[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 17047-17048]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                               PRIORITIES

  Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, after a refreshing though strenuous August 
recess, we are now in the home stretch not only of this session of 
Congress but of this Congress.
  The previous speaker discussed one of the great national and 
international priorities, normal trade relations with China on a 
permanent basis. I have several other priorities, both national and 
regional, that I will discuss, each of which I think is vitally 
important for the successful conclusion of this Congress of the United 
States.
  At the very top of my list is pipeline safety. More than a year ago, 
a tragic accident in Bellingham, WA, occurred with a liquid pipeline. A 
huge explosion snuffed out the lives of three bright young people and 
destroyed a magnificent and beautiful park. Ever since the date of that 
accident, my colleague from the State of Washington and I have focused 
a great deal of attention on the renewal and the strengthening of the 
Pipeline Safety Act and of the Office of Pipeline Safety, designed to 
enforce its restrictions.
  We have succeeded in passing a relatively strong Pipeline Act 
reauthorization through the Senate Commerce Committee with certain 
objections, with a number of amendments that were seriously contested 
and closely divided in that committee. We have now worked diligently 
with all concerned and I believe we are on the verge of a bill that can 
come before this Senate and can be passed enthusiastically, and I 
believe unanimously, by the Senate of the United States. It is 
imperative that we do so quite promptly because while the House has 
begun to focus attention on the issue, time is very short before the 
end of this Congress to actually accomplish the goals we seek in 
increasing pipeline safety.
  A dramatic and equally tragic incident during the course of the last 
month with a national gas pipeline in New Mexico has illustrated most 
regrettably, once again, the essential nature of our improving pipeline 
safety standards all across the United States. I am focused 
particularly on giving a more significant voice in pipeline safety 
matters to the people who live in the vicinity of these pipelines and 
whose lives regrettably seem to be very much at risk with respect to 
either negligence or oversight on the part of those who own and operate 
these pipelines.
  Pipelines, both for natural gas and for the transmission of liquid 
petroleum products, are a vitally important part of our economy. In 
some respects, they are safer than other forms of transportation for 
these commodities. However, accidents are all too frequent, and all too 
frequently those accidents are devastating and fatal in nature.
  The importance of passing this legislation cannot be overemphasized. 
I am highly optimistic on this subject. I had an extensive discussion 
last evening with the majority leader and have his encouragement. I 
believe in the course of the next few days we will be able to take up 
this bill.
  Regrettably, on another high national priority, I find myself 
frustrated that we have not made a sufficient degree of progress. A 
number of days, over a period of weeks and months, have been devoted in 
this body to a debate on education policy and a renewal of the 
Elementary and Secondary Education Act. For all practical purposes, 
that bill is being frustrated by extended discussion, led by the 
unalterable opposition to providing more trust and confidence in our 
local school authorities on the part of the Democratic leadership and 
the senior Senator from Massachusetts.
  An integral part of the bill, which is still before this body and 
which has majority support, is Straight A's. Straight A's gives State 
school authorities several options: One, to continue under the present 
system. Two, for a dozen or so States to combine a dozen or more 
present categorical aid

[[Page 17048]]

