, but most of the food is grown in
this country and processed; not all of it, but most of it. So you get a
big bang for the buck. For every dollar in food stamps, you get $1.73
in economic activity in this country--$1.73 for every dollar invested.
Unemployment benefits, $1.63. Right next to food stamps, unemployment
benefits. Infrastructure investments that so many of us talk about,
very close on their heels: $1.59. If we want to put people to work,
let's start doing infrastructure rebuilding in America. Rebuild our
sewer and water systems, our highways, roads, bridges, rails, high
speed. That is a great investment, plus it will put a lot of people to
work too.
A whole lot of people say, Well, we have to extend the Bush tax cuts
to get the economy going. Extending the Bush tax cuts is a 49-cent
return on the dollar--not a very good investment, folks. Not very good.
So unemployment benefits, yes, they cost money. Yes, they do add to
the deficit, but they provide for a lot of economic activity in this
country--a lot more than extending a tax cut. For example, in Iowa
alone, more than 3,700 jobs were saved or created in my State in 2009
thanks to the benefits of unemployment insurance. That is 3,700 jobs in
my State alone because of unemployment benefits.
Again, under these circumstances, obstruction of an extension of
unemployment benefits is inexplicable. How do you explain it? How do
you explain something such as that to someone who is on their lifeline,
has lost their benefits, or is on the verge of losing their benefits
right now? It is like a person who is in the hospital with a serious
infection. The doctor says, OK, here is a 15-day course of antibiotics.
The patient goes home and says OK, 15 days, I have to take the
antibiotics every day. But day 8 comes, day 9 comes, the patient feels
better, they stop taking their antibiotics. The infection reasserts
itself, the patient is right back in the hospital.
That is where we are in this economic recovery. We made the mistake
once before; history shows this. In 1937, we were getting out of a
depression, the public works projects and things President Franklin
Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress put in place were getting us out
of the recession. But then the so-called deficit hawks took over and
began then to tighten down on the benefits and these programs. What
happened? The Federal Reserve started tightening up the money, Congress
slashed spending, the Fed tightened its policy, and the economy plunged
back down into a depression.
That is why I used the analogy of someone in the hospital with a
serious infection and they are prescribed 15 days of antibiotics, but
after 5 to 7 days, they feel better and they stop, the infection then
reasserts itself, and they are right back in the hospital. That is
where we are now.
Well, quite frankly, there is an infection in our country. The
infection is called a recession, a deep recession, a depression. Thirty
million people are out of work. That is an infection. There is one
thing that will help relieve that infection right now: the medicine of
unemployment benefits.
Mr. DURBIN. Will the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. HARKIN. I am delighted to yield to the Senator.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator for bringing this
issue and timely discussion to the floor.
We had a meeting today of the deficit commission--18 of us who have
been charged with finding a way to deal with our Nation's deficit.
Speaking to us was the Director of the CBO, Congressional Budget
Office, Mr. Elmendorf, who talked about what we need to do. I asked him
a question that went directly to the Senator's point: As we talk about
reducing the deficit, isn't there a worry or concern that if we hit the
brakes too soon, we can plunge even deeper into a recession, with more
people out of work? He said yes. He said that you have to make sure we
start moving forward, putting people to work, with the GDP growing; and
once you have the economy stabilized and moving forward, with people
paying taxes--which, incidentally, brings down the deficit--then you
can talk about the long-term deficit fix. So I say to the Senator from
Iowa, he really hit the nail on the head.
Our colleagues on the other side who refuse to support extending
unemployment compensation benefits say: We want to take it from some
other area of spending. Well, of course, that just reduces the stimulus
to the American economy. So they are not helping things. What we need
to do is help them.
I see the Senator from Iowa has 3,700 workers in Iowa affected by
this. We have over 10,000 in the State of Illinois. In fact, it is
20,000 at this point. It will be 80,000 by the end of June, if I am not
mistaken. At this point, these folks have reached a point of
desperation.
I had a call over the weekend from a friend who is unemployed. She is
the mother of three kids, with a grandchild in the house. They are
cutting off her utilities because her unemployment check was cut off.
That is the reality of life for people who have lost jobs through no
fault of their own.
I thank the Senator for bringing up this issue. I will be embarrassed
if we leave here for the Fourth of July break without taking on this
unemployment issue and helping people across the Nation who are
similarly situated.
I will ask the Senator a question since he yielded for that purpose.
Does the Senator even possibly agree with what I have said?
Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator, who has been a
champion of working people and families for all the many years I have
known him, and that is many years now. I thank him for telling us about
what the CBO said in the deficit commission.
I pointed out a couple of things earlier. The Senator is right on the
mark in terms of economic activity, and that is why it is so important
right now to get the economy moving again, to keep it moving. The
biggest bang for the buck we get is food stamps. People spend those
right away on food.
Second to that, for every dollar we put into unemployment benefits,
it causes $1.63 of economic activity. That is not a bad return on the
dollar. Well, down here on the chart, extending the Bush tax cuts, you
only get 49 cents back. That is what my Republican friends say you need
to do--more of these Bush tax cuts. That is dismal. Yet an
infrastructure investment brings $1.59 cents. If you invest more in
infrastructure--sewer and water, plants and highways, roads, bridges,
high-speed rail--not only do you get a great return, you get a lot of
people employed at the same time.
How can we leave here tomorrow or Friday, when we leave for 10 or 12
days, when we know this is what is happening? At the end of last week,
1,350,000 Americans lost their unemployment benefits. At the end of
this week, it jumps up to 1,720,000. By July 10, before we come back,
it will be 2,140,000 Americans who will lose their benefits. How can we
go home and celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks--the birthday
of our Republic--and give patriotic speeches about how great we are,
what a good country this is, when we are going to leave all these
people out in the cold? What does that say about this body, about the
Congress?
I will tell you, I say to all those families who have written me
letters, contacted me by e-mail, and have come into my offices, telling
me of your joblessness and your struggles: You are not forgotten. We
are here fighting to try to get this done.

