[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Pages 7380-7407]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               FAA REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2007--Continued


                           Amendment No. 4587

  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, I rise in support of Senator Durbin's 
amendment.
  The debate is not about an arcane, technical pension funding rule. 
The issue before us is about whether thousands and thousands of airline 
employees are allowed to keep hard-earned defined benefit pensions or 
if we are going to regulate them or throw them out to the underfunded 
PBGC, which has so much debt that you cannot count the zeros. This 
issue is about whether we are going to send additional major carriers, 
who have so far avoided bankruptcy in these brutal financial 
circumstances, into a downward spiral. My premise is to hold the main 
carriers harmless. They are up against it, at the cliff. We should hold 
them harmless.
  Adding this pension provision to the FAA bill would defeat the whole 
purpose of this compromise brokered by the Finance and the Commerce 
Committees, which was done with the underlying principle that we should 
hold the commercial airlines harmless during these turbulent economic 
times, which are expected to last. That is sacred. That is why it would 
be unwise to load up an additional liability on airlines trying to do 
the right thing for their employees.
  It would be especially wrong to cause that result in a misguided 
effort to put the preservation of regular order before common sense--in 
other words, going around a committee. It happens. Airline employees 
will pay the unnecessary price for this change from current law. It 
cannot happen.
  During these tough times of rising fuel prices and mounting financial 
losses, this is not the time to impose tougher, unrealistic pension 
funding requirements upon the airline industry. To do so would risk 
more bankruptcies and force carriers to dump their pensions into the 
woebegone PBGC. That would put in danger the economic security of 
workers who would prefer to stay employed and not have their pensions 
frozen.
  In 2005, when the Senate was considering the Pension Protection Act 
on the Senate floor, we passed an amendment by voice vote that I 
cosponsored with Senator Isakson and Senator Lott. The amendment would 
have given all airline carriers substantial pension relief. The 
amendment did not pick winners or losers within the airline industry. 
It is not our business. Rather, it focused on keeping their defined 
benefit pension plans solvent.
  Unfortunately, as Senator Hutchison pointed out, the final product 
that came out of conference in 2006 limited the pension relief the 
Senate sought to give all airlines. Led by--and I will say he is gone 
and I am not sad--the Ways and Means Committee chairman, Bill Thomas, 
the conference report chose winners and losers. It gave some carriers 
more pension relief than others, creating a competitive advantage for 
some carriers.
  A number of Senators were not happy with the airline provisions bill, 
including Senators Durbin, Reid, Obama, Harkin, Menendez, Lautenberg, 
Bill Nelson, and a lot of the rest of us. They entered a colloquy on 
the floor arguing that this disparity needed to be dealt with.
  That is why in last year's Iraq war supplemental appropriations 
legislation Dick Durbin did the only thing that he had available to him 
to do, and with the strong support of Senator Hutchison, he sought to 
right this wrong and inserted a provision that brought the airlines up 
to par and gave them the necessary pension relief that they deserved. I 
understand this was perhaps not the best process. We are not a body 
known for our meticulous protocol. We are trying to get something in 
that is lifesaving for the Nation.
  As a senior member of the Finance Committee myself, which has 
jurisdiction of pension legislation, I agree with Senator Baucus that 
it would have been more ideal to go through the regular order and have 
the Finance Committee review and vet the provision. The problem is that 
it wasn't going to happen.
  However, airlines need and deserve pension relief. We cannot adopt 
the pension provision of the Finance Committee tax title and impose 
higher pension burdens upon five domestic airlines, which has been 
discussed by various people, during these tougher economic times.
  Remember, hold legacy commercial airlines harmless. So we would be 
turning our backs on American, Continental, US Airways, Hawaiian, and 
Alaska Air. To do so would risk more bankruptcies and more job losses. 
I pointed out earlier that one out of every six jobs in the airline 
industry has been lost in the last 6 years.
  In 2005, while we were debating the Isakson-Rockefeller-Lott 
amendment that brought all airlines equitable pension relief, I stated 
on the Senate floor that my goal was to protect the employees and 
retirees who worked so hard to earn retirement benefits, and that 
remains my goal today.
  To deny disadvantaged airlines the relief they rightfully deserve in 
the Pension Protection Act and which the Senate voted to give them 
would be unfair.
  I have the utmost respect for Senators Baucus and Grassley. They are 
a superb team. They did their very best and did a very good job on the 
whole on the Pension Protection Act. But the Finance Committee in the 
Senate should not have received the dicta of

[[Page 7381]]

the now thoroughly retired former Ways and Means Committee chairman. 
The former House majority succeeded with their desperate efforts to 
achieve questionable policy goals by holding long-awaited pension 
reform legislation hostage. But that was then and this is now, and we 
should not give the former House majority the satisfaction of achieving 
their desired objective over a jurisdictional squabble, and that is all 
it is. It counts. I understand that. It counts. People lie on the floor 
to protect it, but in this case, we are dealing with something much 
larger.
  We can do better, and that must begin by us stepping back and 
invoking the ``do no harm'' principle. America cannot afford another 
major bankruptcy to cripple our aviation system.
  With all of my respect to the Finance Committee leadership, we just 
cannot do one more thing to jeopardize the health of our domestic 
aviation industry, particularly the commercial sector. The rest of it 
is doing very well. For that reason, I will support Senator Durbin's 
amendment, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I take a view opposite what was just 
spoken by Senator Rockefeller on the amendment that is before the 
Senate, the Durbin amendment, No. 1, because of a very carefully 
crafted compromise that was worked out when the pension reform bill was 
passed, and No. 2, the purpose of that legislation was to protect the 
pensions of the workers of the corporations of America, including the 
workers who work for our airlines.
  What we are trying to do is stay within the realm of that compromise 
and the protection of workers' pensions. This effort detracts from it. 
I am trying to make sure workers' pensions are protected.
  I am going to ask my colleagues to be against the Durbin-Hutchison 
amendment. The amendment before us seeks to keep in place a policy that 
is wrong from a pension policy standpoint. The amendment also would 
preserve a process followed against two committees with jurisdiction 
over pension policy--the Finance Committee and the Health, Education, 
Labor, and Pensions Committee. These two committees worked arm in arm 
for all of 2006 to get a pension reform bill together that would 
protect workers' pensions.
  If the proponents of this amendment succeed in their effort, it will 
taint the legislative process with respect to one of the most important 
policy challenges before Congress, and this is strengthening retirement 
security.
  The provision the proponents seek to strike is not only justified 
from a policy perspective--but the way in which the original provision 
of the Pension Protection Act was modified should raise the eyebrows of 
some of my Senate colleagues.
  I would first like to walk my Senate colleagues through the yearlong 
conference negotiations of the Pension Act which occurred less than 2 
years ago. But let me first remind my colleagues that the underlying 
intent of the Pension Act is to require defined benefit plan sponsors 
to fully fund their pension plans; in other words, keep their promise 
to their employees.
  In nontechnical terms, the Pension Act makes sure plan sponsors are 
not digging a deeper hole by requiring plans to pay off their unfunded 
liabilities.
  The Pension Act requires defined benefit plan sponsors to make 
contributions, one, to cover benefits accrued in the current year and, 
two, to pay off any unfunded pension liabilities or past liabilities 
over a 7-year period of time. A lot of people think we were not doing 
justice to the workers of America by giving these companies 7 years to 
pay off these past liabilities, but at least we have a plan in place 
that two committees of this Senate worked on that was a compromise that 
would bring us to the point where even after 7 years, workers' pensions 
would be protected.
  There is an interest rate issue with a lot of pensions--the interest 
rate used to determine these past liabilities based on the yield curve 
of high-quality corporate bond rates. Currently, the corporate bond 
yield curve rate is approximately 6 percent. The Pension Act provided 
two exceptions to this general rule. The exceptions were specifically 
provided for certain commercial airline carriers that may have had 
difficulty meeting the general requirements within the bill. In other 
words, we were taking into consideration 2 years ago the very critical 
and--how would I say it--very unpredictable future of airlines. That is 
something that was legitimate at the time.
  There were exceptions for these commercial airline carriers. Under 
the first exception, carriers that froze their pension plans were 
permitted to pay off any past pension liabilities over 17 years--that 
is instead of 7 years--and use in the process an 8.85-percent interest 
rate to calculate past liabilities. And that would be instead of 
current law, which is a 6-percent rate. Under the second exception, 
carriers that did not freeze their pension plans were permitted to pay 
off liabilities over 10 years instead of 17 years, if they chose the 
other course, and use the current 6-percent rate instead of the 8.85-
percent interest rate.
  During the Pension Act negotiations, those airline carriers freezing 
their plans were permitted to take advantage of the first exception. We 
were aware at that time that these carriers pledged to make new 401(k) 
contributions on behalf of current and new employees in their union 
negotiations.
  Those airline carriers that did not freeze their plans did not need 
to make the same pledge for a 401(k)-type retirement because these 
carriers continued their pension plans. The workers for these carriers 
continued to accrue benefits under the pension plan.
  The opponents of section 808 do not understand or maybe they choose 
to ignore that this was a carefully crafted compromise which was 
intended to place workers of each of these carriers in a similar 
position from a retirement perspective. Workers of carriers that did 
not freeze their plans continued to accrue their usual pension 
benefits. Workers of carriers that froze their plans received 
retirement benefits under 401(k) plans. Under each approach, the 
carriers remain obligated to pay their retirement benefits that accrue 
in the current year.
  This was a proworker, proparticipant approach that recognized the 
financial distress the airline industry was experiencing. It also 
recognized the differences in the financial health of the carriers that 
froze their pension plans and the financial health of carriers that did 
not freeze their retirement plans.
  The amendment's proponents are now saying they want the same set of 
rules that were offered to carriers that froze their plans.
  What is on the books that we in the Finance Committee are trying to 
correct in this legislation is that we gave maximum flexibility to 
airlines to choose one plan or another, the one that fit, whether they 
wanted to freeze their pension plans or not freeze their pension plans. 
And if they froze their pension plans, they chose a future 401(k) for 
their employees. It was maximum flexibility because these union 
agreements were much different among the airlines and the financial 
conditions of the airlines were very much different. We wanted to give 
choice for flexibility for the financial management of the corporations 
to keep their promise to their workers, and we wanted to keep our 
promise that Congress made under our laws that workers' retirement 
ought to be protected. So there was maximum flexibility.
  OK, everybody agreed to this, and then later on, people wanted to 
change the rules in the middle of the game to benefit one airline over 
another airline. So the proponents of the present law, the present 
distraction from our compromise that was made less than 2 years ago, 
will tell you that just before passage of the Pension Act, an agreement 
was reached with Senate leadership that the Senate would take the first 
available opportunity in the next Congress to offer the same set of 
rules to carriers who do not freeze their pension plans. If that is 
true, then why did

[[Page 7382]]

we worry and try to make this compromise over a period of 7 months 
during 2006? We wouldn't have had to spend the time to do that.
  On January 4, 2007, Senator Hutchison and Senator Cornyn introduced a 
bill that loosened the rules for those carriers that did not freeze 
their plans. The bill increased the current interest rate of 6 percent 
to 8.25 percent, which, in their view, is closer to the 8.85-percent 
rate given to frozen plans.
  The bill was referred to the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions 
Committee. I don't recall Chairman Kennedy and Ranking Member Enzi 
considering the Hutchison-Cornyn bill in the normal course of the 
committee process. I know for a fact that neither Chairman Baucus nor I 
considered the Hutchison-Cornyn bill in the Finance Committee.
  Language that was identical to Hutchison-Cornyn was slipped into the 
war supplemental conference agreement. This action was taken without 
consideration by the two committees of jurisdiction over pensions, the 
very same two committees that worked for several months during 2006 to 
work out this carefully crafted compromise that took into consideration 
the financial conditions of the various airlines, the desire of some 
airlines to freeze their pensions and substitute 401(k)s and those 
airlines that wanted to keep their pension system going as was, without 
any consideration to the people who worked on this for so long.
  It was slipped into the conference agreement of an appropriations 
bill. Isn't that the process we here in the Senate are trying to put an 
end to? No promises were broken. The promise to make the rules the same 
was taken up in this Congress. Specifically, the Senate Finance 
Committee included the provision we are debating today and the 
modification of the chairman's mark of the Federal Aviation 
Administration authorization bill. The mark was considered by the full 
Senate Finance Committee in September of last year. The full committee 
overwhelmingly supported that provision and favorably reported it out 
of committee. Proponents of this amendment cannot stand on the Senate 
floor and cannot in good conscience argue that promises made to them 
were not kept.
  Let me remind my colleagues that we here in the Senate have a 
committee process which enables Members to debate and dispense with 
issues in an orderly process. Without this orderly process, the 
democratic process our Founding Fathers gave us breaks down. I didn't 
serve as chairman and now ranking member of the Finance Committee to 
let an orderly and democratic process break down, particularly 
considering the months of compromise the House and Senate took to work 
out what that pension bill was all about.
  For my Senate colleagues to suggest that a provision that was not 
considered during the normal course of the committee process is making 
good on a promise that was made to them--I think that is not 
acceptable. For my Senate colleagues who, alternately, contend that the 
promises that were made to them were not kept, I ask them why they did 
not speak up during the full and open deliberation that occurred in the 
Finance Committee in September. Why are they now opposing a provision 
that was out there in the clear light of day for over 7 months and, if 
they had problems with the provisions, not speak to us about them? Or 
is it that the airline carriers that oppose this provision finally woke 
up? I don't know. Did they wake up to the fact that their blatant end 
run around the committee process would not go unnoticed and they wanted 
to find some way to undo the careful compromise of 2006? I am 
skeptical, of course. ``Skeptical'' is an understatement.
  But let me turn to the policy in the Finance Committee bill. As we 
have established, opponents of that provision successfully increased 
the interest rate for nonfrozen plans to 8.25 percent. They say the 
8.25-percent rate levels the playing field. I admit that and agree with 
them. But it only levels the playing field in the context of 
calculating past liabilities. So I agree it is equitable to allow all 
the carriers to use the more favorable interest rate to calculate past 
liabilities, but it is not equitable to allow carriers that did not 
freeze their plans to underfund benefits earned in the future and maybe 
get us back to the position we are still in somewhat, even regardless 
of the law that is now on the books. This is what is going to happen if 
we do not do something about it right now.
  I would like to correct the manner in which my distinguished 
colleague from Illinois--and he is here on the floor--refers to the now 
infamous 8.25 percent, versus the 8.85 percent. These are not 
``earnings rates.'' The rates are not used to determine the value of 
plan assets. Instead, the rates are discount rates that actuaries use 
to determine the present value of pension liabilities. Basically, the 
rates are used to determine how much a company has to contribute today 
to make good on the promised pension payments that would be due when an 
employee retires.
  This is an important distinction because when a company uses a higher 
interest to project the present value, the company is able to 
understate--or I would use the word ``mask''--the promised pension 
payments. This understatement allows the company to contribute less 
money to the plan. Less money to the plan is an important distinction 
because we are talking about protecting workers and their pension 
rights.
  Why would a worker support a policy that places the full value of 
their promised pension payments in jeopardy? My colleague from Illinois 
contends that the workers of the carriers in question support this 
practice and, of course, the Durbin-Hutchison amendment. Most workers I 
know ask for bigger payments or at least want to make sure they are 
secure in retirement. It is usually management that wants to short the 
worker. That is why we get into the trouble we are in and why the 
Pension Act of 2006 was necessary.
  But let me get back to what the war supplemental actually 
accomplished. Carriers that are currently using the 8.25-percent 
interest rate are now permitted, No. 1, to mask the pension plan's 
unfunded liabilities and, No. 2, contribute less money to a pension 
plan. The greater extent to which a pension plan is underfunded, the 
greater the risks to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the 
Federal insurer of the pension plans. Then, obviously, if that comes up 
short, the taxpayers pick up the bill.
  Opponents of the Finance Committee provision argue that the most 
important risk factor for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is 
the financial health of a plan sponsor. This is not entirely true. 
Whether a plan is underfunded is an equally important risk factor. 
Specifically, if the company goes into bankruptcy and pushes the 
pension liabilities onto the PBGC, guess who is holding the bag for 
those unfunded liabilities--it is the PBGC. In the most extreme cases, 
then the taxpayers might be left holding the bag.
  My opponents cannot tell half of the story. Yes, the financial health 
of the plan sponsor is important, but so is the funding status of the 
plan. What we have here is an issue of underfunding. I told you that 
from an actuarial perspective, higher interest rates mean lower plan 
liabilities. When a plan's sponsor uses a higher interest rate to 
determine its liability, the sponsor is effectively masking the plan's 
liabilities. In other words, the plan's liabilities are artificially 
understated. I want to emphasize the word ``artificial'' because what 
we have here is a case where the carriers that oppose the Finance 
Committee provision are trying to take advantage of a special funding 
rule based on an artificial funding status.
  I went to great lengths to say to my colleagues during 2006 how we 
tried to take into consideration--between the two committees, the Labor 
Committee and the Finance Committee--considerations of the different 
financial conditions of the various air carriers and to give them some 
choice. Specifically, if a plan sponsor using the normal 6-percent rate 
is 100 percent funded, the plan sponsor is only required to contribute 
money to cover the current