programs into one system that comes to the State, is passed through 
with at least 95 percent of the money to individual school districts on 
one undertaking and one undertaking only, and that undertaking is that 
each State that would get this authority will sign a contract pursuant 
to which there will be an improvement in the skills of the students 
over a 5-year period; that is to say, by any objective measure that the 
State uses, our kids will be better educated.
  It is a dramatic change. It is a change from process accountability, 
the form of accountability we have at the present time--that is to say: 
Did you fill out the forms correctly?--to results accountability: Are 
our children better educated? I am convinced and a majority of this 
body is convinced that by providing more trust and confidence in 
parents and teachers and principals and school board members--the 
people who know our children's names--that the students' education will 
improve. There is still time to pass such a bill. I regret the 
opposition even to a test, optional to each State, is so great it seems 
unlikely that this vitally important education reform will be passed.
  Just last week I spoke to the junior and senior classes at Bridgeport 
High School, a rural school in Washington State, a very small school, 
not more than 100 students and faculty combined. They do not need more 
Federal rules and regulations. They don't need to be told they should 
use the newest Federal program to hire roughly half a teacher, which is 
what they get under that program. They need our trust and confidence in 
the dedicated nature of those teachers and administrators and parents 
in that community, who know better than we do here in Washington, DC, 
what the students of Bridgeport, WA, need. The same thing is true of 
17,000 other school districts across the United States.
  I also note present on the floor today my distinguished friend and 
colleague from North Dakota. He and I are joined in at least two other 
priorities with which we are dealing this year. One is the opportunity 
to end unilateral boycotts against the export of food and medicines 
from the United States. We represent, I am convinced, a substantial 
majority of the Members of the Senate, as well as the House of 
Representatives. We have a termination to those boycotts in the 
Agriculture appropriations bill that is now before our conference 
committee. I know he joins with me in believing that it is absolutely 
essential, and long overdue, that we end those agricultural boycotts at 
the present time and provide additional markets to American farmers and 
agricultural producers as at least one modest step toward returning 
prosperity to the agricultural sector of our economy.
  We are also joined in believing that Americans are overcharged for 
prescription drugs, that we have a system under which American 
pharmaceutical companies--who benefit from very large subsidies, both 
indirectly from the National Institutes of Health, and directly through 
tax credits for the development of prescription drugs--that when those 
companies charge Americans twice as much or more than twice as much for 
those drugs as they charge, for all practical purposes, almost anyone 
outside the United States, that something is absolutely wrong. Again, 
we have passed in this body at least a significant step in the 
direction of correcting that injustice. I think it is very important 
that the appropriations bill to which that important matter is attached 
be passed and we make at least a significant step, a genuine step 
forward toward fair and nondiscriminatory treatment of all Americans in 
the cost of the prescription drugs that are so important to their 
health.
  On two other subjects, this body has passed a bill attempting to 
ensure the reliability of our electrical transmission system and the 
supply of electricity to all the people of the United States. We have 
had unwarranted price hikes. We have had both the existence and threat 
of brownouts in various parts of this country this year. That situation 
is only going to get worse until we do something about it. A 
noncontroversial but vitally important electricity reliability bill has 
passed this body. I urge my colleagues in the House of Representatives 
to do the same.
  Finally, on a regional issue, the great issue in the Pacific 
Northwest is the future of our hydroelectric dam system on the Columbia 
and Snake Rivers, and particularly the four dams on the lower Snake 
River. Many in this administration have pursued the foolish goal of 
removing those dams in order, the administration asserts, to save 
salmon. Nothing could be less cost effective as against the many 
absolutely first rate programs that are going on in the Pacific 
Northwest directly to that end, programs that not at all incidentally 
have been remarkably successful if we measure them by this year's 
return of spring chinook salmon to the Columbia River system.
  The administration and the Vice President have blinked in this 
connection, knowing the proposal is as unpopular as it is absurd in the 
Pacific Northwest. One group in the administration said it would be off 
the table for 8 years. However, the chairman of the White House Council 
on Environmental Quality was cited in the course of the last month 
saying that moratorium will only be for 3 years, and the Vice President 
is not guaranteeing 3 years but just, ``as long as it [the present 
system] works.'' My own view is that that is until after the November 
election.
  So to the best of my ability to do so, the administration will be 
given the opportunity to put its money where its mouth is with a 
prohibition against its using any money in the appropriations bill for 
fiscal year 2001, not only for removing the dams but for any step or 
purpose on the road to removing those dams. The debate over salmon 
recovery, a universal goal in the Pacific Northwest, will be far more 
constructive and far more productive when that particular view is taken 
off of the agenda in its entirety.
  Finally, as the Senator responsible for the management of the 
Interior appropriations bill, we must, of course, deal with the 
remaining fires across the United States in our forests and on our 
rangelands, and particularly again in the Northwest part of the United 
States from which my State has not been entirely free but with which it 
has not been afflicted to the extent that Montana, Idaho, and certain 
other States have been. Whatever our concerns about the causes of those 
fires, the expenditures that have been made and are to be made in 
connection with their suppression are a genuine emergency and will be 
included in the conference committee report on the Interior Department 
bill as an emergency. At the same time, due to the very hard work of my 
friend and colleague, the senior Senator from Idaho, there are dramatic 
changes in fire prevention policies which will also be included in that 
bill that are vitally important to see to it that we do not soon have a 
repetition of the disastrous fires that have consumed so many hundreds 
of thousands, even millions of acres of our public and private lands 
during the course of this summer.
  Mr. President, that is an ambitious agenda, but I believe it to be a 
vitally important agenda, not only for my own constituents but for the 
people of the United States as a whole.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Hutchinson). Under the previous order, the 
Senator from North Dakota is to be recognized.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator 
from New Jersey be recognized for 10 minutes, following which I will be 
recognized.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The 
Senator from New Jersey.
  Mr. TORRICELLI. I thank my friend, the Senator from North Dakota, for 
his consideration.

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