[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 18782-18783]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              TRYING TIMES

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, in the past few days, we have seen a real 
meltdown in our financial community. One major investment bank failed. 
Another is filing for bankruptcy. As we know, Bear Stearns was propped 
up because of Government money. Lehman Brothers is being purchased by 
another bank. It is hard to comprehend that Bear Stearns is no longer 
what it was. Lehman Brothers is, in effect, gone. The name may be 
saved, but that may be all. We have other companies that we are 
watching very closely. One of the companies was saved by a competitor, 
and the Federal Reserve is now saying they must liberalize access to 
its discount window.
  By all accounts, this was a remarkable turn of events for Wall 
Street, our Nation's financial markets, and the world's financial 
markets. When all the smoke of these major financial shakeups has 
cleared--and we don't know when that will be--our job remains the same 
as always; that is, the Members of Congress, to do everything we can to 
help the American people make it through these trying times.
  What we are seeing on Wall Street today is yet more fallout from the 
Bush and now McCain economic policies that have failed our country. The 
Bush administration failed to police lenders and neglected to protect 
consumers. That led to the subprime crisis and cost millions of 
American families their homes and continues to wreak havoc on 
neighborhoods and financial institutions throughout America. This Bush-
McCain ``anything goes'' approach, which the Bush administration has 
called free market economics but has amounted to nothing more than 
willful neglect for American families, has resulted in, I repeat, 
millions of lost jobs, millions of lost homes, with an enormous price 
tag for the American taxpayer to accompany that. If there ever was a 
reminder of our country's desperate need for new economic leadership, 
what more do we need? This is it.
  Today, Monday, with what happened around the financial markets to our 
great country, with all the bad news today, Senator John McCain said 
the fundamentals of our economy are strong. Think about that. I don't 
know what that means. I don't know if anyone knows what that means. For 
whom is the economy strong? It is not strong for homeowners in Nevada. 
It is certainly not strong for homeowners in Florida, Arizona, 
California, and most every other place in America. It is not strong for 
wage earners who are spending more of their paychecks than ever to buy 
gas to get to work, and then they have to come home at day's end. 
School districts are having a difficult time because busing is now an 
integral part of a school district. Trucking companies are in desperate 
shape, all because of the high price of fuel.
  It is not just middle-class families that are saving less and 
spending more on groceries, clothing, and health care; it is throughout 
our society. The economy certainly isn't strong for the 606,000 
Americans who lost their jobs this year. This is 606,000 people, and 
you have John McCain saying the economy looks good. I really don't 
understand what he means, that the fundamentals are good. The economy 
is not strong for fixed-income seniors, which the Presiding Officer's 
State of Florida has more than any other place in the union. Certainly, 
in Nevada, we are the most rapidly growing senior population. It is not 
strong for them or especially for those in the Northeast because they 
have so much heating done with fuel oil. The prices will go up by at 
least 50 percent--some say 75 percent--this year. There may be places 
in America where the economy is strong, such as country clubs and 
boardrooms at firms that haven't folded. For the rest of America, this 
economy is not strong. It will not solve itself, no matter what 
President Bush and John McCain say. Fixing this mess will take real 
leadership and a change of direction.
  During this work period, I hope Congress will show some leadership, 
with some direction from the President, which we don't have, by passing 
another economic stimulus plan that creates jobs and invests in our 
economy.
  We have a lot to do in the next 2 weeks. That is all we have left 
until the due date for us to leave here. I hope we can leave here, but 
I don't know that we can. Everybody should understand that we may do 
the unthinkable and have to have votes here on Friday and maybe even on 
Monday. We have to get essential work done.
  The Defense authorization bill--we need to complete that legislation. 
There will be no rollcall votes on this today. The managers have worked 
most of Thursday and Friday. Of course, today they are available and 
have been available to come up with an agreement on amendments before 
the cloture vote on the bill. If the managers of the bill don't get an 
agreement on how to move forward with amendments, we will have a 
cloture vote in the morning. We have no choice. Senators have until 4 
o'clock today to file first-degree amendments to the bill.