[[Page 7383]]

year's costs. If the plan is, say, 115 percent funded, the plan sponsor 
may use the excess to cover the current year liabilities. In some 
cases, the plan sponsor will not have to contribute any money because 
the excess would cover the current year costs. Carriers that are using 
the 8.25-percent are contending that, because their plan is 116 percent 
funded, they do not have to make the current year contribution. The 
problem here is that the 116-percent funding status is artificial. It 
is artificial because the 8.25 rate effectively masks the underfunding 
of the plan.
  So I ask my Senate colleagues, should a plan that is artificially 
funded be permitted to avail itself of a rule that is only available to 
plans that are adequately funded? Or put another way--this is fuzzy 
funding math. It is fuzzy in the way it puts the plan at risk. Should 
plans that are artificially funded be allowed to skip making their 
current year contributions? In that case, are they not just digging the 
hole deeper?
  The Finance Committee provision says that if these carriers use the 
8.25-percent rate, which results in an artificial funding level, these 
carriers cannot skip their current year's contributions. So the Finance 
Committee provision makes good on the promise that was made to Senators 
during the year 2006; that is, that we are allowing carriers that did 
not freeze their plans to use a more favorable interest rate to 
determine their past liabilities--the same deal that was given to 
frozen plans. What we are also saying, however, is that if you are 
using the more favorable rate, you have to contribute the current 
year's cost. That is the grand compromise of 2006.
  Again, the same deal was given to the other set of airlines and/or 
other corporations--to freeze their plan. To do otherwise would, No. 1, 
adversely affect active workers and, No. 2, allow these carriers to dig 
a deeper hole by allowing pension liabilities to continue to grow.
  Moreover, taxpayers can end up being on the hook for these unfunded 
liabilities.
  It all comes down to this bottom line: Workers, retirees, and 
taxpayers are in better shape if there is more money in the retirement 
plans. Workers, retirees, and taxpayers are in worse shape if there is 
less money in the retirement plans. Management wins if the company puts 
less money into the plan and workers, retirees, and taxpayers lose.
  A vote for this amendment is a vote to put less money in the 
retirement plan. A vote against this amendment is a vote to put more 
money in.
  Let me make sure I said that right. A vote for the amendment is a 
vote to put less money in the retirement plan. A vote against the 
amendment is a vote to put more money into the retirement plan. If you 
vote for the amendment, you are putting workers and retirees--and you 
ought to be concerned about taxpayers, most of all--at risk.
  I hope my colleagues join me in opposing this amendment.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Menendez). The Senator from Illinois.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I greatly respect the Senator from Iowa. I 
know he may have to leave, but I do have to tell him I disagree with 
several things he said.
  First, the point he raised: Why wasn't I in the Finance Committee 
stating my position? I am not a member of that committee and I do not 
know the procedure that was followed by the committee.
  I will tell you, in this Federal Aviation Administration 
authorization bill, this is the only pension provision. To think this 
is a pension bill and we should have been forewarned that airline 
pensions would be part of the discussion about keeping America's skies 
safer and air travel safer came as somewhat of a surprise.
  I learned of this amendment last week. I have known for a long time 
the position of the chairman and ranking member in opposition to my 
position on this issue, and I knew the day would come when we would 
revisit it.
  But there are several things here which I think have to be said: 
First, freezing a pension plan might not sound like much unless you are 
a retiree. A frozen pension, which is what we are talking about with 
some airlines, would disqualify new workers from qualifying for the 
pension and restrict the airline from expanding any benefits under the 
retirement plan.
  That is a frozen plan. That is what happened with several airlines as 
they faced and went into bankruptcy. They froze their plans. They said 
to their retirees: Times are tough. We cannot cover new employees. We 
cannot give you anything more; it is frozen.
  Now, they were given pretty good treatment by the Finance Committee. 
In fact, they were given the most preferred treatment of any 
corporations in America. They were allowed to fund their pension plan 
over a longer period of time than any company in America, 17 years, and 
they started with an imputed assumption of 8.85 in terms of--as the 
Senator from Iowa called it the discount rate or others, the interest 
rate. But they were given this preferred position. It applied to two 
airlines, Northwest and Delta.
  Now, what about the rest of the airlines? They were put in a 
different category. In their situations, airlines such as American 
Airlines did not freeze their pension plans; new workers came into 
their pension plans; benefits could be improved in their pension plans.
  They were told: You will not be given the preferred treatment given 
to those that freeze their pension plans. It seems like it is upside 
down. You would think we would be benefitting those companies that are 
trying to do better by their employees. But, instead, we went the other 
way and said: We limit their catchup funding and liability to 10 years 
and the imputed interest to 8.25 percent, not as good a deal, and in 
the world of hundreds of millions of dollars, a very expensive 
difference between frozen pension plans and those that still have 
active defined benefit plans.
  So now comes the argument with this new amendment in the Federal 
Aviation Administration authorization bill, that we have to freeze the 
current level of contributions being given by the airlines. Well, let 
me give you an example of what that means. In the instance of American 
Airlines, they have not only funded their liability to 100 percent, 
they have added more, despite the tough economic times.
  Their funding level is 115 percent. It is not as if they are trying 
to pull anything over on their workers and retirees, they are putting 
more money in than they are required, even in these tough times.
  The effect of this amendment, if it is not removed, is to hold them 
at that 115 percent contribution. What does it mean to the airlines 
such as American? It means $1 billion over 5 years. It means $200 
million each year to keep the funding level way beyond the 100 percent 
that is necessary.
  Now, if these were prosperous times, and these were companies that 
were making money, having record profits, you might be able to make 
that argument. I am not sure how, but you might be able to make it. But 
exactly the opposite is true.
  I think the Senator from Iowa knows as well as I do how many airlines 
have gone bankrupt. The first time I met the Senator from Iowa, we were 
flying together on Ozark Airlines. That goes back a few years. Then we 
were flying together on TWA. That goes back a few years. And these 
airlines are gone. In the last few weeks, another five airlines are 
gone. This is a very risky business with the cost of jet fuel.
  To say: Well, this will not hurt the airlines, another $200 million a 
year, just have them keep overfunding their pension liability is to 
ignore the obvious. As dangerous as it may be to have an unfunded 
pension plan, it is even more dangerous to be working at a company that 
goes into bankruptcy. I have been with companies that have gone through 
this PBGC. They do not always come out whole at the end of the day. 
There are limits on what the PBGC will pay, in terms of outstanding 
benefits to workers. They can end up with less.

[[Page 7384]]

  So what we have is a circumstance where the Finance Committee is 
wanting to roll the dice. They want to bet that American airlines in 
general, not the American Airlines but American airlines in general, 
that do not have frozen benefits plans are going to start making a lot 
of money. They seem to think the price of a barrel of oil is going to 
go down; they think the cost of jet fuel is going to go down; they 
think these airlines are going to be flush with cash and be able to 
overfund their pensions.
  Well, that is one possibility, but you would have to say, looking at 
what has happened over the last several weeks, not very likely; it is 
more likely that airlines will continue to face the pressure of 
increasing energy and fuel costs, more airlines will be flirting with 
bankruptcy, they will be struggling to meet the bottom line.
  United Airlines laid off 1,000 workers last week, a $500 million loss 
in the first quarter. I think it is the largest they have ever 
sustained. Things do not look that rosy.
  What Senator Hutchison and I are saying is be careful. Do not toy 
with the pensions of so many workers. Do not bet the farm, even an Iowa 
corn farm, on the possibility that things are going to get better for 
the airlines. Be conservative. Be careful. But protect the workers in 
the meantime. So as you listen to the Senator from Iowa close and say: 
Well, if you want to put more money in the pension system, vote against 
this amendment. If you want to take money out, vote for it.
  I would say to the Senator, there is only one problem with his 
argument: 150,000 of the 180,000 workers affected by your amendment 
support the Durbin-Hutchison amendment. They believe it is far better 
to maintain the current system of funding, not jeopardize these 
airlines so they might go into bankruptcy, have fair funding that makes 
sure these retirement benefits can continue to be paid. That is a fact.
  When Senator Baucus, the chairman of the committee, came to the floor 
earlier, he said he wants to level the playing field. Well, the current 
law is already unfair. The field is far from level. And section 808 
makes this inequity even worse, even worse.
  It tips the playing field heavily on the side of Delta and Northwest 
at the expense of the other airlines, the five that would be hit by 
this. I urge my colleagues, if we are going to err, let's err on the 
side of caution. Caution tells us: Good funding of the pension 
liabilities in a difficult economic climate, with airlines going into 
bankruptcy, listen to the workers whose pensions are at stake and vote 
for the Durbin-Hutchison amendment.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Salazar). The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I am proud to join Senator Durbin and 
Senator Hutchison, the senior Senator from Texas, along with Senators 
Brown, Voinovich, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, and Senator 
Lautenberg from New Jersey in support of this amendment which would 
strike section 808 of the FAA reauthorization bill.
  I would like to explain why. The 30,000-foot view is, if enacted, it 
would impose a significant and unfair burden on airlines that have done 
the most to provide for secure retirements for their former employees 
or their employees who will retire.
  This amendment will make sure Congress does not jeopardize the 
pensions of 50,000 of my constituents in Texas who depend on the 
airline industry for their retirement, their nest egg, that they will 
retire on when they leave active duty.
  Also, if this amendment is passed, it will relieve a significant 
competitive disadvantage some airlines, not coincidentally a couple 
headquartered in my State, American and Continental, would operate 
under, if the Finance Committee proposal would prevail.
  That is why I support striking section 808 of the FAA authorization 
bill. Section 808 would undermine the ability of some airlines to 
maintain their commitments to their workers at a time when our economy 
is becoming softer and more questions than answers are apparent with 
regard to what our economic future, at least in the short term, is 
going to look like. It would reduce the financial flexibility of 
airlines, precisely at a time when they need it the most.
  Now, I think a little refresher on recent history is important. 
Because what has actually happened is, in 2006, the Pension Protection 
Act was passed, and to be blunt about it, what happened is it 
benefitted airlines such as Delta and some others around the country, 
while American and Continental were basically told to wait, there will 
be an opportunity later on to come back to take care of your concerns 
and level the playing field and to eliminate the preferential treatment 
that was given to some other airlines during the Pension Protection Act 
of 2006.
  So patiently we waited. Last year's supplemental appropriations bill 
was the vehicle we used to correct the inequitable treatment created 
for airlines such as Continental and American in the Pension Protection 
Act of 2006. The act included language that is in the supplemental 
appropriations bill, language out of S. 119, that I introduced with 
Senator Hutchison. As I said, it corrected the inequity that was 
earlier created in the Pension Protection Act of 2006.
  But now, section 808 in the Finance Committee provision would simply 
undo the corrective action that Congress undertook in the supplemental 
appropriations bill I mentioned a moment ago. It should not be a part 
of the bill, I would also say, that is about improving and modernizing 
the air traffic control system in this country. Why would we be messing 
with the pensions of 50,000 Texans who depend on those two major 
airlines for their retirement benefits in this bill? It makes no sense.
  I believe it is unfair and would reverse the corrective action we 
were able to accomplish in last year's supplemental appropriations 
bill. I have worked hard, along with my colleagues I mentioned, to make 
sure those folks who work in the airline industry will have a pension 
when they retire. I will continue to do so. I sincerely believe that 
passing the Finance Committee provision, section 808, would jeopardize 
their retirement benefits; could, in all probability, result in more 
airlines becoming bankrupt with tremendous uncertainty injected in 
terms of how their pensions would be protected.
  At a time when airlines and their employees are facing enormous 
challenges, Congress should not pull the carpet out from under their 
feet and get in the business of picking winners and losers by giving 
some airlines preferential treatment over other airlines.
  I wish to extend my gratitude to the Senator from Illinois, Mr. 
Durbin, and my colleague, Senator Hutchison, for their leadership on 
this issue. I am proud to join them in this bipartisan amendment, which 
would strike section 808 of the FAA authorization bill, as I have 
described, and would, I think, make sure that what we do is keep the 
level playing field, not jeopardize the pensions of thousands of 
airline workers and would comport with fundamental fairness and equity.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 15 
minutes as in morning business on the energy crisis taking place in our 
country.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                             Energy Crisis

  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I think virtually everyone in America 
understands our country is in extremely difficult straits; that the 
middle class is collapsing; that poverty is increasing; and that one of 
the immediate factors that is driving so many Americans over the edge 
is outrageously high energy prices.
  This impacts every community in America, but it especially impacts 
rural States such as the State of Vermont, where workers are forced to 
drive long distances to work and end up spending an inordinate amount 
of money at the gas tank.
  It is not uncommon in my State for people to travel 100 miles a day 
to work and back. If you do the arithmetic, you will find that in many 
cases, as oil

[[Page 7385]]

prices and gas price have risen, people today are paying $1,000 a year 
more than a year and a half ago to fill up their gas tanks.
  If you are a worker earning $30,000 or $35,000 a year, and you got a 
3-percent increase in your wages, that is pretty good; in some cases 
all of your wage increase is going down that gas tank. You have to pay 
higher health care costs, higher educational costs, higher property 
taxes, and you are in a lot of trouble, which is why the middle class 
in America is, in fact, shrinking significantly.
  Not only is this a major crisis in terms of what is happening at the 
gas pump, there is also severe worry about what happens next winter 
when people have to fill up their home heating oil furnaces and stay 
warm in the winter in States such as Vermont.
  I can tell you that all over my State, a lot of senior citizens and 
other people are extremely worried about how they are going to stay 
warm next winter with the price of home heating fuel soaring to the 
degree it is.
  Meanwhile, while prices at the gas pump are soaring, while home 
heating oil and diesel fuel are soaring, the profits of huge oil 
companies are going up to recordbreaking levels; hedge fund managers 
make billions speculating on oil futures, and OPEC continues to 
function as a price-fixing cartel in violation of World Trade 
Organization rules.
  The average price for a gallon of gas recently hit a record breaking 
$3.60 a gallon, which has more than doubled since President Bush has 
been in office. The price of diesel fuel is now averaging over $4.17 a 
gallon, which is a $1.36 more than a year ago, and the price of oil is 
well over $114 a barrel. These prices say it all. What they say is we 
have a national emergency on our hands. It is absolutely imperative for 
the Congress to begin to act in order to lessen this onerous burden on 
tens of millions of families. These record-breaking oil and gas prices 
at the pump are impacting not only consumers of oil and gas but, 
obviously, our entire economy. They are impacting family farmers, small 
businesses, airlines, grocery stores, restaurants, tourism and, of 
course, the price of food. This national oil emergency demands both 
short-term and long-term solutions.
  One of the issues that concerns me is, I hear people getting up and 
saying: Long term, we have to transform our energy system away from 
fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. There is 
nobody in the Senate who believes that more than I do. We are on the 
cusp of a major transformation of our energy system. We need an Apollo-
type project to invest heavily in wind, solar, and geothermal energy 
efficiency. We can do that. In the process, we can create millions of 
good-paying jobs. We have made a start in that direction, but we have 
not gone far enough. But to say we must focus on long-term solutions 
does not mean we can ignore the immediate crisis. Yes, we have to break 
our dependency on fossil fuel, but that is not going to solve the 
problem for a worker in Vermont who is paying $3.50 for a gallon of gas 
today. We have to address his and her problem as well. So it is not 
either/or. Yes, we break our dependency on fossil fuel and move to 
sustainable energy, but we also address the crisis of today. We tell 
workers all over this country that we understand they cannot afford to 
pay outrageous prices for gas.
  There have been literally dozens of ideas from both sides of the 
aisle, good ideas, an understanding of the crisis as to why oil prices 
are soaring and also good ideas as to how we might solve the problem. I 
applaud all of those Senators who have come up with ideas. But it seems 
to me if we are going to be successful in helping the average American, 
we have to come forward with a comprehensive package. It is not good 
enough to say: I have an amendment in this bill and I have some 
language in that bill which may come about in 2 years or may never come 
about, and I have something over there. What we need is a comprehensive 
piece of legislation which understands the cause of this crisis is not 
just one thing--it is a multipronged problem which is causing oil 
prices to soar, and we will not solve this crisis through one simple 
action. We need a series of actions, but we have to bring our solutions 
together in a comprehensive package which says to the American people 
if that package is passed, oil and gas prices are going down. That is 
what we need to do.
  I have been working with a number of my colleagues in order to do 
that. Let me briefly talk about what I believe should be in that 
package. It is about four provisions that could play a major role in 
lowering gas prices today. First, we need to impose an excise tax on 
the profits of the oil and gas industry. The American people simply do 
not understand why they are paying record-breaking prices at the pump 
while ExxonMobil has made more profits than any company in history in 
the last 2 years. Last year alone, ExxonMobil made $40 billion in 
profits, and they rewarded their CEO with a $21 million package in 
total compensation. A couple of years ago, they rewarded their former 
CEO, Lee Raymond, with a retirement package of $400 million. But it is 
not ExxonMobil alone. We have seen BP come in the other day with a 63-
percent increase in their profits. Shell made a huge increase in their 
profits.
  Since President Bush has been President, the five largest oil 
companies have made over $595 billion in profits, and that number is 
only going to go up as the oil companies report last quarter's profits. 
Last year alone, the major oil companies made over $155 billion in 
profits. People are sitting at home saying: I can't afford to fill up 
my gas tank to go to work, and ExxonMobil and Conoco and Shell, all the 
big oil companies, are making huge profits. What is the Congress doing 
about it?
  Well, up to now, the truth is, the Congress is doing nothing about 
it. Obviously, the President is not doing anything about it. But I 
think most people understand the President and Vice President are never 
going to do anything to represent the interests of ordinary Americans. 
The question is, what do we do about it? The time is now that we should 
move forward with an excise profits tax. If we enacted a 23-percent 
excise tax on oil company profits, that would bring in about $35 
billion this year. That sum of money would be enough to provide a 6-
month suspension in Federal gas and diesel taxes and would also allow 
States to suspend all or part of their gas and diesel taxes as well. In 
other words, we are not just talking about Federal taxes; we are 
talking about State taxes. That would lower gas prices at the pump by 
almost 37 cents a gallon and up to 48.8 cents for diesel during the 
next 6 months. Is that going to solve all of the problems? No. But if 
you can't afford to get to work right now, it will help. Having an 
excise profits tax on the oil companies is only one of the things we 
should be doing.
  Congress has to also address another area where there is strong 
evidence that speculators, both in hedge funds and in other financial 
institutions, are driving the price of oil to outrageously high levels. 
What we have to address is undoing the so-called Enron loophole. This 
loophole was created in 2000, as part of the Commodities Futures 
Modernization Act. At the behest of Enron lobbyists, a provision in 
that bill was inserted in the dark of night with no congressional 
hearings. Specifically, the Enron loophole exempts electronic energy 
trading from Federal commodities laws. Virtually overnight the loophole 
freed over-the-counter energy trading from Federal oversight 
requirements, opening the door to excessive speculation and energy 
price manipulation. Of course, nobody knows exactly what the impact of 
the Enron loophole is. But we do know huge amounts of money are being 
made, not simply in the production of oil but in driving oil futures 
prices up.
  Let me quote Stephen Simon, a senior vice president of ExxonMobil, on 
April 1, 2008, in recent testimony before the House:

       The price of oil should be about $50 to $55 per barrel.

  Right now it is more than double that. He attributes the addition, 
the almost doubling of the price, to speculation that is taking place.

