[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Page 3497]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               THE BUDGET

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, no Member of the Senate has more 
experience in various levels of government than the Senator from Ohio, 
Senator Voinovich, who just spoke. He was a commissioner, a mayor, a 
lieutenant Governor, a Governor, and a Senator. Since he has come here, 
no Senator has spent more time on the drudgery--some Senators would 
say--of understanding the operations of government, how the budget 
decisions we make affect different parts of the Federal Government, 
different parts of society, the State and local governments, and how 
the civil service system works, how employees are fairly treated. I 
salute the Senator for his work.
  I think we ought to hear him carefully when he reminds us of one of 
the most obvious solutions to that problem, the 2-year budget. That 
idea has broad support in this Chamber, and it is a very simple idea. 
It says we will make our budget every 2 years. If we have to make 
adjustments in the odd year, we can do that. We already do that from 
time to time, but then in the intervening year, we would have plenty of 
time to look over our programs, make sure they work, and perhaps repeal 
some of them and add some better ones and check the stacks of 
regulations. If you look at all of the regulations that small colleges 
in Ohio and Tennessee have to wade through every year, that stack is 
very high. I brought them down on the floor one time. Surely, we can 
get rid of those. On both sides of the aisle we would like to do that. 
Our process doesn't appear that way. As our Republican whip sometimes 
says, process is often substance in the Senate, and a 2-year budget 
would be a force for orderliness, a force for review of programs; it 
would cause us to repeal and change and revise laws.
  We have plenty of forces for adding laws or spending more money. We 
need forces for review and repeal. The people around America who elect 
us and depend upon us to provide the funds we provide in an orderly 
flow could then make their plans and spend the money more wisely. The 
example the Senator from Ohio gave is a good one, about the Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission. On this floor, what do we hear more often than 
anything else now? We hear let's stop the dependence upon foreign oil 
or at least let's reduce it, and let's deal with global warming.
  How do we do that? There are lots of different ways to try to do 
that, but in a country such as ours that produces and uses 25 percent 
of all of the energy in the world, we don't have many ways to produce 
large amounts of carbon-free energy; 70 percent of our carbon-free 
energy comes from nuclear power in the United States. So when we slow 
down the processing applications for new nuclear power plants--a 
process we invented, which our Navy used without incident since the 
1950s, a process which France uses to produce 80 percent of its power--
so when we slow ourselves down, we are delaying urgent action on global 
warming and on dealing with our dependence upon foreign oil.
  That was a very good example the Senator used. I salute his interest 
and his call for a biennial budget, a 2-year budget, and his focus on 
the practical problems our failure to deal with appropriations bills on 
time cause, and it can be shared all around the room.

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