[[Page 18783]]

  This Defense authorization bill is an important piece of legislation. 
I don't know how else to phrase its importance. We know the security of 
our Nation depends on things other than this Defense authorization 
bill. We know we are importing 70 percent of our oil. That is important 
to the security of our country. For a basic understanding of how to 
treat our military, this bill is it. These two experienced legislators 
have worked together for decades on this committee. They have put 
forward some extremely important issues, including the pay raise for 
the troops and so many other things, to maintain the integrity of our 
military. Not to pass a Defense bill--how can we leave here and not do 
that?
  There are 51 Democratic Senators, and every one of them will vote for 
this legislation. We need help from the other side. Now, did everyone 
have the opportunity to offer all of the amendments they wanted? The 
answer is yes. Did they get a chance to vote on them? No, but that is 
not our fault or the managers' fault. I hope unanimous consent can be 
reached on a list of amendments and that we will dispose of those as 
quickly as we can. This would allow Senators to have their voices 
heard, which could perhaps allow us to pass this without another 
Republican filibuster. We are probably at about 95 filibusters now, Mr. 
President.
  Once we complete this bill, then we are going to have to move to our 
energy legislation--first of all, the tax extenders. That is so 
important. We have an economy that we have talked about a little bit 
today, about how very shaky it is. If we extend the tax credits for 
renewable energy, we would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. These 
are not just jobs where the Sun shines a lot; these are jobs everywhere 
in America. In my little hometown of Searchlight, NV, renewable energy 
has hit there. There is a company that is going to put in windmills 
there. It takes a while, with environmental impact statements, but they 
have gotten permission in the Federal agencies to do this. That would 
happen all over America today. But what has happened is that people who 
have these projects are backing out of them because they don't have the 
tax credits. You cannot have people investing huge amounts of money for 
a tax credit of 1 year or 6 months, and the legislation that will be 
brought before the body will have multiyear, long-term tax credits. 
That is what we need. That is going to happen. We have worked out an 
arrangement with the Finance Committee, as I understand it, that it 
will all be paid for, which I think will be acceptable to both 
Democrats and Republicans.
  Then we are going to have to do the other tax extenders, with AMT and 
other problems. We cannot pay for all that. I certainly cannot tell the 
House of Representatives how to do business, and they don't tell us how 
to do ours, but I hope they will allow this vote on what we are going 
to send them.
  The Presiding Officer and this Senator from Nevada served in the 
House of Representatives. When we served there, the leaders we had 
there never, ever tried to pass legislation just with Democrats, even 
though we had a significant majority when we served in the House. We 
always looked to Tip O'Neill and Jim Wright, who were our leaders, and 
they would go to the Republicans and try to get enough votes to pass 
it. I hope we can do it. This is passable. We need to do this on the 
tax credits and tax extenders.
  Mr. President, I have expressed to everybody, and I say it here 
today, that even though I don't think there is going to be immediate 
relief from drilling, we are going to have some drilling votes here. It 
is the consensus of the American people, and both Democrats and 
Republicans, that we should have some drilling votes. We are going to 
do that. Senator Bingaman came up with a proposal that he worked on for 
weeks. We will do that, and then we will move to what the Republicans 
want. We will vote on that, and then we are going to have the 
bipartisan proposal of the Gang of 10. In the meantime, we will get 
from the House, I think, a bill they will pass over there dealing with 
energy. As I understand it, it won't have any of the tax extenders on 
it, but it will have a number of important issues to people over here.
  Then there are a lot of things we need to deal with, which I have 
talked about briefly. I hope we can get direction from the President. 
We can call it a stimulus bill, supplemental appropriations, emergency 
funding--call it whatever you want, but we have real problems out there 
in our country that deserve Federal attention. We hope we can get 
something done there.
  Then we have the continuing resolution we have to do so we can fund 
the Government. I can only speak for myself and my counterpart, Senator 
McConnell, will have to speak for himself, but I think it is our 
initial hope that we can fund the Government until sometime in 
February. But if not, then we will have to come back here for a lame-
duck session. But we have to fund the Government. We tried in the past, 
on one occasion, to shut down the Government, and it didn't work very 
well. We are going to do everything we can to make sure that does not 
happen.
  During this period of time, we have a variety of other bipartisan 
pieces of legislation that the House has passed and that we need to try 
to move forward on. We hope we can do that.
  Again, we may have to have some votes on Friday, and hopefully not 
over the weekend, but this is important business that we need to do and 
so little time left to do it. The American people expect us to get it 
done. Everyone should look at their schedules this weekend to see what 
we can get done so we don't have to be here for an extended period of 
time.
  This Defense bill should pass, and after that, we would have to have 
a very quick conference with the House. Certainly, people work on these 
bills for a long time, both the Senate managers and the House managers, 
so that can be completed.
  As to this energy legislation, I hope the House will take what we do 
with all the tax extenders.
  We talked about the other business that needs to be done. There is a 
limited number of items we need to do, but we cannot leave unless we do 
them.

                          ____________________