[[Page 7386]]

  Closing the Enron loophole would subject electronic energy markets to 
proper regulatory oversight by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission 
to prevent price manipulation and excessive speculation. I applaud 
Senators Levin, Feinstein, Dorgan, and others who have focused on this 
issue. In addition to an excise profits tax on the oil companies, we 
must go after the speculation on the part of people within hedge funds 
and in the financial institutions industry who are simply playing 
games, making money, and driving the price of oil up. Those are two 
important steps we must take to lower the price of gas and oil.
  Thirdly, the Bush administration must stop the flow of oil into the 
Strategic Petroleum Reserve and, in fact, release oil from this Federal 
stockpile. At a time of record-breaking prices, it makes no sense to 
continue to take oil off the market and put it into the Strategic 
Petroleum Reserve. This is not just my opinion. We have seen staff at 
the Strategic Petroleum Reserve recommend against buying more oil for 
the SPR in the spring of 2002. This is not a new idea. The truth is, 
this is an idea that has been used before under Democratic and 
Republican administrations. For example, when President Clinton ordered 
the release of 30 million barrels of crude oil from the SPR in 2000, 
the price of gas fell by 14 cents a gallon in 2 weeks. When the first 
President Bush released 13 million barrels of crude oil from SPR in 
1991, crude oil prices dropped by over $10 a barrel. This is an 
approach which has been used in the past. It has worked in the past, 
and it is something we should do right now. That is the third provision 
I believe we should undertake.
  Further, and in terms of where I think the comprehensive package 
should be, we must begin to address the OPEC cartel. I hear a lot of 
folks around here talk about the wonders of the free market and 
capitalism and free enterprise. But every single Member of the Senate 
understands that by definition, OPEC is a cartel. That is what they 
are. They are a group of oil-producing nations that come together to 
control oil production, to limit oil production, and, therefore, to 
artificially raise the price of oil. That is what a cartel is, and that 
is what OPEC is doing.
  In that regard, we have to do two things. No. 1, the President must 
file a complaint with the World Trade Organization. The truth is, OPEC 
itself is a violation of the rules of the WTO which is presumably about 
creating the free flow of goods and free trade. On the surface, OPEC is 
in violation of those rules and agreements. The second thing we must do 
is to tell people in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, people whom American 
soldiers died for in 1991, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait: 
Friendship is a two-way street. We protected you in 1991. Now the 
United States economy and much of the world's economy is in serious 
trouble. What you, Saudi Arabia, have to do is increase the production 
of oil.
  My understanding is that right now Saudi Arabia is producing less oil 
than they did 2 years ago. There are experts who believe Saudi Arabia 
can produce almost 2 million barrels a day of oil more than they are 
currently producing.
  So that is where we are. Where we are right now is, we have a 
national crisis. We have working people suffering and wondering about 
how they are going to be able to afford to get to work or keep warm in 
the wintertime, at the same time as oil companies are enjoying 
recordbreaking profits, and at the same time as speculators are making 
billions and billions of dollars in profits.
  Now, it is no secret--everybody knows--that the oil and gas industry 
is enormously powerful. Everybody understands these people have spent 
hundreds of millions of dollars in the last 10 years on lobbying, and 
we know their lobbyists are hard at work at this very moment. We know 
those people have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in 
campaign contributions. That is the reality and that is the American 
political system. That is the way it is. It is a system we have to 
change, but that is the way it is.
  I think the time is now for the Congress and for the Senate to begin 
to stand up to these very powerful special interests. I think we need a 
comprehensive energy approach, and I have outlined it. I think we need 
a long-term approach moving away from fossil fuels to sustainable 
energy. I think we need a short-term approach, and I have outlined the 
four provisions I believe should be in it.
  Let me conclude by saying this: The crisis we are facing as a nation 
is not just an energy crisis. It is a crisis as to whether the American 
people have faith in their own Government, in the people they elect. It 
is no secret that the President's approval ratings are perhaps as low 
as any President in American history, and the approval ratings of this 
Congress are even lower. That is the simple reality.
  We are a democratic society. When people have problems, they look to 
their elected officials to respond to those problems and, hopefully, to 
address them. If we cannot do that, I am not quite sure why we are 
here. If the oil companies and the gas companies are so powerful with 
all of their money and their lobbyists and their campaign contributions 
that we cannot address the crisis facing working Americans, well, maybe 
we should rethink about what we do here.
  But I think we can do something, and I have outlined what I think is 
a series of ideas that, if passed, would address, in a very significant 
way, this crisis. I look forward to working with my colleagues to do 
just that.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business for 10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                           Foreclosure Crisis

  Mrs. MURRAY. Thank you, Mr. President.
  Mr. President, as I come to the floor to speak this afternoon, 
millions of Americans are struggling to hold on to their homes in the 
wake of the foreclosure crisis. Thousands of them have lost their jobs, 
just in the last couple of months. Millions more are finding it harder 
just to get by because sky-high oil prices are forcing many of our 
families to pay more at the pump, more at the grocery store, and more 
in their power bills.
  Yet while all of these working families are scrimping so hard today, 
the economic downturn has not even registered for one segment of 
America--big oil. The major oil companies reported their profits this 
week, and they are seeing record increases.
  ConocoPhillips reported first quarter profits of $4.1 billion. That 
beats their previous record by $600 million. Shell and BP are also 
reporting huge gains.
  Americans do not have to look very hard to figure out where the 
responsibility lies--why oil companies are seeing their profits soar--
while working families are watching their bank accounts bottom out. 
Over the last 7\1/2\ years, Republicans have backed an energy policy 
that does very little but gives big oil companies tax breaks and 
special favors. Meanwhile, our middle-class families today are paying 
the price, and they know it.
  In the first month of the Bush administration, oil prices averaged 
$29.50 a barrel. Almost 8 years later, that price has quadrupled. It is 
almost $120 a barrel this week.
  When President Bush first took office, Americans were paying just 
$1.46 a gallon to fill their gas tanks. Last week, gas prices averaged 
a whopping $3.60 a gallon.
  I went home last week--like I always do--to Washington State, where 
drivers are paying even more. A gallon of gas in Seattle, WA, costs 
$3.70; up in Bellingham, near the Canadian border, $3.80.
  Families across my State are telling me they are cutting back on 
everything from shopping errands to summer vacations, and they are 
pretty

[[Page 7387]]

angry they have to pinch their pennies while oil companies are making 
record profits.
  When I travel around my State, gas prices are one of the first things 
people come up and talk to me about. They have written me countless 
letters about this.
  For example, there is a stay-at-home mom from Yakima, WA, who wrote 
me that she worries every single day because her husband now has 
started riding a motorcycle to work instead of his car in order to save 
money on their gas bill. She wrote to me, and I want to read to you 
what she said. She said:

       It is unnerving to think of him riding his motorcycle after 
     working a 10-plus hour shift. . . . It does not seem fair 
     that my middle class family has to choose between paying the 
     doctor--or putting gas in [our] car--while oil companies are 
     making record profits.

  High gas prices are not just affecting our drivers. Industries from 
shipping to trucking to commercial fishing in my State are all hurting. 
Our farmers in Washington State are especially concerned. We have 
thousands of farmers in Washington State. They grow everything from 
apples to wheat. They have to plow their fields and harvest their 
crops. Cutting back is not an option for them. They have no choice but 
to absorb the cost of fuel.
  One woman--from the southern Washington farming community of 
Goldendale--just wrote to me that she and her husband are finding it 
hard to pay for groceries. I want to quote what she said:

       We, the little people, are struggling. Meanwhile, the gas 
     companies are still netting billions. When is it going to 
     stop? Something needs to be done to stop the nonsense.

  That is how a farmer's wife from southwest Washington sees it.
  Republicans have supported the energy policy of tax breaks for the 
oil companies because, they say, oil prices would be higher without 
them. But even President Bush said that was not true. In April of 2006, 
he said:

       Congress has got to understand that these energy companies 
     don't need unnecessary tax breaks like the write-offs of 
     certain geological and geophysical expenditures--or the use 
     of taxpayers' monies to subsidize energy companies' research 
     into deep-water drilling.

  That was President Bush.
  The reality is, not only have Republicans allowed oil companies to 
make record profits while gas prices have soared, but their policies 
have made us more dependent on foreign oil than ever before. That has 
put our economy and our national security at risk. The amount of money 
we have sent to OPEC countries, such as Saudi Arabia, has skyrocketed 
from $41 billion to $140 billion since 2001. Just this week, the 
president of OPEC said oil prices could go as high as $200 a barrel.
  Now, I come to the floor to talk about this today because over the 
last several days we have seen a parade of Republican Senators coming 
to the floor complaining about high gas prices. In many cases, they 
have been blaming Democrats for failing to address this crisis over the 
past 16 months. They are bringing out charts that show the price of gas 
when Democrats took over in Congress and the price now, and they ask 
all of us to simply forget the real reason for this crisis; that is, 
the misguided energy policy this administration has pursued for over 6 
years.
  But I have to tell you, the people in my State and the American 
people are not going to forget. They are not going to forget it was 
this administration that asked oil and gas companies to write that 
energy plan. They are not going to forget that the only real idea 
coming from the other side is to drill our way out of this problem. And 
they will not forget this is an administration closer to the oil and 
gas industry than any in U.S. history.
  Now, we are not going to forget either, and that is why we are 
fighting for change. We have already won higher fuel economy standards 
and new investments in renewable energy sources. We all know we need to 
do more. We know that Americans cannot rely on big oil to solve our 
energy problems.
  People in my home State of Washington are worried. They are worried 
about the future. They want to be sure their kids are going to have 
economic security. They want a solution to our energy problems that is 
going to keep us safe and protect our environment for the long term. 
Democrats have been fighting for policies that will help cut our gas 
prices, help to create jobs, and help keep our air and our water clean 
and, importantly, our Nation secure. We are going to keep up that 
fight. We know it is not going to be easy. The oil companies and those 
who support them are not going to give up on the status quo. Still, I 
hope our friends on the other side of the aisle will see what I see 
when I go home: Americans have had enough. I hope they will join us in 
investing in America's future and putting our working families first 
again.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Menendez). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  (The remarks of Mr. Kennedy are located in today's Record under 
``Morning Business.'')
  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. Presdient, 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. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  The Senator from New York is recognized.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask you to let me know when I have 
spoken for 10 minutes.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Chair will advise.


                                 Energy

  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I rise today to address a serious issue 
and that is the dramatically rising cost of energy and its impact on 
American families. The problem with rising gas prices compounds the 
pain felt in the American economy. Today we learned the economy had 
stalled to a paltry .6-percent growth rate. If you factor out the 
highest 10 percent in income, the remaining 90 percent of Americans are 
clearly experiencing a recession. Only people at the very high end--the 
wealthiest, the best educated, by and large--are experiencing 
significant increases in income, and when you factor that out, 
everybody else is experiencing decreases in income. The vast majority 
of Americans are already in a recession, and they do not need any 
statistic to tell them that.
  It is also obvious from today's data that the entire economy has 
stalled. The last time we had two significant quarters such as this, we 
were battling a recession in the 1990s. Americans are being squeezed at 
every possible pressure point--at the gas pump--I am going to talk 
about this issue later--the grocery store, by their mortgage company, 
and by their employers. Just because President Bush will not say the 
word does not mean Americans are not feeling like we are in a 
recession. If we look at income numbers for most Americans, that is 
absolutely true.
  It is long past time for the President to work with the Congress to 
help get this economy and American families back on track. If President 
Bush simply gives speeches and brings out the same old saws, we know he 
does not want to work with us. He is simply trying to say: I am out 
here talking about this, but there is no real solution. Imagine, the 
solution to the oil crisis is ANWR, the Alaskan oil reserve, which has 
been defeated even in a Republican-controlled Congress, which would not 
produce a drop of oil for 10 years and would bring no relief to the 
American driver. But I guess it is better than saying nothing, at least 
if you are the President of the United States.
  With regular gasoline prices in States such as mine already over 
$3.75 a gallon--over $4 a gallon in many other States--and with the 
entire national average threatening to surpass

[[Page 7388]]

$4 a gallon this summer, it is no surprise Americans are outraged as 
they hear about record profits for both the big oil companies and OPEC. 
Sometimes I wonder if there is any difference because OPEC and the big 
oil companies are almost always in cahoots.
  Gas prices are 63 cents higher than last year, more than double in 
the time since President Bush took office, and they show no intention 
of slowing down. Shockingly, our very own President responded with a 
surprise to a question at the end of February about the likelihood of 
$4-a-gallon gasoline by saying:

       That's interesting. I hadn't heard that.

  Well, Mr. President, I hope you hear us now because gas is at $4 a 
gallon already in many places in America, and it is only going higher. 
The only people who are happy about $4-a-gallon gasoline are big oil 
companies and OPEC in the Middle East.
  We know the reason prices keep going up, of course, is in good part, 
world demand is increasing. We know, too, in the long run, we will not 
be able to reverse this price increase if we do not have a real energy 
policy. In fact, we have had no energy policy since President Bush took 
office. If you think it is energy policy to say let the oil companies 
do what they want, you are sadly mistaken. That is why we have $4-a-
gallon gasoline.
  This administration's energy policy is simply of, by, and for big oil 
and OPEC, of course, their partners, their buddies benefit. So in the 
long run, we need a comprehensive plan. We need conservation--that is 
the cheapest and easiest way to get lower prices--and we need new 
production of alternatives and also, in a reasonable and sound 
environmental way, new production of fossil fuels in America.
  But we are also looking for some short-term ways to reduce the price 
of gasoline because even should we embark on a long-term energy policy 
that makes sense--and I am hopeful under the next administration, the 
new President, she or he, will make sure that happens--there are things 
we can at least attempt to do in the short term because people cannot 
wait 4, 5, 6 years to begin reducing the price. Even if tomorrow we 
were to implement a comprehensive policy, it would not be enough, it 
would not happen quickly enough.
  So what can be done in the short term? One of the most important 
things that could be done quickly in the short term is to increase 
supply in existing reserves. The one country that has ample supply and 
has held back is our good ``ally''--and I use that word in quotes--the 
Saudis. The Saudis should begin to understand that their relationship 
with America is a two-way street. They want our weapons, they want our 
troops to provide them with protection, but then they rake us over the 
coals when it comes to the price of oil.
  The Saudis and big oil are in cahoots, and this administration has 
coddled both of them for far too long. There is no better evidence of 
this cozy cooperation than BP and Shell reporting record earnings this 
week and ExxonMobil and others on deck to do the same.
  The bottom line--the sad bottom line--is the whole Bush tax cut for 
middle-class families this year will line the pockets of OPEC. Let me 
repeat that. The whole Bush tax cut for middle-class families this year 
will line the pockets of OPEC. People will pay out more because of the 
increase in energy prices than they got back on any tax rebate. The 
stimulus checks we are all so proud people are receiving, the stimulus 
checks families will receive in the mail next month will, in all 
likelihood, go to paying eye-popping gas and grocery bills this summer 
and end up in the coffers of countries such as Saudi Arabia. Therefore, 
people will pay more for gasoline this year than they will receive from 
their stimulus checks. It is galling to think our stimulus checks will 
be lining the pockets of OPEC.
  Yet despite all this, last week, Saudi Arabia's Oil Minister said 
there was no need to increase supplies by even one barrel of oil. 
However, as they are saying no, no, no to U.S. consumers, the Saudis 
are planning to double oil production for China.
  Despite record billion-dollar profits, it seems the big oil 
producers, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, 
are willing to turn a blind eye to the supply demands and leave 
Americans with skyrocketing prices at the pump. In Saudi's case, they 
have not produced as much oil in the last 2 years as they did in 2005.
  I urge my colleagues to take a look at this chart when they get a 
chance because it says it all. Here is Saudi oil production in 2005. It 
is lower in 2006 and lower still in 2007. This is not new production 
they have to explore for, this is not something where they have to 
change things around. They can order the new production and we could 
have millions of extra barrels of oil a day out there in the markets 
within a month or two, and the price would come down significantly.
  The countries are putting profits straight into their pockets. So 
that is why I, along with four others of my colleagues, have demanded 
the Bush administration stipulate that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab 
Emirates, and Kuwait must increase their oil production or risk that 
Congress will block their lucrative arms deals while they stick it to 
American consumers at the gas pump.
  The administration has proposed selling roughly $14 billion in arms 
to gulf countries that are members of OPEC, and it is clear to us that 
without pressure from this administration, oil prices will continue to 
rise as countries such as Saudi Arabia will continue to reap the reward 
of high prices.
  It is terrible that this administration, after making the American 
taxpayer foot the bill for its war in Iraq, is now rewarding the very 
countries that are driving up the price of oil.
  Congress has the authority to block these arms deals, and we want to 
put the administration on notice that if they fail to deal aggressively 
with OPEC countries that are not producing at their full capacity, we 
will seriously consider blocking this and other arms deals.
  On their face, I question the merit of these deals, $14 billion in 
arms, but it is particularly egregious when Americans are paying 
through the nose to put money in the pockets of the administration's 
friends in the Middle East. OPEC nations may have to protect themselves 
with these weapons systems, but American consumers and our economy also 
need protection from high oil prices, exacerbated by OPEC's 
stranglehold on supply.
  The administration needs to use all the leverage it has to influence 
the OPEC cartel to stop manipulating the world's oil supply to its 
member nations.
  Again, to those who say we cannot do anything in the short term to 
reduce prices, look again at this chart. Saudi production in 2005, 
Saudi production in 2006, Saudi production in the last full year we 
have numbers for, 2007, it is lower and lower. The Saudis have not kept 
the supply flat; they have decreased it at a time when the world is 
thirsty for oil.
  At a time when the world is thirsty for oil, we know they are driving 
down supply, increasing the price. Yesterday, President Bush said there 
is not much you can do about the price of oil. Mr. President, we beg to 
differ. Get your friends, the Saudis, get your close buddy, the King of 
Saudi Arabia, to begin producing more oil. If they produce half a 
million more barrels of oil a day, the price would come down a very 
significant amount and at the same time it would stop the speculation 
that keeps driving up the price of oil. We would get a double benefit.
  We need to ask ourselves what the economic consequences are for our 
Nation--not only from the long and expensive war in Iraq but from this 
administration's cozy relationship with the only international 
organization he seems to have any high regard for--OPEC.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Texas is 
recognized.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, we have been talking about the Durbin-

[[Page 7389]]

Hutchison amendment during most of the day. I have heard some of the 
debate going back and forth. I want to address some of the issues 
raised in the debate, trying to stop our amendment from going forward.
  First, let me say I so appreciate Senator Durbin joining with me to 
make sure we have a bipartisan effort that stands for the companies 
that are trying desperately to keep their defined benefit plans for 
pensions for their employees.
  These airlines that are doing this are doing it at the same time that 
the price of jet fuel has gone up exponentially. For instance, since 
January 2007, a little bit more than 1 year ago, the price of jet fuel 
has increased 107 percent. Continental Airlines' year-over-year 
increase in fuel costs is approaching $2 billion. This year, American 
Airlines' fuel bill is going to be $9.3 billion. Everybody who is 
driving an automobile to their job or to pick up their children from 
school knows how much it costs to fill up the tank of a car. Just 
multiply that for an airline whose entire business is flying back and 
forth across the country and across the globe. You can imagine what 
that does to the bottom line of a business.
  Here we are, looking at actually three airlines that are trying to 
make their benefits the most generous they can be while they are 
looking at rising fuel prices that are about to sink them. They are all 
showing unprofitable months and quarters. Now we have legislation 
coming forward that would take away a law that was passed last year 
that attempted to equalize the airlines that have benefit plans that 
are defined benefits and plans that are defined contributions, which 
are 401(k)s. We want to keep the playing field as level as we can. If 
you put on top of that the fact that the timing of this could not be 
worse because of the rising fuel costs, it is just impossible to 
imagine that the Senate will do this.
  The underlying provision, it has been suggested, would have no effect 
on the bottom line. Of course it is going to have an effect on the 
bottom line. It requires full funding of pension obligations, 
irrespective of past overfunding. In plain English, the carrier must 
come up with more cash, even if they have overpaid. According to one 
carrier, the new cash demand would be $1 billion over the next 3 years. 
Where are we going to find that amount of cash?
  Domestic fare increases are not even covering the rising cost of 
fuel. As compared to January 2007, the price of jet fuel was 65 percent 
higher and domestic average fares have risen 9 percent. You are 
beginning to see they are not going to be able to recover this at the 
fare box. But if we pass this legislation requiring one airline, 
instead of putting in $80 million, to put in $350 million, how is it 
going to offset those higher costs? There is only one way, and that is 
higher ticket prices. Are we going to pass a law that is going to raise 
ticket prices at a time when the airlines--and every American--are 
feeling the pinch of this economy? I cannot even imagine we would do 
that.
  I have also heard it argued that the provision in the bill that we 
are trying to eliminate is fair. The truth is the current law is 
equitable and fair. Changing the current law in the manner suggested 
would treat two carriers differently from the other carriers that do 
not have defined benefit plans. We had the equity debate. The current 
law is the product of that debate. Ask the carriers if they think the 
current law is equitable. They will say yes.
  The carriers that are not affected by this have told me they are 
agnostic on this issue. They are not pushing for a competitive 
advantage because I think all the carriers know that this is not the 
time that anybody wants to go into bankruptcy and they do not even want 
their competitors to go into bankruptcy because we can't handle the 
commerce in this country without the airlines we have operating without 
a disruption.
  We settled this debate. We settled it in 2006. It was undone. We 
settled it again in 2007. The law we passed must be adhered to because 
these businesses made decisions based on the law.
  The employees of these airlines will be the biggest losers if this 
bill is allowed to stand with this provision in it. Senator Durbin and 
I are trying to take this provision out to protect the employees and 
to, hopefully, keep the airlines from having a hit they cannot take 
right now.
  I have heard the argument on this floor that the amendment we are 
putting forth would mean less money to employee pensions. It is exactly 
the opposite. The carriers that are hurt by this provision are trying 
to do the right thing by maintaining their pensions and providing their 
employees with strong retirement benefits. In fact, these impacted 
carriers have been prepaying their pension obligations in good years, 
showing their employees they are committed to these benefits. The 
excess contributions helped ensure that, in tough times, if cash 
becomes tight, the pensions of these hard-working employees are 
protected and funded. If the pension rules are changed to disallow the 
flexibility of using past excess contributions, they will actually 
discourage overfunding of pensions. The carriers will only provide the 
minimum contributions in order to preserve cash in difficult times.
  Some have challenged this claim on the belief that cash contributed 
to pensions can be pulled out in tough times, so they wouldn't be in 
any way discouraged from overcontributing to pensions. But this is not 
true. Once cash is contributed to the pension plans, it cannot be taken 
out. In fact, that is one of the reasons the current law allows 
companies to offset ongoing pension costs with previous overfunding. If 
they couldn't do it, a company would never put extra cash into pension 
funds. Instead, they would put it in a bank account where they could 
get it out. In the end, a carrier would never contribute in excess to 
the plan because they just couldn't do it.
  Employees are at risk with the underlying provision we are trying to 
take out. The cash demands this language places on the carrier trying 
to secure solid pension benefits for its employees will simply be too 
high. If we destabilize this environment, we could very well jeopardize 
the ability of these carriers to weather the current storm, and the 
outcome would be devastating to employees. Bankruptcy is not kind to 
employees. Ask any person who has worked for a company that has gone 
into bankruptcy. Whether it is their present livelihood or their 
pensions, the employees would lose. That is why they support striking 
this provision with our amendment.
  The current pension laws for air carriers are fair and equitable. 
They do not need changes. They especially do not need changes 
retroactively, after they have made decisions to overfund pension plans 
based on the law as it is today. The change could lead to disastrous 
consequences for impacted carriers and especially for their employees.
  Why would we take such a risk? We should be doing everything to help 
these companies during difficult operating environments, not 
destabilizing them, not giving advantages to some in the industry.
  No one in the industry is asking for this. This is something that has 
come up seemingly because there were process arguments about what bill 
the fix went into. The bill that the fix went into was the only 
available bill where you could put an amendment, and the amendment had 
been given to all of the relevant committees, so they knew what we were 
trying to do. There was nothing hidden. There was nothing sudden. 
Everybody knew we were going to try to correct the inequities, as we 
have all negotiated at the table to do. If you ask any of the carriers 
I have spoken to, no one is asking for this to be retroactively fixed 
in a different way from the present law, a law that has been relied on.
  The bottom line is some airlines have overfunded their pension 
obligations because they had cash and that is where they wanted to put 
it, to assure employees of a safe and sound pension system, more than 
the law required. American Airlines is 115 percent funded. But that was 
always done because, under the present law, you had the flexibility to 
just catch up with the current obligations with a credit for the 
overobligation as these airlines are