[[Page S5674]]

My Republican colleagues refuse to let us extend unemployment
benefits--even for less than half a year, a short period of time. Well,
we will do everything we can to get this done. For the sake of these
families, our country, and for the sake of, yes, our economy, we can't
leave here without extending these unemployment benefits.
I ask my Republican colleagues who have been blocking this to have a
sense of humanity on this, a sense of compassion, of caring for these
families. We all make good money around here. We get good pay and
benefits, good retirement benefits. All our staffs are employed.
Everybody here in this Chamber is employed. How about these people who
are unemployed? You have to think about them before we close up shop
and leave here this week.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts is recognized.
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in
morning business.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(The remarks of Mr. Kerry are located in today's Record under
``Morning Business.'')
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana is recognized.
Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, I begin by complimenting the senior
Senator from Massachusetts for a remarkable tribute to the late Senator
Robert Byrd. It was beautifully delivered, beautifully written. It
captured the spirit of this wonderful Senator and highlighted just a
few of the extraordinary accomplishments in his life. I was privileged
to be on the floor to hear it delivered by the Senator from
Massachusetts.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 10 minutes
as in morning business.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Small Business Lending Fund Act

Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, I was here earlier today, following
Senator Baucus's handling of a portion of the small business bill. I am
pleased to share in that responsibility on a small business bill that
is not immediately before the Senate because, remember, we came off it
temporarily to talk about the unemployment measure that is pending
about which Senator Harkin just spoke.
I want to return to the small business bill because at some point,
after a vote on the unemployment measure before the Senate, we will get
back to a very important bill for you, Mr. President, and you have been
a leader in this area, as well as many of us.
I want to speak for a moment about a couple of provisions of the
small business bill. The bill itself has three major pieces to it.
There is a piece that came out of the Small Business Committee about
which I spent some time this morning talking, the elements of
strengthening the SBA lending programs, expanding the limits for the
amount of money that businesses can borrow. There is a piece that is
coming out of the Finance Committee that is broadly supported. Senator
Baucus and Senator Grassley have done a great job. Basically, it is tax
cuts relative to small businesses that can help them with tax
provisions. Then there is a piece that has come from the Treasury, the
White House, the leadership team, about small business lending.
I want to talk for a few minutes about a piece of the small business
package, and then I want to talk about the bank investment program, the
$30 billion program.
First of all, one of the most important aspects of the small business
bill is the extension and the expansion of 7(a) loans. To put this in
plain English, these are the loans that the Small Business
Administration partners with banks to make what we call floor plan
lending. It is any business that has inventory--maybe it is a tractor
company or a manufactured home company or a boat, marine industry with
a small business owner--and you have some of these in Illinois, I know,
Mr. President, and I have many of them in Louisiana--that has to buy
inventory and put it in their showrooms for when people come by and
they look at the product.