[[Page 7390]]

working out their pension plans according to the law we passed last 
year and the year before.
  I hope we can get a vote on the Durbin-Hutchison amendment. The 
members of the committee who have worked on this--the Commerce 
Committee, Senator Rockefeller, the chairman of the Aviation 
Committee--have been very supportive of us having our bill, which we 
worked so hard in a bipartisan way to produce, which has such good 
effects for the aviation industry, not to be hobbled by an extraneous 
issue that has been put in by another committee that does not have the 
aviation jurisdiction but is a tax committee.
  I hope we will keep the underlying bill, which is very solid. Senator 
Rockefeller and I, Senator Inouye, and Senator Stevens have worked very 
hard. We have a great bill. It is a bill that will fund more safety 
measures. It will put more inspectors in the FAA. It is a bill that has 
a passengers bill of rights--Senator Boxer has worked on this for a 
long time. It will assure that passengers who are stranded in a plane 
that cannot take off will have accommodations for comfort or they will 
be able to get off the airplane--something we have never had before.
  It is a bill that will modernize the traffic control system so we 
will have more service in our country. This bill has so many good 
features. I hope we can pass the Durbin-Hutchison amendment that will 
keep the bill intact that was hammered out by the Commerce Committee 
and not have it taken down by a tax bill, most of which has nothing to 
do with aviation at all.
  The aviation part of the bill is great. It is a good, solid 
compromise. But the pension and the extraneous provisions are going to 
sink this bill, and it will be a sad day for the consumers in the 
aviation system in this country if that happens.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from West Virginia.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  The Senator from West Virginia is recognized.


             Fifth Anniversary of ``Mission Accomplished''

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, tomorrow we mark the fifth anniversary of 
the now infamous ``Mission Accomplished'' speech which was delivered by 
President Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003.
  Five years ago, I took issue with the President's choreographed 
political theatrics because I believed then that our military forces 
deserved to be treated with respect and dignity, and not used as stage 
props to embellish a Presidential speech.
  The President's declaration of ``Mission Accomplished'' and the ``end 
of major combat operations'' proved wildly premature and dangerously 
naive. The complete lack of foresight and planning by the President for 
what lay ahead became tragically clear in short order. Our Nation 
continues to pay the price every single day. More than 97 percent of 
the more than 4,000 Americans killed in Iraq lost their lives after the 
President's flashy declaration of victory.
  Years from now, I expect that history books will feature the sorry 
``Mission Accomplished'' episode as the epitome of this 
administration's reckless and arrogant foreign policy, which has reaped 
disastrous consequences for our Nation and the world. We have seen a 
President who is eager to use American troops for a political backdrop, 
yet who is seemingly indifferent when it comes to providing those same 
American troops with the equipment they need, quality health care, or a 
real plan for ending this terrible war.
  President Bush has said that history will judge him on his decision 
to go to war in Iraq. I say that history is already delivering its 
verdict. It is evident in the strains of the long and multiple 
deployments that are wearing down our mighty military, and in the 
sufferings of the American people as they bury their fallen heroes. It 
is evident in the fear and distrust with which the rest of the world 
views us, and in the instability wracking the Middle East, Iraq, and 
Afghanistan as a result of the Bush policies.
  President Bush has recklessly squandered more than 200 years of 
American leadership, American good will, and prosperity. If that is 
what he was aiming for when he took office, then he can claim ``Mission 
Accomplished.'' That is his legacy. As we write the next chapter in our 
Nation's history, let us commit to building a new legacy that restores 
the promise of America, both at home and around the world.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. McCaskill). The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. 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. ROCKEFELLER. Madam President, I wish to inform the Presiding 
Officer of a quandary. We have in front of us a bill which would come 
close to rescuing the aviation industry of the United States of 
America. It is a bill that the aviation industry supports. It is a bill 
that the general aviation community supports. But it is not supported 
by a couple of Senators, with their reasons, and we find ourselves, 
therefore, in a position not to be able to move forward in the short 
term. It is one of those situations when the more you wait, or the 
greater the disagreement, the more people dig in.
  I wish to offer my feelings which are that in a big bill such as 
this, which I think would be the biggest policy bill this Congress has 
passed this year if we were to do it, there are always areas of 
disagreement. The trick is to work out those areas of disagreement. 
That is what the floor of the Senate is for. That is what negotiations 
are for.
  But I do want people to understand that in the interests of 
protecting certain prerogatives, protocols, our aviation industry as a 
whole is being ignored and thereby threatened. If we were to put up 
some purportedly helpful amendments, we have no idea at this point how 
they might turn out. So there are really a couple of people who control 
this entire situation. As long as they remain negative, there is very 
little we can do that we can count on turning into success.
  The aviation industry, just in my State, as I have explained a number 
of times, is a $3.4 billion industry that employs 51,000 people. That 
is something almost nobody does in a State as small as West Virginia. 
But we have to work this through. Everybody can't come out an exact 
winner. If I were to line up one side versus another side, I think 
having an aviation industry, giving them the confidence to go forward, 
the passing of this bill would be like an increase in their bond 
rating, certainly psychologically, and it would give them the 
confidence that we are trying to do the right thing by them.
  In doing that, we have held all of the commercial aviation airlines 
harmless so they will not have to pay any more fuel tax than they do 
today, which is about $10.7 billion, and adding a small portion of fuel 
tax on to the general aviation industry so they would be paying about a 
billion dollars.
  We found a mechanism, being clever but correct, to actually raise 
$400 million a year for the life of this bill. Of course, there would 
have to be other bills to get us on our way to building a $20 billion 
to $30 billion to $40 billion air traffic control system which is 
sufficient for the needs of the aviation industry. I know the Presiding 
Officer has an amendment which I would support, and there are others 
who have--they just don't want to--I don't know how to put it, but they 
just don't want to lose their position in all of this.
  So the question is, What do we do? I am just here to report that we 
are hard

[[Page 7391]]

at work. Everybody is working feverishly in back rooms--that is in a 
good sense--the Democratic and Republican cloakrooms. Senator Hutchison 
and I are in precise agreement on all of this, and it is a bipartisan 
bill. It has enormous consequences to the economy of America, to the 
passengers who are held hostage by delays and maintenance problems. 
Sixty-eight rural States have had airports entirely removed from 
service which were previously served. It is very painful if you are 
from a rural State. It sort of defines the meaning of being cut off 
from the rest of the world. That is not important to some people, but 
it is very important to those of us who come from a rural State, and to 
be quite frank, every one of us comes from a rural State in some part.
  So what I am saying is, the stakes are extraordinarily high. It is, 
in my judgment, and on a bipartisan basis, an amazingly one-sided case. 
You protect your legacies; that is, your commercial airlines, you get 
the support of the general aviation community which has an enormous 
number of airplanes with millions more to come, and you get the 
financing to start on an air traffic control system which is behind 
that of, as I have said today several times, Mongolia. Landing aircraft 
by ground radio and x-rays is not really the way to run a safe system. 
We have had so many close collisions that have been averted only at the 
last moment by air traffic control folks and very quick-witted pilots. 
Hundreds and hundreds of deaths could have easily resulted.
  So I think it is a choice of the people doing the negotiating or the 
people who want to block the people who are doing the negotiating to 
think in very clear terms about what is important. Is it pride? Is it 
the future of the aviation industry? We haven't passed any bills in 
Congress on our side, and this would be a major accomplishment. But 
that is not important. The importance is it would save an aviation 
industry, and they believe that because the bill carries on for a 
number of years. They would begin to get their safe landing system.
  So people must be wondering what is going on, and I just wanted to 
report that people are at work, hopefully in good faith, trying to get 
a parliamentary situation or an amendment situation or whatever that 
works our way through this crisis.
  In the meantime, we are on hold. I wanted to make that report to the 
Senate.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MENENDEZ. 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. MENENDEZ. Madam President, our Nation depends on our system of 
air travel to do business, to visit family and friends, to connect us 
with the world. We depend on the Federal Government to keep an eye on 
that system and to make sure air travel is as safe as humanly possible. 
But over the last 7 years, the American people's trust in the Federal 
Aviation Administration has come crashing down. When we learned that 
the FAA had allowed hundreds of flights on planes with cracks in them, 
that was just the latest abuse of our trust.
  It seems as if we are finding new regulatory problems in American 
aviation every day. With every new headline and every whistleblower who 
comes forward, we learn that something else has gone wrong--something 
that could inconvenience us, at best and, at worst, claim human lives. 
Meanwhile, the FAA is enveloped in a cloud of cronyism and neglect. 
Whether we are talking about managing delays, maintaining safety, or 
managing its employee relations, the FAA has constantly let us all down 
and put us all at risk.
  Last month, we found out that Southwest Airlines was allowing dozens 
of planes to take off without inspection. We found out American 
Airlines was flying planes for weeks that had potentially dangerous 
wiring problems. When the news got out, thousands of Americans saw 
their flights canceled while airlines scrambled to comply with safety 
guidelines they should have been following all along.
  Why did it take so long for the FAA to notice?
  A few weeks ago, one FAA employee testified before Congress that when 
he found out these planes were flying with cracks and complained about 
it, Southwest contacted the FAA, and he was removed--removed--from his 
role of overseeing the airline. Other employees who complained were 
encouraged to transfer or removed from their posts.
  Now, what is the FAA--the Federal Aviation Administration--supposed 
to be doing? Job 1, it seems to me, is to ensure the safety of the 
flying public. I know they have this dual mission. I have always 
wondered about that dual mission of safety and promoting the industry--
the other mission. But safety is job 1--job 1.
  When they take employees who come forward and say: Look, there are 
cracks, maybe we should not let this airplane take off, or a series of 
airplanes take off, and because the company objects, it gets them 
hauled off of the job, or when others come forth and they are told: 
Well, maybe you should consider transferring, it simply undermines the 
very essence of what is job 1. The message that was sent is: If you are 
an inspector, don't do your job too well or you will lose it.
  Those are not the only safety concerns. The people of my home State 
of New Jersey have reason to be worried about safety at our airports. 
We just learned that Teterboro Airport, which is one of the small but 
one of the busiest airports we have in the region, has one of the 
highest numbers of near-misses in the country. A few months ago, at 
Newark Airport, two planes came within seconds of crashing into each 
other. There was a similar incident in December and three near-misses 
last May. How many serious close calls do we have to live through 
before the FAA takes this problem seriously?
  Not only is the FAA failing to do due diligence on behalf of the 
people in the air, they have risked the well-being of people on the 
ground as well.
  A while back, the FAA decided to redesign the airspace around some 
New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania airports. Now, I have been a big 
supporter of airspace redesign since when I was first in the House on 
the Transportation Committee. We live in the most congested airspace in 
the Nation. We are in somewhat of a straitjacket. But the redesign 
should have been done in such a way that not only did we do something 
about delays, which this redesign does not do very much about, but it 
should not have the pounding decibels of noise upon communities that 
this new redesign does.
  They decided to change the flightpaths--and it is fair to do that 
every now and then--but they forgot one thing: They forgot to listen to 
the people who are going to be flown over. When they rearranged the 
flightpaths, the FAA simply did not account for air noise and how it 
affects people's lives. I am not talking about simply being bothered by 
a little noise. I am talking about the pounding and pounding and 
pounding of decibel levels that actually affect hearing.
  Some of the communities have populations that are least likely to be 
able to be in a position to do something about it. They forgot about 
people such as Ray Bennett, who lives in Westville, NJ. He has lived 
there for nearly 40 years. In all those years, he could not remember a 
single plane flying directly overhead, especially at low altitudes. 
Now, since the FAA rushed to implement this plan, not only is there 
noise, but it is noise that causes his windows to vibrate and keeps him 
up at night. Imagine that. In the comfort of your own home, in a place 
where you should be able to find your own peace and quiet with your 
family, one day the Government decides to turn the volume level way up 
by running jet planes over your house regularly. Ray has seriously 
thought about moving out of his home, and it is hard to blame him. This 
is not a case of one or two isolated households. Planes are now flying 
directly over the center of the city of

[[Page 7392]]

Elizabeth, NJ, affecting tens of thousands of people.
  The effects go beyond annoyance. It can cost people money by reducing 
property values. In the midst of a nationwide housing crisis, in a time 
when far too many New Jerseyans are facing foreclosure, skyrocketing 
electricity and home heating costs, and the specter of $4 per gallon 
gasoline, the last thing they need is for air noise to bring down their 
property values.
  It is almost no wonder that we are seeing this agency become so out 
of touch, considering how toxic the working environment there has been. 
In addition to the FAA's questionable safety record, there is also the 
issue of its hostile relationship with its own employees. Experienced 
air traffic controllers are leaving their jobs at an alarming rate, and 
the FAA is struggling to attract, train, and keep new ones. But instead 
of trying to work with the unions to try to finally implement a 
contract, they fan the flames by publicly suggesting that if the 
controllers do not like working for the FAA, they should reconsider 
their line of work. With this kind of working environment, it is no 
wonder we have a shortage of experienced controllers working to keep 
our skies safe.
  We are talking about increasingly--and I fly, obviously, quite a bit, 
certainly to my home State of New Jersey through Newark International. 
But in the whole region, and across the country, where we have 
controllers--trainees, I should say. They are still not fully 
controllers. It takes about 5 years to fully train a controller. 
Trainees can only do part of the segment necessary, whether it be on 
takeoffs, whether it be on landings, or whether it be about controlling 
the airspace, as delays take place and aircraft are made to be put in 
holding patterns.
  So imagine you and your family are up in an airplane and you are 
dealing with, increasingly, individuals who do not have the full 
certification to do all of these elements together, which is what we 
would like to see--for them to have the expertise. Because we can spend 
all the money in the world--and I appreciate the bill does move us 
forward in modernization and technology, and that is critically 
important--but at the end of the day, we can have the best technology 
in the world, but if, in fact, we do not have the human capital to make 
that technology work successfully, then, in fact, we have failed. That 
human capital happens to be the air traffic controllers. At the end of 
the day, all the technology in the world will be used by those 
individuals. Human capital in this regard is incredibly important. The 
FAA has disdain for them. I believe they are the critical nexus to the 
safety of the flying public. So you are seeing a system that is on a 
path to becoming slower and less safe because experienced personnel are 
colliding with management.
  When you have problems that are so widespread and an institutional 
culture that shows no sense of urgency, it is not just about one 
employee or another, it is about a lack of leadership. That is why 
Senator Lautenberg, my colleague from New Jersey, and I have placed a 
hold on the nomination of Robert Sturgell as the FAA Administrator, and 
we will continue the hold until the FAA truly addresses these and other 
concerns.
  We have no choice but to use every tool at our disposal to make this 
unresponsive bureaucracy do what is right for the well-being of the 
American public. If the public's concerns are not being addressed at 
the FAA, we will have to make sure they are addressed in Congress.
  Which brings me to this bill. We have an opportunity--and I salute 
Senator Rockefeller and the members of the Commerce Committee who have 
worked with him to bring this bill to the floor--we have a tremendous 
opportunity with this authorization bill to set some things right.
  This bill makes smart investments to make air traffic safer. It 
upgrades our aging airport infrastructure.
  The bill improves the oversight of airlines and the FAA. This 
legislation makes great strides in making air travel safer not only in 
the skies, but on the runways.
  But I also believe the base bill can have some improvements, so at 
the appropriate time--I want to talk about a few of them now--I will be 
offering some amendments to it. The first is to strengthen the 
provision with reference to the revolving door between the FAA and the 
airline industry and end the cozy relationship between safety 
inspectors and the airline industry. We have to have faith and 
confidence in the people who are critical to making sure that when we 
fly, we are flying in airplanes that are as safe as safe can be; that 
they are not compromised. I appreciate what the committee did in the 
bill, but I think there are some elements of it that can be 
strengthened.
  The second amendment will require the FAA to monitor the air noise 
impacts of the air space redesign and simply provide that data to the 
public. I don't even understand why the FAA has no intention--no 
intention whatsoever--of monitoring air noise as a result of the 
redesign. I think the public has a right to know what health 
consequences there are in that redesign, and that is a minimal--a 
minimal--amount of information and transparency that we should be 
allowing the flying public to have and the communities that are 
affected to know.
  The third will help local communities coordinate with nearby airports 
to plan compatible land use and mitigate air noise and to receive 
grants from the FAA to do so. This is incredibly important. There are 
several communities, I am sure, across the Nation, but in our State in 
the city of Elizabeth, which is the third largest city in the State, it 
is pounded, pounded, pounded away--schools have actually held a press 
conference at one of the schools. I don't know how students learn at 
that school, because all you hear is one constant drone of jet noise. I 
can imagine a teacher in the classroom having to overcome that 
challenge day in and day out to keep the attention of the students. We 
should have the ability to make sure that in fact there is mitigation 
money for that noise, and we look forward to being able to offer that.
  The last amendment we are considering is to address the growing 
problem of low fuel landings. We have had a whole host of low fuel 
landings at Newark International. That means you are sitting on an 
airplane and because the industry is trying to save money, they have 
less fuel in the aircraft and now, because you have been put in delays 
and holding patterns, it gets pretty low, maybe dangerously low. We 
want to know what is the level of that and what is the reporting of 
that so we can make judgments--and certainly so the FAA can make 
judgments--along the way. We think that is incredibly important.
  Finally, one of the worst casualties of the Bush administration is 
how much trust the public has lost in their Government. We lost trust 
when the administration flew us into Iraq on the wings of a lie. We 
lost trust when millions of dollars in tax breaks were given to those 
with million-dollar bank accounts while the middle class saw their 
economic situation get worse. And at the very least, at the very least, 
we should be able to trust our Government to keep us safe when we take 
to the skies. That is the core mission of the Federal Aviation 
Administration. It is time for them to put that mission ahead of the 
financial interests of the industry they regulate. It is time for them 
to put that mission and our safety first. This bill goes an enormous 
way to making that happen.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee is recognized.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as 
in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                          Energy Independence

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, in 1942 President Franklin D. 
Roosevelt summoned a bipartisan group of congressional leaders to the 
White House. He outlined with them a secret plan to win World War II. 
At the conclusion of the briefing, the President asked Kenneth McKellar 
of Tennessee, who chaired the Appropriations Committee in the Senate, 
if the Senator could hide $2 billion in the appropriations bill for

[[Page 7393]]

this project to win the war. Senator McKellar replied:

       That will be no problem, Mr. President, but I have one 
     question: Just where in Tennessee do you want me to hide the 
     $2 billion?

  That place in Tennessee turned out to be Oak Ridge, one of the three 
secret cities, along with Hanford in Washington and Los Alamos in New 
Mexico, that became the principal sites for the Manhattan Project.
  The purpose of the Manhattan Project was to end the war by finding a 
way to split the atom and build a bomb before Germany could. Nearly 
200,000 people worked secretly in 30 different sites in three 
countries. President Roosevelt's $2 billion appropriation equaled $24 
billion in today's dollars.
  Less than 3 years later, after that conversation between President 
Roosevelt and Senator McKellar, the project succeeded when on August 6 
and 9, 1945, the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki. On August 14, Japan surrendered unconditionally.
  According to New York Times science reporter William Laurence, who 
watched the Nagasaki bombing:

       Into its design went millions of man-hours of what is 
     without doubt the most concentrated intellectual effort in 
     history.

  On Friday, May 9, I will go to one of those secret cities--Oak 
Ridge--to propose that the United States launch a new Manhattan 
Project: A 5-year project to put America firmly on the path to clean 
energy independence. Instead of ending a war, the goal will be clean 
energy independence so we can deal with rising gasoline prices, 
electricity prices, clean air, climate change, and national security--
for our country first, and--because other countries have the same 
urgent needs and therefore will adopt our ideas--for the rest of the 
world.
  By independence, I do not mean the United States would never buy oil 
from Mexico or from Canada or from Saudi Arabia. By independence I do 
mean the United States could never be held hostage by any country for 
our energy supplies.
  In 1942, many were afraid that the first country to build an atomic 
bomb could blackmail the rest of the world. The overwhelming challenge 
in the Manhattan Project veteran George Cowan's words was:

     the prospect of a Fascist world and the need to build a 
     weapon so powerful that it would quickly guarantee victory.

  Today, countries that supply oil and natural gas can blackmail the 
rest of the world. Today's need is to create clean energy independence 
to quickly guarantee victory over that kind of extortion.
  Such a concentration of brain power directed toward an urgent 
national need is not a new idea, but it is a good idea, and it fits the 
goal of clean energy independence.
  The Apollo project to send men to the Moon in the 1960s was a kind of 
Manhattan Project. Senator Susan Collins of Maine has suggested an 
energy independence by 2020 project, comparable to the goal of putting 
a man on the Moon. Others such as Senator Kit Bond of Missouri and 
Congressman Randy Forbes of Virginia have suggested a Manhattan Project 
for clean energy or energy independence. As part of their ongoing 
Presidential campaigns, both Senator John McCain and Senator Barack 
Obama have called for a Manhattan Project for new energy sources. 
Likewise, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Democratic National 
Committee Chairman Howard Dean have said a Manhattan Project-type 
program is needed to develop technologies to free us from oil 
dependence.
  All throughout the 2 years of discussion that led to the passage by 
this Congress of the America COMPETES Act, several participants 
suggested that we should focus on energy--believing that solving the 
energy challenges would force the kind of investments in the physical 
sciences and research and teaching that the America COMPETES Act seeks 
to encourage.
  The Manhattan Project in 1942 was in response to an overwhelming 
challenge: the prospect that Germany would build a bomb and win the war 
before America did.
  In his address on Monday to the annual meeting of the National 
Academy of Sciences, Academy President Ralph Cicerone described today's 
overwhelming challenge, and that is the need to discover ways to 
satisfy the human demand and use of energy in an environmentally 
satisfactory and affordable way so we are not overly dependent on 
overseas sources. According to Cicerone, this year Americans will pay 
nearly $500 billion overseas for oil--that is $1,600 for each one of 
us--some of it to nations that are hostile to us or even trying to kill 
us by bankrolling terrorists. That weakens our dollar. It is half our 
trade deficit. It forces gasoline prices toward $4 a gallon, and it is 
crushing family budgets.
  Then there are the environmental consequences. If worldwide energy 
usage continues to grow as projected and fossil fuels continue to 
supply over 80 percent of that energy, humans would inject as much 
CO2 into the air from fossil fuel burning between 2000 and 
2030 as they did between 1850 and 2000. We have plenty of coal to help 
achieve our energy independence, but we have no commercial way yet to 
capture the carbon from the coal, and we have not finished the job of 
controlling sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury emissions.
  So instead of finding a way to build a bomb to win a war, the new 
goal would be to find ways to help our country, which consumes 25 
percent of all the energy in the world, to achieve clean energy 
independence, and to do it at a price the family budget can afford, 
with the hope that the rest of the world will follow our lead.
  In addition to the need to meet an overwhelming challenge, other 
characteristics of the Manhattan Project are suited to the challenge of 
a new Manhattan Project. First, it will require what Harris Mayer has 
called meta-engineering. Next, it needs to proceed as fast as possible 
along several tracks to reach the goal.
  According to Don Gillespie, a young engineer in Los Alamos during 
World War II:

       The entire project was being conducted using a shotgun 
     approach, trying all possible approaches simultaneously, 
     without regard to cost, to speed toward a conclusion.

  Next, it needs Presidential focus and it needs bipartisan support in 
Congress. It needs the kind of centralized, gruff leadership that Gen. 
Leslie R. Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers gave the first 
Manhattan Project. A new Manhattan Project needs to put aside old 
biases and subsidies and instead break the mold. As Dr. J. Robert 
Oppenheimer said in a speech to Los Alamos scientists in November of 
1945 about the atomic bomb, the challenge of clean energy independence 
is ``too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.''
  Most important, in the words of George Cowan as reported in a book on 
the Manhattan Project edited by Cynthia C. Kelly:

       The first Manhattan Project wouldn't have come into 
     existence at all without initial concepts that were spelled 
     out by a small number of extraordinary people. . . . The 
     Manhattan Project model starts with a small, diverse group of 
     great minds.

  As I said to the various National Academies when we first asked for 
their help in the American competitiveness project in 2005:

       In Washington, DC, most ideas fail for lack of the idea. We 
     need ideas from the best minds we have.

  I said it then about American competitiveness, and I say it now about 
clean energy independence.
  I addressed a meeting earlier this week of about 500 men and women 
from all over America who were here to encourage the Congress to fully 
fund the America COMPETES Act that we passed into law in 2007. The 
President has asked for an 18-percent increase in funding for the 
Department of Energy's Office of Science, which is the money for our 
national laboratories. He has asked for a 13-percent increase in 
funding for the National Science Foundation. Both of those would put us 
on the road to doubling funding for the physical sciences so we can 
keep our brain power advantage so we can keep our jobs from going 
overseas.
  That was the recommendation of the small, diverse group of great 
minds

[[Page 7394]]

whom we asked 3 years ago to tell us what we need to do to keep our 
brain power advantage. Most of the speakers at that meeting this week 
were talking about the need to come persuade the Senator from New York 
or the Senator from Tennessee or the Senator from some other State to 
fully fund the America COMPETES Act.
  I see the Senator from New York here. He was very active in that 
legislation, especially with a project from New York that helped focus 
on better ways of teaching mathematics to young people. Almost all of 
us here have felt some sense of ownership of the America COMPETES 
legislation: The majority leader and the minority leader were the 
principal sponsors, and 70 of us cosponsored it. So we saw the need for 
it. Now we need to apply even more focus and discipline on a different 
goal, which is clean energy independence. That is why I am going to Oak 
Ridge on May 9 to propose a second Manhattan Project for clean energy 
independence.
  I believe the work we did during the America COMPETES Act over the 
last 3 years has important lessons for how we solve the energy 
challenge.
  Let's remember how America COMPETES happened. Three years ago, in May 
of 2005, a bipartisan group of us asked the National Academies to tell 
Congress in priority order the 10 most important steps we could take to 
keep America's brain power advantage. Basically, we were asking for the 
antidote to the problems set out in Tom Friedman's book, ``The World is 
Flat.''
  By October 2005, the academies had assembled what might be called a 
``small diverse group of great minds,'' chaired by Norm Augustine, a 
member of the Academy of Engineering, which presented to the Congress 
and the President 20 specific recommendations in a report called 
``Rising Above the Gathering Storm.''
  We worked with the Bush administration in a number of ``homework 
sessions'' to refine the proposals, and we considered a number of other 
very good proposals by different competitiveness commissions.
  Then, in January of 2006, President Bush outlined his American 
Competitiveness Initiative to double over 10 years basic research for 
the physical sciences and engineering, and he included money to do that 
in his budgets that he proposed 2 years ago, 1 year ago, and this year.
  As I mentioned earlier, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the 
Senate became the principal sponsors of the legislation. That didn't 
change even when the Senate changed from Republican to Democrat.
  Last week, I telephoned Ralph Cicerone, the president of the National 
Academy of Sciences. I told him about my proposed May 9 Oak Ridge 
speech. He told me about an address he made this past Monday before the 
annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences on America's energy 
future. That study will be completed in 2010.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that, following my remarks, 
the remarks of Ralph Cicerone be printed in the Record from the 145th 
annual meeting of the Academy of Sciences on Monday.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 1.)
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I told Dr. Cicerone that what I will be 
proposing at Oak Ridge will require more specific and quicker action 
than what the National Academies already have underway. I hope that 
within the next few weeks, a bipartisan group of us from the Congress 
could meet with the National Academies and see what concrete proposals 
we might offer the new President and the new Congress, and that we 
complete that work this year.
  Democrat Bart Gordon, a Congressman from Tennessee and chairman of 
the Science Committee in the House of Representatives, was--along with 
Senator Bingaman, myself, and then-Congressman Sherwood Boehlert--one 
of the four original signers of the 2005 request to the National 
Academies that led to the America COMPETES Act. Congressman Gordon will 
join me in Oak Ridge on May 9, and he will address those who are there 
about clean energy independence. Also there--and cohost for the 
meeting, along with the Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory--
will be Congressman Zach Wamp, a senior Member of the House 
Appropriations Committee in whose district we will be. I have talked 
this week with our leaders in the Senate on energy, Senator Bingaman 
and Senator Domenici--both of New Mexico--who have played such a large 
role in the America COMPETES Act over the last 3 years. I talked with 
Senator Murkowski, who likely will succeed Senator Domenici as the 
senior Republican on the Energy Committee when Senator Domenici retires 
at the end of this year.
  I know this is a Presidential election year. I have no illusions 
about the difficulty of bipartisan congressional action. But I also 
know that gasoline is nearing $4, and that the electricity produced by 
America today is not clean enough for our country. I also know that, on 
our present course, we permit other countries in the world to whom we 
are paying $500 billion a year the possibility of blackmailing us, or 
other countries, because of their ownership of oil assets. I believe 
now is the best possible time for Members of Congress and candidates 
for President of the United States to address the clean energy 
independence goal.
  Let us compete to see who can come up with the best ideas and compare 
them with one another, knowing that in the end--especially in the 
Senate--it will take the kind of bipartisan cooperation we had with the 
America COMPETES Act to get a result. After all, the people didn't 
elect us to take a vacation this year just because there is a 
Presidential election.
  This country of ours is a remarkable place. While enduring this 
economic slowdown, this year we will produce about 30 percent of all 
the wealth in the world for 5 percent of those of us who live here. We 
have 30 percent of the wealth in the world, but we are just 5 percent 
of all the people in the world.
  Despite the ``gathering storm'' of concern about American 
competitiveness, no other country approaches our brain power 
advantage--the collection of research universities we have, the 
national laboratories we have, the private sector companies that exist 
in the United States. And this United States is still the only country 
where people can say with a straight face that anything is possible--
and believe it.
  These are precisely the ingredients America needs during the next 5 
years to place ourselves firmly on a path to clean energy independence 
and, in doing so, we can make our jobs more secure, help balance the 
family budget, make our air cleaner and our planet safer and healthier, 
and lead the world to do the same by our example.
  I yield the floor.

                               Exhibit 1

                           Energy Challenges

   (Presented to the 145th Annual Meeting of the National Academy of 
         Sciences, Ralph J. Cicerone, President, Apr. 28, 2008)

       As I stand before the members of the NAS, I feel as each of 
     you would in my place--that it is a great honor and a rare 
     opportunity to address you here in our historic NAS building. 
     As you know, we are planning a major restoration of the 
     building which will be discussed further in tomorrow's 
     business meeting.
       I want to recognize NAS Presidents-Emeritus Frank Press and 
     Bruce Alberts who are here with us today. Each of them led 
     the Academy with distinction and continues to represent us 
     well.
       The past year has been a very busy one, reflecting the 
     importance of science and technology in contemporary society. 
     One project, the revision and updating of our 1984 and 1999 
     booklets on science and creationism, was completed when the 
     new booklet, Science, Evolution and Creationism was released 
     in January. This project was initiated and supported by the 
     NAS Council. For this third edition, we invited the Institute 
     of Medicine to join the NAS.
       The authoring committee is shown here. I ask each of the 
     authors who is here today to stand.
       Today I want to use the opportunity to draw your attention 
     to a major issue of today, human demand for and usage of 
     energy, a topic that has become progressively more serious, 
     one that will take years to address and which requires 
     scientific efforts of many kinds.
       In the past fifty or sixty years there have been other 
     transforming issues that have dominated national and 
     international attention and which required science and 
     technology for any successful outcome, but these

[[Page 7395]]

     earlier cases have not been numerous. One can recall the 
     nuclear arms race, the polio outbreaks of the 1950's, and the 
     very rapid increases of human populations of the 1950's and 
     1960's. Science made possible the cessation of nuclear 
     weapons testing through demonstrated capability to detect the 
     detonation of even relatively small weapons, while 
     computational methods enabled stockpile stewardship. 
     Similarly, through medical immunology, scientists came to 
     understand the cause of polio and created preventive 
     vaccines; and the Green Revolution made it possible to feed 
     many more people. Two other major issues in which public 
     attention was focused on science and technology were the 
     launching of early Earth-orbiting satellites (and placing a 
     man on the Moon), and the capabilities that emerged in the 
     early 1970's from molecular biology for safe laboratory DNA-
     transfer experiments.
       Now in 2008, we see that human demand and usage of energy 
     is a pervasive issue. The issue has multiple dimensions and 
     constraints. It is both national and worldwide. Enormous in 
     scale, it will remain serious for the foreseeable future, and 
     science and engineering are essential for progress.


                              Main Points

       My main points today are:
       Our energy-intensive way of life, population growth and 
     worldwide economic progress combine to create large and 
     growing demand for energy.
       Our options to meet this large demand with types of energy 
     now available to us are seriously constrained. We must assure 
     access to energy and geopolitical security, overcome the 
     financial impact of high costs, deal with climate change, 
     other environmental impacts, nuclear safety and wastes. There 
     is no simple single solution and some attractive options are 
     mutually incompatible.
       Science and technology and scientists are essential to 
     meeting this pervasive challenge.


                        Energy Usage and Demand

       The scale of human energy usage today is large and 
     projections of future demands are even larger. Let me begin 
     by outlining current energy usage in the United States.
       We consume 100 Quadrillion BTU (one Quad is 10\15\ BTU) per 
     year as a nation, or 3.3 x 10\8\ BTU per person annually. 
     There are many ways to disaggregate these figures. For 
     example. we can examine end usage by economic sector or by 
     function. One such cut reveals that 28 percent of U.S. energy 
     usage is for transportation (burning gasoline, diesel and jet 
     fuel) and 39 percent is used in buildings for lighting, 
     heating, cooling, appliances and office equipment.
       What are the sources of our primary energy? For the U.S., 
     85 percent comes from the burning of fossil fuels: 23 percent 
     from natural gas, 23 percent from coal and 40 percent from 
     petroleum (using rounded numbers). Eight percent is derived 
     from nuclear power and six percent from renewable sources 
     like hydropower (3 percent), biomass (3 percent), geothermal 
     sources, wind, and solar.
       Two key factors are liquid fuels for transportation and 
     coal burning to generate electricity. Slide 5 shows growth in 
     U. S. imports and consumption of petroleum.
       Net imports grew from 3 million barrels per day in 1970 and 
     surpassed domestic ``production'' in 1996. Today, we import 
     approximately twelve million barrels of oil daily, most of it 
     for transportation, and we consume about six million barrels 
     of oil more each day for running our automobiles and trucks 
     than is produced (extracted, to be more precise) 
     domestically.
       A related figure is the fraction 41 percent of primary 
     energy consumption that goes into producing electricity.
       Annually, the U.S. consumes about 3800 billion kWh of 
     electricity, with an average instantaneous consumption rate 
     of 440 million kW, or 1.47 kW per person. Because of 
     considerable inefficiency in the conversion of primary energy 
     into electricity during generation and losses in its 
     distribution, the electrical energy received by the end user 
     is only about one-third of the primary energy invested in 
     generating it.
       Our electricity is generated in several ways but the major 
     pathways are from coal burning (52 percent), nuclear power 
     (20 percent), natural gas (19 percent) and renewable energy 
     including hydropower (8.5 percent). While still small, 
     electricity generated from wind power grew by over 25 percent 
     compounded annually from 2001-2005.
       Slide 7 shows world energy consumption 1970-2005 and 
     projected usage to 2030, developed & developing countries. 
     Worldwide energy consumption was about 447 quadrillion BTU in 
     2004. This figure grew from approximately 207 quadrillion BTU 
     in 1970; it doubled in 30-32 years. World average energy 
     consumption is approximately 6.2x10 \7\ BTU/person, or only 
     one-fifth as much as for Americans. The fraction of total 
     world energy usage from fossil-fuel sources was about 87 
     percent in 2004, slightly higher than the corresponding U.S. 
     figure. The fraction of world electricity from nuclear power 
     was only six percent as opposed to eight percent in the U.S. 
     although it is well known that France's electricity is 
     generated primarily (70 percent) from nuclear power, and of 
     course, there are other nations that employ no nuclear power 
     at all. Recently, Germany has emerged as a world leader in 
     capturing wind energy and in the manufacturing of 
     photovoltaic cells for the direct conversion of sunlight to 
     electricity, as is Japan.
       World energy consumption is projected to grow to 
     approximately 700 quadrillion BTU in 2030, another doubling 
     from its early 1990's value. Much of this projected growth is 
     likely to occur in developing, or emerging market countries, 
     where there is great demand for energy usage per capita to 
     grow, while slower growth is projected for mature market 
     countries like those of advanced developed countries. One 
     projection is for non-OECD countries (including China and 
     India) to increase energy usage by over three percent 
     annually, more than doubling between 2004 and 2030 while U.S. 
     energy growth is projected to be one percent annually. This 
     differential growth will continue trends observed from 1999-
     2005 when China and India increased their energy usage by 80 
     percent and 25 percent, respectively.
       The dynamics and impacts of this differential growth are 
     extremely important to analyze. For example, we must 
     understand what is driving this increased demand 
     (electrification, pumping water for irrigation and for 
     manufacturing and consumer uses, population growth . . .). We 
     must also anticipate impacts on world prices and availability 
     and on world geopolitics, environment and climate. A recent 
     report from the InterAcademy Council is a rich source of data 
     on growing demand and strategies for satisfying it worldwide.


                Impacts of Energy Usage and Constraints

       For many years there have been concerns over the stability 
     of energy supplies or the cost of energy or the consequences 
     of too much dependence on overseas sources or over various 
     environmental impacts. Now all of these concerns are 
     operative at once and they are seen as long term as opposed 
     to temporary.
       For example, as U.S. consumption of petroleum, mostly for 
     transportation, has grown, and costs have risen to over $100 
     per barrel, the net flow of dollars to oil-exporting 
     countries has ballooned to between $450 to $500 billion 
     annually, as noted recently by former CIA Director James 
     Woolsey. Let me note that even at the now past price of $65 
     per barrel, 300 million Americans send $1000 each overseas 
     for oil annually. At our NAS/NAE energy symposium on March 
     14, former Secretary of Energy and Secretary of Defense James 
     Schlesinger said that our dependence on foreign oil is 
     allowing some hostile oil-exporting countries to accumulate 
     dollars, resulting in diminished U.S. influence not only 
     toward them but also with our allies. He stated that ``we 
     cannot ensure energy security, only mitigate energy 
     insecurity''.
       Predicting future energy costs is perilous and certainly 
     not a talent of mine. Personally, I did not predict that 
     gasoline would cost $3.5 to $4 per gallon as it is now. 
     However, there is general consensus that the era of low cost 
     energy is over, largely due to increasing demand from 
     developing countries. Thus, one can expect U.S. purchases of 
     oil to continue and world prices to remain high enough to 
     cause difficulties for poorer countries. Worldwide fleets of 
     car and trucks demand oil as does the growing commercial 
     airline sector. High costs of energy are being felt by 
     individuals, families, businesses, universities, governments, 
     and hospitals, for example. High energy costs are now 
     beginning to be blamed for rising grain costs and food 
     shortages in some countries.
       The imperative for access to secure energy supplies prompts 
     some regions and countries to turn to coal or to nuclear 
     power. For example, the U.S., China, South Africa and India 
     have substantial domestic coal supplies. Environmental and 
     climatic impacts must be dealt with. Inadvertent emissions of 
     soot, sulfur, nitrogen oxides and mercury, historical 
     challenges which have been met in some selected regions, 
     remain major problems elsewhere and due to the scale of coal 
     usage, they are increasingly serious problems, as are 
     deleterious effects of coal mining on land surfaces and 
     ground water. In each of the last several years, a large 
     number of coal-fired power plants have been built in China; 
     total generating capacity from these plants has increased 
     annually by approximately 95 Gwatts (adding approximately the 
     entire capacity of France or Germany).
       In recent years it has become clearer that the global 
     climate is changing in response to increased atmospheric 
     concentrations of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning. 
     Current atmospheric concentration of CO2 is over 
     380 ppm, compared to a pre-industrial level of 280 ppm. 
     Climate change is being observed in elevated air and sea 
     temperatures, losses of ice, rising sea level and several 
     other variables, and it is judged mostly due to greenhouse 
     gases, including carbon dioxide, from human activities. While 
     some climate change can be accommodated, there is increasing 
     evidence and concern that dangerous changes can also occur. 
     ``Dangerous'' here is defined as irreversible changes such as 
     sea-level rise and loss of biodiversity, and generally other 
     physical variables whose rates of change exceed the rates at 
     which we can adapt to them. Large or prolonged changes in 
     regional water supplies can destabilize entire nations.

[[Page 7396]]

       While it might be intuitive to guess that we could 
     stabilize worldwide atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts by 
     holding worldwide emissions constant, the natural uptake of 
     atmospheric CO2 by the global carbon cycle is only 
     about 40 percent of current emissions; this figure has been 
     derived by decades of research, much of it by NAS members. 
     Current annual emissions are nearly seven billion tons of C 
     as CO2. The eventual steady-state atmospheric 
     concentration of CO2 from current emissions would 
     be over 650 ppm. Thus, a specified carbon constraint such as 
     preventing atmospheric CO2 from rising above say 
     450 parts per million, is difficult to satisfy: it would 
     require reducing emissions by more than four billion tons (C) 
     from current levels. Several examples show how difficult it 
     will be. Reducing emissions by just one billion tons C per 
     year would require a fleet of two billion cars to achieve 60 
     mpg instead of 30 mpg, or replacing 700 one GW coal-burning 
     power plants with nuclear plants, or replacing coal-burning 
     plants with one million 2 MWe (peak) wind turbines or 2,000 
     1-GWe (peak) photovoltaic power plants.
       Instead, if worldwide energy usage continues to grow as 
     projected and fossil fuels continue to supply over 80% of 
     that energy, worldwide CO2 emissions would grow to 
     over ten B tons C annually by 2030, just 22 years from now. 
     At such a rate of fossil-fuel burning, humans would inject as 
     much CO2 into the air from fossil-fuel burning 
     between 2000 and 2030 as they did between 1850 and 2000.
       In addition to climatic change from carbon dioxide, we 
     expect the world's oceans to become acidified by the 
     CO2 added from the atmosphere. Research on the 
     biological effects of this acidification is in its early 
     stages and there are many questions surrounding the ability 
     of calcifying marine organisms to make shells, for example.
       The view that emerges is of a carbon-constrained world. 
     Taking into account the fact that coal is relatively 
     plentiful and that its supplies are secure within several 
     large countries, and recognizing the carbon constraint gives 
     rise to the need for research on carbon capture and storage 
     (CCS) and to other means to tap into coal's energy without 
     releasing CO2 to the atmosphere and oceans.
       Even if coal, for example with effective CCS, could be used 
     even more intensively to generate electricity, one must 
     realize that to use today's fleets of cars and trucks and 
     airplanes, one requires liquid fuels, presumably from oil. 
     While coal yields less energy per unit of CO2 
     released, carbon constraints apply to oil and natural gas as 
     well as to coal.
       The constraints of energy supply, dependence on foreign 
     sources and atmospheric carbon dioxide cause us to consider 
     wider usage of nuclear power. Nuclear power plants, currently 
     based on nuclear fission processes, offer several advantages 
     in that their operation does not emit carbon dioxide nor are 
     supplies of nuclear fuel thought to be seriously limited 
     physically or immediately. Widespread utilization of nuclear 
     power is limited instead by concerns over safety of operation 
     and over waste handling, storage and disposal. Strongly 
     related is the need to prevent the misappropriation of 
     nuclear wastes to produce nuclear weapons or conventional 
     bombs spiked with radioactivity (dirty bombs). In addition, 
     costs of electrical power from current nuclear plants exceed 
     those for coal and from natural gas; capital costs of nuclear 
     plants are much higher. These concerns have virtually stopped 
     the building of new and replacement nuclear power plants in 
     many countries since approximately 1980.
       For nuclear power to satisfy large parts of current and 
     future world demand for electrical energy would require the 
     siting, construction and operation of large numbers of new 
     and replacement nuclear power plants such as a tripling or 
     quadrupling of the number of such plants now in service. 
     Local limitations on volumes and temperatures of cooling 
     water will tighten as tensions grow over water supplies and 
     heat waves intensify. Even if successful, we would not have 
     satisfied much of world demand for energy to drive 
     transportation, now supplied by petroleum, with today's fleet 
     of automobiles and trucks.


    Agenda for Scientists, the National Academy of Sciences and the 
                       National Research Council

       The constraints placed on energy choices for the United 
     States and for the world today can appear to be intractable. 
     For example, large U.S. domestic coal reserves, much of our 
     existing infrastructure and the goal of energy security all 
     argue for more dependence on coal. However, we are pushed in 
     the opposite direction by the pressing need to reduce 
     CO2 emissions to the atmosphere so as to limit 
     climate change, and by several other environmental impacts 
     including ocean acidification. In a democracy there are many 
     different voices representing people with differing values 
     and interests, such as protecting or advancing locally based 
     industries, and also with differing weighting factors for 
     addressing the various constraints.
       All of these challenges place scientists and engineers in 
     an essential position--we can:
       Perform research relevant to energy supplies and usage,
       Formulate and analyze options for decisionmakers,
       Inform the public about research and policy options,
       Advise and help government officials and business leaders,
       Develop scientific and engineering human resources.
       We must address each of these needed roles with 
     complementary skills. Along with creating specialized 
     processes and strategies, we need big-picture synthesis. For 
     example, achieving increased energy efficiency can relax all 
     of these constraints but implementing this goal requires 
     great attention to detail.
       The NAS and the NAE, working through the NRC, are 
     conducting a study, America's Energy Future, and it will be 
     published in less than a year from now. This report will 
     present objective, quantitative data and estimates of 
     contributions to our energy supply from various energy 
     technologies, including energy-efficiency technologies, along 
     with their costs. Many NAS and NAE members and other experts 
     are involved on this project. It is led by economist Harold 
     Shapiro, President-emeritus of Princeton University (and an 
     IOM member). This report will lay a foundation for much more 
     work to follow on energy research, energy-policy options and 
     worldwide cases. It is intended to provide what Benjamin 
     Franklin aptly described as ``useful knowledge'' to 
     individuals and groups in business and government and the 
     general public as they consider how to transition to the 
     energy trajectories that are needed.
       We are also beginning a new suite of studies on climate 
     change, focusing on how to benefit from and extend the 
     scientific understanding of climate change and also how to 
     mitigate it and adapt to it.
       Scientific research, as always, offers possibilities for 
     improvements in how we extract, convert, store, distribute 
     and consume energy. Indeed, research can lead to major 
     changes which could revolutionize our current systems and 
     which could dodge some of the constraints that now bind us. 
     Opportunities for this research to create new technologies 
     with worldwide business potential are enormous.
       There are numerous fascinating research topics in physical 
     and biological sciences which could dramatically transform 
     the energy landscape or which could at least improve our 
     options. Photovoltaic devices based on new materials to 
     convert sunlight into electricity and chemical means to 
     convert sunlight into chemical fuels offer great 
     opportunities. Photosynthesis-based designs are beginning to 
     receive some attention. Energy-storage devices with high 
     energy and power densities could enable much wider use of 
     solar, wind and nuclear energy, for example, in electric-
     drive vehicles.
       Alternative energy sources for transportation must match or 
     overcome a large advantage of liquid hydrocarbons; the 
     oxidizer for their combustion does not have to be carried 
     along with the fuel. A major goal is to derive petroleum 
     substitutes from plant matter other than food crops which 
     would be approximately carbon-neutral. Microbiological 
     processes enhanced by molecular biology comprise many 
     potential advanced pathways toward creating liquid biofuels 
     such as alcohols. In such advanced processes, efficient use 
     of normally recalcitrant material like plant cellulose and 
     lignins must be made. Progress from this laboratory-based 
     biological research is needed to obtain higher biofuel yields 
     which justify inputs of energy, fertilizer, water and land. 
     These input/output ratios themselves and corresponding 
     tradeoffs require research to clarify the value of this 
     option.
       Wider usage of nuclear power to generate much larger 
     amounts of electricity could displace some fossil-fuel usage 
     but it requires safe and efficient handling of wastes which 
     in turn require secure geological and geochemical storage. 
     Similarly, economical and safe waste-to-fuel reprocessing 
     represent research and engineering challenges and 
     opportunities, and some materials problems with reactors 
     remain.
       As has been the case for too many years, nuclear fusion 
     remains a distant but tantalizing pathway toward plentiful 
     energy, with almost no radioactive waste, but very difficult 
     problems in confining high-temperature plasmas have impeded 
     progress.
       A host of other research frontiers must be explored, for 
     example, can carbon dioxide be effectively captured and 
     stored in geological reservoirs in amounts measured in tens 
     of billions of tons and for centuries? Can transmission lines 
     be vastly improved through superconductivity or by using 
     direct current transmission instead of AC, with better system 
     analysis and control? If so, solar and wind energy can be 
     distributed in ways to match generation and demand time 
     functions better.
       Scientific research on climate change is essential to 
     enable us to predict how climate will change in smaller 
     geographical areas and shorter time intervals than is now 
     possible so as to guide our efforts in mitigating the changes 
     and in adapting to changes that do transpire. Economic 
     science and social phenomena must be incorporated in this 
     endeavor, and as is the case in all of the topics mentioned 
     here, computational science has become essential.

[[Page 7397]]

       In deciding how to deal with the constraints placed on us 
     by U.S. and global energy usage, governments, businesses, 
     NGO's and individuals want to know what options they have. An 
     important role for us as individuals and through National 
     Research Council committees is to help to formulate and 
     analyze options that can illuminate the consequences of 
     various proposed actions. This work can consist of focused 
     analyses of specific energy sources or pathways and 
     respective technologies, or on comparisons of many 
     alternatives. Variables include physical, chemical and 
     biological principles, costs, readiness for deployment, 
     social acceptance and time frames. In many cases, those who 
     will make decisions amongst the options will be political or 
     business leaders who have little or no scientific background, 
     so scientists' communications skills will be tested. In these 
     interactions centered on formulation and analysis of options, 
     scientists must be prepared to interact with such 
     decisionmakers in iterative ways. It is likely that some 
     overall pathways to a more secure, safe and robust energy 
     strategy will involve short-term options in preparation for 
     transitions to a longer term.
       More broadly, scientists can inform the public about 
     research prospects and goals and about policy options. The 
     pervasive nature of our challenges with energy requires wide 
     public awareness and consensus, and arriving at consensus 
     will be challenging. Whether deciding how to locate solar 
     collector arrays, nuclear power plants or wind farms or how 
     to gauge the benefits of various biofuels or automobile fuel 
     efficiency, and how to invest their own resources or public 
     funds, people must appreciate the constraints and the goals 
     to choose the best options and to avoid costly mistakes and 
     ineffective actions. Scientists who are effective 
     communicators should present public talks and/or help other 
     scientists and journalists who are even more effective. In 
     our NAS communications with the general public, we plan to 
     emphasize energy topics in several ways.
       We depend on many structures and institutions to govern us. 
     Agencies of the U.S. Government which support science 
     research, set standards, monitor and regulate trade, products 
     and pollutants need qualified people to serve in them and 
     they need external counsel through advisory committees, for 
     example. Each of us should serve when invited, and we should 
     prepare thoroughly for each assignment. Important roles in 
     advising the government are carried out by the National 
     Research Council. State and local governments have many 
     significant energy issues in front of them so the need for 
     scientific advice is even larger. Scientists can also help 
     each other when one is called to advise.
       Education of the current and future generations of students 
     is a high priority. All of the needs listed above require an 
     educated public to recognize our options, to understand their 
     consequences, and to exploit opportunities. Students who will 
     go on into business and government will have big roles just 
     as future scientists will. We must develop human resources, 
     both broadly and in specific scientific endeavors, from 
     microbiology and molecular biology to nuclear science and 
     engineering. Our university curricula for science and for 
     non-science students must create awareness of challenges and 
     opportunities surrounding energy usage, efficiency and 
     related research. As always, research opportunities for 
     students are especially important.


                               conclusion

       We must change the trajectories of our energy usage and 
     energy sources. World peace, economic development for much of 
     the world, continuing prosperity for the developed countries 
     and a stable climate require us to do so. To create and 
     analyze options, and to educate and inform people about the 
     work ahead, scientists and engineers are critical.
       There is no single action or individual technology that 
     will take us to this goal. (The glass(es) are partly filled 
     and partly empty. The baseball is just for fun!)
       Rather we must explore all sources and pathways and 
     discover, invent and optimize in each case. While it might 
     disappoint some people that there is no single pathway to 
     success, a world in which many energy sources and solutions 
     are integral to the whole will be more stable and less 
     susceptible to disruption. Our enthusiasm and efforts must be 
     broad as we seek to discover and disseminate useful 
     knowledge.
       A great deal of innovative and determined work is needed by 
     scientists and engineers in the years ahead. It is our 
     privilege and our responsibility to rise to these energy 
     challenges. Let's get going; there is a lot of useful 
     knowledge to be gained.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Schumer). The Senator from Maryland is 
recognized.
  Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, first, I welcome the bipartisan support 
for programs that will move us toward energy independence. I agree with 
my colleague from Tennessee that we need to do a Manhattan-type 
project, with the same type of commitment we made when putting a person 
on the Moon, to become energy independent. We have the technology. We 
know how to get it done. If we have the will, this Nation can do 
anything it wants to do.
  I think there is a growing awareness among Members of this body, as 
well as on the other side of the Capitol, that we need to take 
immediate steps so this Nation can become energy independent. So I 
welcome the comments that have been made.
  I come to the floor because the people of Maryland and throughout the 
Nation are hurting today. The most recent assault on their pocketbooks 
has been filling up their cars with gasoline. The costs are prohibitive 
for families--gasoline prices. Quite frankly, I think the 
administration is doing virtually nothing to help those who are trying 
to afford energy costs today--whether it is their electricity bills in 
their homes, or whether it is running the family automobile, or whether 
it is a business that requires them to use an automobile. This 
administration has done very little to help deal with the escalating 
costs of energy. Instead, they look for additional tax breaks for oil 
companies, or they want to extend tax cuts for millionaires. They don't 
come forward with energy policies that would try to make energy much 
more affordable.
  I believe we need to have a strong energy legislation in this 
Congress. Let me give you some of the statistics that people in my 
State of Maryland are confronting on energy costs. Electricity rates 
went up 72 percent in 2007. Gasoline prices in Maryland are now $3.49, 
on average, for regular gasoline, and $3.80 for high test. That is a 
150-percent increase since President Bush took office.
  Let me try to translate this as to how it affects the average family 
in my State. When you take a look at what household costs have gone up, 
just for gasoline for your automobile, since President Bush took 
office, for a typical household it has increased $2,731 for the people 
of Maryland. If that household has children, it is an increase of 
$3,414 a year. If they have a teenager also operating a car, it has 
gone up over $4,000. To me, that is a shocking increase in just 7 years 
on the cost of gasoline that we put into our automobiles.
  I recently had a conversation with small business owners in Maryland. 
Sixty-two percent of small business owners use a vehicle in their 
business. They need automobiles. They have to fill these tanks with 
gasoline. The majority drive over 50 miles a day in their automobiles 
to operate their businesses. So the statistics show that small 
businesses--and all of us talk about helping small businesses--spend 
more than their competitors that are large companies on energy costs. 
It can cost up to three times as much for a small business person for 
their energy cost to deliver a product to the market than for larger 
companies. I am sure you are aware that small businesses don't have the 
same availability of capital in order to buy equipment or the same 
availability of capital in order to keep their businesses afloat. Many 
small business owners are mortgaging their homes in order to keep their 
businesses going. Many are using credit cards with the highest possible 
interest rates to keep afloat. Now they have additional energy costs. 
So, yes, we need to take action on the energy problem.
  I must tell you that the first thing we need is a national energy 
policy. We have had bills that have been submitted on this floor. I 
appreciate my colleagues on both sides of the aisle coming forward in 
support of a national energy policy for energy independence. But if you 
remember when we voted on the renewable energy portfolio, we didn't 
seem to get the votes we needed from the Republican side of the aisle. 
It is time to take action on a national energy policy--one that will 
truly make this Nation energy independent--whether you call it a 
Manhattan-type project or an Apollo-type project, we can do it. We can 
do it by using less energy and by developing alternative and renewable 
energy sources. We can do it in a way that will be good for America.
  We should not be dependent for oil upon any country halfway around 
the world, that disagrees with our policies. We have to eliminate our 
dependency

[[Page 7398]]

on imported oil. We need to do that for the security of America. Our 
national security should come first. If for no other reason, we should 
do it for national security. Also, let's do it for the environment. I 
listened to my friend talk about green energy. We have a chance to do 
that. We have a bill in the Environment and Public Works Committee that 
Senator Boxer provided tremendous leadership on, along with Senators 
Lieberman and Warner, that would cap our carbon emissions. That would 
energize our economy to produce green jobs and would help us to become 
energy independent. It would reduce greenhouse gases and would help our 
environment. We need to become energy independent because of our 
national security and because of our environment.
  My friends who are talking about energy independence, we have a 
chance to move forward on that. Let's bring out the Lieberman-Warner 
legislation and move it on the floor. We are trying to do that, and if 
we had more help on the Republican side of the aisle, we could get that 
done this year and move toward energy independence.
  There is a third reason we need an energy policy, and that is our 
economy. I don't need a clearer message about how important it is to be 
independent for our economy than to fill up my tank with gasoline. Go 
to any of your neighborhood gasoline stations and look at the price. We 
don't have control over our energy costs. If we were energy 
independent, we would. So we need an energy policy that is good for 
this Nation. We should not be financing other countries. That is what 
you do every time you fill up a tank with gas--financing other 
countries, and actually we are borrowing money to do that.
  So we need a policy that is good for this Nation. What have the oil 
companies done to help us in this regard? They are doing quite well. We 
have businesses that are hurting. We are in a recession. We are not 
doing well in economic growth. But in the last year, the five major oil 
companies had profits of $103 billion, and 2008 is going to be a better 
year than 2007 for the oil companies.
  These are excessive profits. We need to do something about them. The 
administration says let's continue tax breaks for the oil companies; 
let's create some new ones. We should be using these tax breaks to 
develop alternative energy sources. That is what we should be doing to 
help the people in our communities. We should be using these tax breaks 
to generate green jobs. We can do that if we energize the American 
economy to develop the alternative technologies that can solve our 
energy crisis as well as our environmental challenges.
  We need to use these tax breaks so we have less reliance on foreign 
energy sources--alternative fuels. I wish to underscore that we need to 
get this administration, if they are really serious about trying to 
make this Nation energy independent, to refocus the tools we are using. 
Every time we try to do that--we try to take these tax credits and 
target it to the alternative energy sources rather than just giving 
them to the oil companies--we get a veto threat from the President.
  I can tell you, Mr. President, people in Maryland desperately need 
leadership on energy. They need immediate help. One of the suggestions 
that has been made that I think we should move forward--again, the 
President said he is not going to do this--is the Strategic Petroleum 
Reserve. It is 95 percent filled. Let me explain to my constituents 
what this is about. Our Government is in the market every day buying 
70,000 gallons of oil to put in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. As a 
result, the cost to the consumers in filling up their automobiles' 
tanks is higher. It is supply and demand. The Government is there every 
day first at the gas pumps taking 70,000 gallons of fuel that otherwise 
could be available for consumers, and with supply and demand, the more 
fuel we have available, the lower the cost will be. This is something 
we can do immediately to try to reduce the cost of gasoline to the 
people of this Nation.
  We need immediate action. We need immediate action to help the 
middle-income families in America and the small businesses that are 
literally being strangled by the high cost of gasoline and the high 
cost of energy. They need immediate relief. They need an administration 
that is going to take action to make more supply available. If the 
administration does not, the Congress should take action to do that. 
The American people need us to take action for immediate relief. But 
they also understand we cannot continue decade after decade to be 
dependent on foreign energy sources. It is way past time that this 
Nation become energy independent. We can get there.
  As I hear my colleagues speak on both sides of the aisle, let's come 
together for the sake of our Nation, for the sake of our national 
security, for the sake of our environment, for the sake of our economy, 
and let's act together to pass laws so at last America can become 
energy independent and control its own destiny, be a good citizen of 
the world on the environment, and do much better for the growth of our 
economy. I am convinced we can do this if we act together in the best 
interest of our country.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Whitehouse). The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed 
to speak as in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                       Tribute to Charlton Heston

  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, over the last few weeks, I have taken note 
of the tributes that have been made about a great American who passed 
away on April 5, 2008. That American is Charlton Heston. This Senate 
even joined in those tributes, and I was pleased to cosponsor a 
resolution offered by my colleague, Senator Jim DeMint, officially 
honoring Mr. Heston's life and extending the sympathies of the Senate 
to the Heston family.
  Charlton Heston's significance was more than his distinguished career 
as an actor. In his lifetime, he became undeniably an American icon. 
But there is an aspect of his life that has not received the attention 
that I believe it deserves--his truly admirable record of public 
service. That is why I rise this afternoon to comment about his 
contributions to our Nation.
  This was not a man who only recited patriotic speeches; he put his 
words into action and put his reputation and career on the line for the 
causes he supported. This was especially true in an area that people 
seem to have forgotten: his work on civil rights.
  Charlton Heston freely allowed his fame to be used to draw attention 
and support to the cause of civil rights, and he did so at a time when 
it wasn't the popular thing for Hollywood stars to do. In fact, 
according to his autobiography, some of his associates warned him that 
his activism could harm his career and his financial success. But he 
pursued it anyway.
  He told the story of demonstrating outside some Oklahoma City 
restaurants that refused to serve black Americans in 1961, and while he 
modestly acknowledged this was a small effort that ``made no more than 
a ripple in the wider world''--those are his words, not mine--the 
restaurants did change their practices, and the episode was a 
significant personal milestone for him.
  His civil rights activism took him further. He was an admirer of Dr. 
Martin Luther King Jr., and wrote ``Many men who knew him better than I 
have written about Martin Luther King. I can't match their eloquence; I 
can confirm what they've written: He was a special man, put on Earth, I 
do believe, to be a twentieth-century Moses for his people. Dr. King 
sought him out to discuss how to integrate certain segments of the film 
industry. Mr. Heston was supportive but had doubts that it could

[[Page 7399]]

be done; he was surprised and impressed when Dr. King accomplished that 
goal.
  Later in 1963, when Martin Luther King famously marched on Washington 
Charlton Heston was not only part of the march but helped organize and 
lead a contingent from the American arts community in participating. 
Their job was to help draw press attention to the cause but Mr. Heston 
characterized the role he played as essentially an ``extra'' at the 
event. Even so, he said of the march on Washington: ``In a long life of 
activism in support of some good causes, I'm proudest of having stood 
in the sun behind that man, that morning.''
  I think many people fail to appreciate the importance of Mr. Heston's 
involvement in supporting the cause of civil rights at that particular 
time. It was a turning point in our Nation's history. His position put 
him at odds with many in his industry, not to mention the mainstream 
America that existed in those days. It was no small thing for Charlton 
Heston to commit his energies and his name to advancing a cause that 
was deeply controversial.
  Today, some have forgotten what those times were like and the risk he 
took. I would even argue that some prefer to overlook or rewrite the 
record of his civil rights activism because they disagree with other 
causes he took up later in his life.
  Maybe it just doesn't sit right with the predominately liberal 
majority in the media and Hollywood that Mr. Heston could both march 
with Dr. King and later publicly denounce the violent, pornographic 
lyrics of rapper Ice-T. Maybe they don't understand how the same man 
who picketed against racism could criticize the Screen Actors Guild--an 
organization he presided over for six terms--for practicing reverse 
discrimination.
  Or maybe they just don't understand the common denominator between 
his fight for civil rights and his fight for the Second Amendment. When 
he took the helm of the National Rifle Association for an unprecedented 
three terms Americans' firearms rights were under attack as never 
before. I met with him and encouraged his participation, as others did. 
Mr. Heston did participate and brought for formidable energy to the 
defense of this fundamental civil right of the law-abiding American 
citizen.
  It was my great privilege to work with him in those days. I came to 
know him as an unabashed patriot and a friend. He was amazingly modest 
about his accomplishments when he told me about his past involvement in 
policy and political issues, but it was from him I learned about his 
early work on behalf of civil rights.
  Charlton Heston is remembered by countless Americans around the world 
for the great roles he played and the characters he created, as only he 
could do. That legacy will live forever. As his movies are discovered 
by new audiences in the future, a new life for that memory will emerge.
  But Americans should also be aware and celebrate and treasure another 
legacy he left behind--his simple and quiet service to our Nation. Let 
the record show Charlton Heston did not sit safely on the sidelines. He 
strode boldly into the arena of public affairs and took on all the 
risks of fighting in that arena. He worked to make this Nation a better 
place through his activism in promoting civil rights and individual 
liberties, a legacy that will have an even more lasting impact on our 
lives and the lives of our fellow citizens.
  Goodbye, Charlton Heston. America misses you.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. President, 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. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the 
quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                              Farm Policy

  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I am going to address, very briefly, an 
action that will come before us this evening in a 2-week extension of 
current farm policy that will be sought by Chairman Harkin, as they 
work out, I understand, the final details of a new farm policy for our 
country.
  As my colleagues know, over the last several weeks, I have come to 
the floor to speak out about the urgency at hand of getting a new farm 
policy before American agriculture as we move into the spring season 
and before the early harvest in the grain belt of our country, which 
starts very soon in Oklahoma and northern Texas.
  As most of my colleagues know, both the House and Senate passed new 
farm policy last year, but because of their differences, we were simply 
not able to work out a compromise in conference. In fact, the House 
waited months to appoint conferees. Then the Speaker openly spoke out 
about being unwilling to provide the tax package to finance the 
necessary new policy.
  I began to object. After 6 months and 4 extensions, finally, last 
week on the floor I did object. But out of that we began to work 
together and worked out a compromise, and I must say to all the 
conferees on the House and the Senate side that their diligence appears 
to have paid off. In talking with my colleague and the ranking member 
of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Senator Saxby Chambliss, today, 
their work in large part is done. It is a matter of simply putting it 
in final form, bringing it to print and, of course, then bringing the 
conference report to the floor of the House and the Senate. Apparently, 
the White House has also signed off on that and their work is largely 
complete.
  It is with that understanding that I will not object this evening to 
a unanimous consent request to extend the current farm policy for 
another 2 weeks while they work out and put to print their final 
effort.
  Let me thank them all for the sense of urgency that has developed 
over the last 2 weeks and the work in completing it. Obviously, the 
finance committee in the House, the House Ways and Means Committee and 
Senate Finance Committee had to bring about the necessary package. 
Senator Max Baucus and Congressman Rangel, apparently working with the 
Republican side, have solved those problems and put the appropriate 
finance package together.
  There are very important policies, new policies inside this farm 
bill. We are hearing for the first time, at least in my memory, a 
question about food shortages or at least some commodity shortages 
because of new demands we put on the production of American agriculture 
as it relates to the production of energy. There is no other time more 
important in our country to have farm policy in place and operative 
than right now, to say to the American people we can get our work done 
in a timely fashion--and that work is now complete; to say to American 
agriculture: Here is your policy for the next 5 years, whether it is 
nutritional policy for America's poor, whether it is production policy 
for America's farmland, whether it is conservation policy or energy 
policy; in large part all that is embodied.
  I thank my colleagues for the work they have done. I hope their sense 
of reality and their finishing the product and getting it before us 
meets that timing. With that in mind, I will not object tonight to an 
extension. But I am on the floor to personally thank them for the work 
they have accomplished in getting it completed in the next 2 weeks and 
getting it before us as soon as possible so we can say to American 
agriculture: The work is done. Here is agricultural policy for the next 
5 years.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington State.
  Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                             Energy Market

  Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I have been to the floor now a couple of 
times already to talk about the high price of gasoline and what is 
going on in the oil markets. I want to take a few

[[Page 7400]]

minutes this evening and talk about this issue as it relates to the 
futures market and what is happening to the day-to-day price of 
gasoline.
  I know my constituents are outraged over this price. I know they are 
frustrated. It is impacting our economy. They want to see results. They 
want to see us take action. I think it is very important for us to keep 
delving into the details of what is causing this problem; that is, the 
price of gas increasing over 100 percent in about a year's time.
  The first thing that is important for us to remember is how dependent 
the United States is on foreign oil; that we are, at 20 million barrels 
per day, the highest user of a country dependent on oil. And when you 
look at other countries and where they are on this issue, you can see 
that 20, almost 21 million barrels a day of foreign oil really means 
the United States, given the high oil prices we are seeing in the world 
market, is more impacted than any other economy.
  So that means the United States has to step up and deal with this 
issue. I am not saying other economies, such as China, Japan, and 
Germany, are not impacted, but we are five times more impacted, and 
that is why we need to be aggressive and act on this legislation.
  Now, we know where oil has been. In fact, I made this chart a few 
days ago to show how oil prices have tripled since 2002. I said oil was 
at $118 a barrel. Well, that changed. It went to $120. Now I think it 
is back down maybe to $116 today. I have not seen where it has closed. 
But that means we have seen gas go from $3.50 to $3.60. We have seen 
diesel at $4.22.
  The important point is that oil futures; that is, the future price of 
oil, people are already purchasing oil and oil contracts into the 
future, and they are paying $100 or more for the next several years. 
That means those contracts that people are purchasing in oil futures 
help set the price for the commodity we purchase today.
  If people are saying: I will buy oil into many years from now, 7, 8 
years from now, and pay over $100 a barrel, it makes it very hard to 
have oil purchased in the physical market for a cheaper price than 
that.
  Now, I have spent many hours on the Senate floor talking about supply 
and demand. The reason I have done that is because when you have a 
normal market, you have supply and demand, it works pretty well. My 
concern is, when you look at the statistics and the numbers, and here 
is a particular example, that world supply basically since 1988 has 
increased 33 percent and world demand has increased in that same time 
period 33 percent.
  I showed a chart the other day that basically showed these two lines 
in parallel. This is not about supply and demand. This is not about a 
major market disruption and thereby not having a lot of supply and 
thereby causing a shortage and an increase, a spike in price. Now, yes, 
we have had some anomalies in the marketplace. We have had situations 
like Katrina, but they have been small instances, nothing that would 
cause a 100-percent increase in a 1-year period of time in the price of 
oil.
  So that leads you to say simply: What is going on in this marketplace 
if it is not supply and demand, if the market is not functioning?
  Well, one thing I know about this futures price that I described to 
you is that we have had a lot of testimony before the Energy Committee, 
before the Commerce Committee. I am sure some of my colleagues with 
oversight of the CFTC have had hearings.
  But one thing we heard from a professor from the University of 
Maryland was, with those selling or buying commodities in the spot 
markets, they rely on the future price to judge the amount they are 
going to pay for the delivery of those commodities.
  So I am reinforcing what I said earlier; that is, if people are 
already buying future contracts, and those future contracts are saying: 
We are definitely going to pay more than $100 a barrel for oil, That is 
going to affect the spot market. And the spot market is the market in 
which people buy the commodity today and what price they will pay.
  So if you are sitting there thinking: How much am I going to pay for 
oil, and people are going to pay over $100 a barrel for it over the 
next several years, it is certainly going to affect the day-to-day 
price of oil.
  Now, why is this so important? Well, it is so important because the 
futures market, in my mind, is out of control as it relates to the 
price of oil. It is out of control in the sense that it is not 
regulated in the same way other futures commodities are regulated. It 
is not regulated the same way cattle futures are, for example. They 
have reporting requirements. They have trading requirements. They have 
oversight by the CFTC. They are not exchanged on an international 
exchange to which we do not have access. There is no loophole, but for 
oil there is. That is the futures market, and the futures market 
impacts the spot price market.
  So let's look at what happened. In fact, one of the analyses that was 
done on these hedge funds and how they are impacting the futures 
market--because I know a lot of people think crude oil is produced and 
an oil company either has that supply and then delivers it to its 
regional retailers throughout the United States or maybe to other 
countries and that is how it works. But what is happening is major 
investors are buying that product.
  In fact, hedge funds are taking an ever-larger bet in the futures 
market because it is smaller than the stock market or the bond market, 
which means you can have more influence. The funds are using borrowed 
money to maximize their bets, magnifying their impact on the energy 
markets and prices.
  So this is a reporter reporting about what is happening in the 
futures market and how hedge funds are playing this large role of 
moving in and having an impact on what the futures price is. Now, the 
reason I mention this is because we know this is causing problems. We 
have a very big example of a hedge fund gone wrong; that is, a hedge 
fund that was involved in rogue trading and used its power in the 
futures markets to disrupt the market as it related to natural gas.
  So many people probably read about Amaranth; they have seen it in the 
paper. But what happened is, Amaranth sold large volumes of the next 
month's gas delivery in the last 30 minutes of the market. So they took 
a huge amount of supply and basically did what was called ``crashing 
the close,'' basically to benefit their position.
  Now what this did is it cost consumers $9 billion more in the cost of 
natural gas. That is what this hedge fund did in disrupting the natural 
gas markets. And, thank God, we had passed a law in 2005 saying this 
kind of activity was manipulative and it ought to be outlawed. The FERC 
is working on enforcement penalties of $291 million against Amaranth in 
this case.
  But this is an example of how a hedge fund has come into the system 
and had a significant impact. Now, the Chairman of the FERC is saying 
these futures market prices impact the physical market price, and these 
manipulative schemes that were used like in Amaranth were designed to 
lower the prices in the futures market in order to benefit positions 
held in the physical market.
  It is that kind of activity that we do not have enough insight into 
in the oil markets. You are saying: Well, how do we know about this? 
This was a natural gas market. And post-Enron we passed a law and said: 
We need to make this clear, a bright line that this kind of market 
manipulation is against the law.
  We did that, and this is what the policeman on the beat, the FERC, 
has been doing to stop bad actors. And it is a very bright line. But 
what we need to do now is to do the same thing with the oil markets 
because after the Amaranth case, after it collapsed, lo and behold, 
what happened? What happened? Well, the futures price dropped to the 
lowest level for that contract in 2.5 years. So, basically, after 
Amaranth got out of the situation, and throughout this period 
thereafter, the market fundamentals of supply and demand basically have 
been unchanged.

[[Page 7401]]

  This was an investigation that was done by our Permanent Committee on 
Investigations of the natural gas market. So once Amaranth was out of 
the market and their activities, guess what. We saw a stabilization in 
price. That is what we want. We want policing of the market. And that 
is why we want the FTC to do its job. We want the FTC to do the 
aggressive job that FERC is now doing in policing the electricity and 
natural gas market.
  This body, this Congress, this President, signed into law language 
saying that the oil markets should also have a very bright line and 
should not tolerate market manipulation. That was signed into law last 
December. For the law to take effect, we need the Federal Trade 
Commission to actually implement the rule, to say how they are going to 
use this law, and to focus on catching the bad actors.
  I want to reiterate the things that we need to do. We need to close 
the Enron loophole. The Enron loophole allows for online trading to be 
exempt from the regulations that other futures commodities comply with.
  We need to require oversight of all oil futures markets. We cannot be 
held, in the United States with that 21 million barrels of oil, to 
having a blind spot on how the market is being impacted because the FTC 
does not have any insight into bad actors who might be manipulating it 
like Amaranth did.
  We need the FTC to implement these new market rules. The FTC needs to 
be clear. They need to publish these rules and implement them as soon 
as possible.
  I believe we need the Department of Justice to step in and help 
because we have seen, in the Enron case, when the Department of Justice 
and the CFTC and the FERC and various agencies worked together to piece 
this puzzle together with their authority, more enforcement mechanisms 
were used to catch bad actors.
  I am sure we will have time again to talk about how 28 States have 
already implemented statutes to make price gouging illegal. I believe 
that is some authority that we should give the President.
  So these are the things that we should be doing to protect consumers. 
I know it might seem to some of my colleagues that the oil futures 
market is complex and might not be the subject of something we should 
be dealing with on the floor of the Senate. But I will guarantee you, 
if we do not have a policeman on the beat for the oil markets, we are 
going to see a continuation of these incredible prices that are not 
based on market fundamentals.
  I know whether you are an oil company or a hedge fund or whether you 
are someone in the supply chain, no one wants manipulation. Everybody 
wants markets to function based on supply and demand and basic 
fundamentals. Everybody should be for transparency of these markets, 
and they should be for strong Federal statutes implemented by the FTC, 
and they should be in support of having a very aggressive policeman on 
the beat to make sure we send a very strong message that these kind of 
practices will not be tolerated.
  I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BAUCUS. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum 
call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Cantwell). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.


                    Defenders of Freedom Fellowship

  Mr. BAUCUS. Madam President, John F. Kennedy once said:

       As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the 
     highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by 
     them.

  I rise today to express my gratitude to the Montanans who have served 
our country in uniform. Montana is home to over 100,000 veterans. Many 
others gave the ultimate sacrifice in service of our Nation. Twenty-
four Montanans have given their lives in combat in Iraq and 
Afghanistan. We owe these brave warriors a debt of gratitude that can 
never be fully repaid, and it is an honor to call myself one of their 
countrymen.
  These veterans embody everything that is great about this Nation. 
They are tough. They are smart. They work hard. No matter the task, 
they get the job done. But the highest appreciation deserves more than 
just words. In honor of all Montanans who have served this great 
Nation, I am launching the Defenders of Freedom Fellowship. The 
Defenders of Freedom Fellowship offers professional experience in the 
U.S. Senate for Montana veterans. Each fellow will work in my personal 
office on veterans issues. The fellow will research issues and 
correspond with constituents, attend congressional hearings, and work 
on new legislation. The fellow will gain a rare insight into how the 
American Government works. The fellow will serve our Nation's veterans 
and all the people of Montana.
  The fellowship has three goals. First, the fellowship aims to help 
involve more veterans in public service. A veteran's patriotism and 
love of service is a valuable asset to any public office.
  Second, the fellowship will take advantage of all the experience a 
veteran has to offer. Many of these young men and women have experience 
well beyond their years. We have much to learn from what they have seen 
and done. We will gain a new perspective on tough problems we are 
working to solve.
  Last, the fellowship is a humble way to say thank you to Montana's 
veterans, humble because it is an invitation for a veteran to come to 
Washington to work. However, this fellowship can also offer a gift. 
Some fellows will find a love for public service that will last a 
lifetime. This passion for public service has propelled many to 
greatness. It is this spirit that has inspired our Nation's greatest 
leaders.
  I am excited about this--very excited. I am very excited about this 
fellowship and the opportunity I will have to work with some of 
Montana's veterans. To all Montana veterans and their families, I offer 
my gratitude for your service and for your sacrifice. To the future 
Defenders of Freedom fellows, I look forward to working with you soon. 
I thank you in advance for your efforts. I am confident you will find 
your service very rewarding.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I wish to speak to an amendment to the 
pending legislation, H.R. 2881, the FAA Reauthorization bill, which 
would require the FAA to more effectively address flight delays that 
are caused by airline overscheduling.
  Airlines continually schedule more flights than airports can 
physically handle. Schedules are made to reduce operating costs and 
maximize airline profits without regard for airport capacity. Since 
only a certain number of flights can be accommodated within a specified 
time period, overscheduling triggers built-in delays which can take the 
air traffic system hours to recover from. Responsible scheduling of 
flights within airport capacity limits will go a long way towards 
alleviating delays.
  Many interested parties point out that airport capacity needs to be 
expanded to match existing schedules. This is true. We do need to 
ultimately expand airport capacity to accommodate passenger demand, but 
projects to expand capacity can take years to develop and millions of 
dollars to construct. In the nearterm, we should ensure that there is 
some rationality to flight schedules so that passengers can trust that 
their flight has a reasonable chance of being accommodated.
  This amendment, on its own, would not cap or reduce peak hour flights 
at any airport. It would simply direct the Federal Aviation 
Administration to intervene in cases where overscheduling is causing 
significant delays.
  Specifically, it would require the FAA Administrator to convene a 
meeting of airlines to discuss voluntary flight schedule reductions at 
any airport where flights exceed the maximum hourly departure and 
arrival rates set by the FAA, provided that such excess flights are 
likely to have a significant adverse effect on the national or regional 
airspace system. In other words, if the excess flights were deemed not 
likely to have an adverse effect, no action would be taken. If an 
agreement cannot be reached on voluntary flight schedule reductions, 
then

[[Page 7402]]

the Administrator, working with the affected airport, would be required 
to take such action as is necessary to ensure that flight schedule 
reductions are implemented. This gives the FAA and the local airport 
the flexibility to decide how best to bring their schedules within 
capacity. Additionally, the Administrator would be required to submit a 
report to Congress every 3 months on flight scheduling at the Nation's 
35 busiest airports.
  This amendment is supported by the Airports Council International-
North America as a measure that will force the FAA to more effectively 
deal with delays. Accordingly, I urge my colleagues to adopt it.
  Mr. President, on December 19, 2007, the Federal Aviation 
Administration, FAA, ordered air traffic controllers at Philadelphia 
International Airport, PHL, to use new dispersal departure headings, 
sending aircraft at low altitudes over residential portions of 
Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey.
  These new flight paths, a component of the FAA's New York/New Jersey/
Philadelphia metropolitan area airspace redesign, have been met with 
enormous fury in local communities, prompting 12 lawsuits against the 
FAA. They also prompted air traffic controllers at PHL to file an 
``Unsatisfactory Condition Report,'' claiming that mandatory use of 
dispersal headings unnecessarily complicates departure procedures.
  The FAA has always touted this project as a congestion relief 
initiative, and it is vitally important to address airspace congestion 
in the northeast. However, they are not sending planes over residential 
areas as a relief option. According to air traffic controllers, these 
dispersal headings are being used as a primary option from 9-11AM and 
2-7PM, resulting in overflights even when there are no other planes 
waiting to take off at PHL.
  At an April 25, 2008, field hearing that I chaired in Philadelphia 
under the auspices of the Transportation and Housing and Urban 
Development Appropriations Subcommittee, FAA Administrator Robert 
Sturgell confirmed that overflights are occurring when less than 10 
planes are waiting to depart at PHL.
  This runs counter to prior commitments the FAA had made to only use 
the headings during moderate to heavy traffic periods at PHL, when 10 
or more aircraft were waiting to depart. The FAA has been unwilling to 
honor its commitment by limiting use of the headings to only those 
times when 10 or more aircraft are waiting because they claim that 
doing so would require them to conduct a reevaluation and analysis. I 
would argue that a reevaluation and analysis are in order if it would 
provide relief to the communities surrounding PHL, but I am more 
interested in seeing to it that the FAA honors its commitments.
  Since they have not been willing to do so on their own, this 
amendment would force them to honor their commitment by prohibiting the 
use of dispersal departure headings at PHL unless 10 or more aircraft 
are waiting to depart. It will ensure that communities are not 
frivolously disrupted by overflights but still give air traffic 
controllers the option of using dispersal headings as a relief option 
when the airport is most congested.
  It is important to note that the FAA is limiting overflights from 
Newark Airport to times when 10 or more aircraft are waiting, so this 
is not a policy that is unprecedented or impossible to implement. 
Accordingly, I urge my colleagues to adopt this amendment.


                      Amendment No. 4585 Withdrawn

  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Madam President, I withdraw my amendment No. 4585.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The amendment is withdrawn.


                           Amendment No. 4627

                (Purpose: In the nature of a substitute)

  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Madam President, I send an amendment to the desk and 
ask for its consideration.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from West Virginia [Mr. Rockefeller] proposes 
     an amendment numbered 4627.

  (The amendment is printed in today's Record under ``Text of 
Amendments.'')
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.


                Amendment No. 4628 To Amendment No. 4627

  Mr. REID. Madam President, I have a perfecting amendment to the 
substitute at the desk, and I ask for its consideration.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Nevada [Mr. Reid] proposes an amendment 
     numbered 4628 to amendment No. 4627.

  Mr. REID. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of 
the amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:

       At the end add the following:
       The provisions shall become effective 5 days after 
     enactment.
  Mr. REID. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Madam President, parliamentary inquiry: Could I ask 
what the amendment is?
  Mr. REID. Madam President, it is a change of date.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Just a date change.
  Could I ask, on the amendment that was offered by the Senator from 
West Virginia, is that the bill that has been discussed that has 
already been on the table without the pension provision? Is that the 
new substitute that was just put forward?
  Mr. REID. That is our understanding.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.


                Amendment No. 4629 To Amendment No. 4628

  Mr. REID. Madam President, I have a second-degree amendment at the 
desk and I ask for its consideration.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Nevada [Mr. Reid] proposes an amendment 
     numbered 4629 to amendment No. 4628.

  Mr. REID. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of 
the amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:
       In the amendment, strike ``5'' and insert ``4''.


                           Amendment No. 4630

  Mr. REID. Madam President, I have an amendment to the bill at the 
desk and I ask for its consideration.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Nevada [Mr. Reid] proposes an amendment 
     numbered 4630 to the language proposed to be stricken by 
     amendment No. 4627.

  Mr. REID. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of 
the amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:
       At the end of the bill, add the following:
       ``The provision shall become effective 3 days upon 
     enactment.''
  Mr. REID. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.


                Amendment No. 4631 To Amendment No. 4630

  Mr. REID. Madam President, I have a second-degree amendment at the 
desk, and I ask for its consideration.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Nevada [Mr. Reid] proposes an amendment 
     numbered 4631 to amendment No. 4630.

  The amendment is as follows:
       In the amendment, strike ``3'' and insert ``2''.
  Mr. REID. Madam President, to all the Senators who are on the floor, 
and those within the sound of my voice,

[[Page 7403]]

there has been a new substitute filed. The purpose of that is to 
eliminate the provision we have been dealing with all day here. I say 
to my colleagues, there are discussions going on as to how we can 
resolve that, if, in fact, we can resolve it.
  I say to especially my distinguished counterpart, Senator McConnell, 
at this stage we are now ready to start the amendment process. I was 
told early this morning that there was a Bunning amendment the minority 
wanted to offer. No problem; we just have not seen it. I think this 
bill, which is a tax bill--we do not want to tell anyone what they can 
or cannot offer--but I think it should be in keeping with what this 
bill is about. I have no problem if the Republicans want to offer one 
amendment, two amendments, or lots of amendments. I have no intention 
of trying to prevent them from offering amendments to this piece of 
legislation. But there comes a time when you have to move on, and that 
is what we are doing now.
  I repeat: The floor is open. I do think it is appropriate--and the 
only thing I did here is to stop random amendments from being offered. 
I do not know how I can be more suggestive of the fact I want to finish 
this bill. I want it to be done. If there are people who want to amend 
parts of this very important bill, they should have a right to do so. I 
have no problem with that. I do say it would be appropriate that we at 
least see what the amendment is so we can move on, and as long as it is 
in keeping with this bill, I do not care what it does.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Republican leader is recognized.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I certainly share the view of the 
majority leader that this is an important bill that needs to be 
completed. However, I do not agree that employing a parliamentary 
technique of filling the tree, which is what my good friend, the 
majority leader, did, will help facilitate the completion of the bill. 
This, of course, gives the majority leader the opportunity to basically 
pick which amendments from my side will be allowed. That is the kind of 
procedure that makes it impossible to get enough cooperation on the 
minority side to get cloture and finish the bill.
  This process is not going to help us get the bill finished. We will 
have to continue our discussions on both sides about the amendments we 
are going to insist be offered.
  Hopefully, at the end of the day, after we get through the various 
procedural moves that have been made, we can develop a regular 
amendment process. I do not think there will be a huge number of 
amendments, but the amendments that need to be dealt with are important 
to this side of the aisle.
  Until that kind of procedure is agreed to or worked out in one way or 
another, it would be difficult to get cloture and to finish the bill.
  I see my good friend from Texas on the floor. She has been working 
diligently on this, along with Senator Rockefeller, for quite some 
time. She may want to offer her observations as well.
  Mr. REID addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.
  Mr. REID. Madam President, I say, through the Chair to my friend, I 
want to legislate on this bill. If someone can come up with a better 
way that we do it, I am happy to do that.
  As we know, if this vehicle is here, standing alone, anyone can offer 
any amendment on anything. I do not think that is helpful to the 
process. I do not want to stop them. If there are amendments over here 
to offer, I have said once, twice--this is the third time--more power 
to you, offer them. I don't wish to stand in the way of anyone offering 
an amendment. I don't want to be dealing with the war in Iraq, abortion 
or anything else which are some things that are very difficult to deal 
with. That is my whole purpose in doing this. I want to deal with FAA 
or anything within the realm of transportation. I hope everyone 
understands that. I will be happy--if somebody can figure out a 
different way to do this, let me know, and I will be happy to 
cooperate.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas is recognized.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Madam President, I am greatly disappointed that we 
have come to the time when we are not going to be able to move this 
bill because there is not an open amendment process. I have worked with 
Senator Rockefeller on the aviation bill; this is the FAA 
reauthorization. We have come to agreement on the basic bill. It is 
very bipartisan. Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens, the chairman of 
the Commerce Committee and the ranking member, have come to an 
agreement on the aviation portions of this bill. The distinguished 
majority leader said we don't want to take amendments that are not 
relevant to the bill, but, in fact, the tax package that is in the 
substitute that was put forward deals with many issues that are not in 
any way related to aviation, not in one instance. So we would like to 
be able to pass a bipartisan FAA reauthorization bill.
  We have come to agreement in the Commerce Committee on the importance 
of the bill--the passenger bill of rights, the added safety features. 
It will modernize the air traffic control system. Yet now we have a 
bill that has no amendments allowed unless we get permission to offer 
amendments, when the underlying bill has many extraneous provisions in 
it that were added by the Finance Committee. They are not relevant to 
this bill, and they are not agreed to even by the leaders on the 
Commerce Committee whose bill this is.
  So I am disappointed. I think it is going to stop the consideration 
of the FAA bill. If we could pare it back to FAA reauthorization, 
modernization, then I think we would have a bipartisan step forward for 
the consumers and passengers in this country.
  I wish to thank my colleague, the Senator from Illinois, for working 
on the pension part, which has now been taken out. I think that is an 
excellent step in the right direction. It is very important to me. I 
was the cosponsor of his amendment. That amendment has now virtually 
been adopted. But I can't walk away from the rest of the people on my 
side of the aisle who want to offer legitimate amendments and who have 
very great concerns about the tax provisions in this bill that have 
nothing to do with aviation.
  So I hope once we get to the point the bill doesn't move forward, 
which is where I think we will go, we can once again come together in a 
bipartisan spirit and have the aviation bill we have agreed to, with 
the tax provisions that relate to aviation that we have agreed to, and 
get this bill going. There will be legitimate amendments on perimeter 
rule, on some other safety issues. Those will be relevant. But we can't 
move forward when half our body virtually is unable to be a 
participant.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.
  Mr. REID. The Senator from Texas makes my case. If there is part of 
this bill she doesn't like, whether it is tax provisions or anything 
else, offer an amendment to try to take it out. No one is trying to 
stop her from legislating. It appears to me my friend from Texas is 
looking for an excuse to kill this bill. If she doesn't like the tax 
provisions in this bill, offer an amendment to strike them. No one is 
stopping her from doing that.
  I don't think it is asking too much to say we would like to have some 
idea of what amendments are going to be offered. I don't care what they 
are if they relate to this bill. I don't know how many more times I 
need to say that. I think people, such as my friend from Texas, are 
looking for an excuse to deep six this bill, and that is what is going 
to happen.
  We are at a place now where I have said if you want to offer 
amendments, offer amendments, and they are saying, well, we don't want 
to offer amendments because you have said you want to look at the 
amendments first.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Madam President, parliamentary inquiry: Wasn't the 
tree filled up so that there are no possibilities of offering 
amendments?
  Mr. REID. I have said--it is so easy. If anyone wants to offer an 
amendment, we take that little tree and add

[[Page 7404]]

her branch to it. It is easy to do. I am not trying to stop anyone from 
offering amendments to this FAA bill. It is an important piece of 
legislation and it should be accomplished. But we can't stand around 
for days on end looking at each other. We have people who say they want 
to offer amendments. Good. Let them offer amendments. I have no problem 
with that.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Republican leader is recognized.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I will try one more time with this 
voice. I expect I am correct in saying that filling up the tree has not 
worked except on occasions when the Republican leader agreed with the 
majority leader on filling up the tree, and there have been a few 
occasions on which I have agreed. I do not agree this time. This is not 
a process that is going to get us a bill. But we all continue to talk 
to each other, and we will hope that when the Sun comes up tomorrow, 
there will be a process agreed to that will give us a chance to get the 
votes we are going to have to get on this side of the aisle in order to 
complete a bill we would all basically like to complete.
  Mr. REID. Madam President, I have an idea. Why don't we have an 
arrangement where the minority leader, the Republican leader, can also 
look at amendments with me. I am not going to try to stop anyone from 
offering an amendment. He can be part of the deal. I shouldn't be the 
sole arbiter. He can work with me on these amendments.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia is recognized.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Madam President, I would observe that from the very 
beginning of this most interesting day, my very good friend, Senator 
Hutchison, who is the ranking member on the Aviation Committee, has 
said there is a way to pass this bill in 5 minutes and that is: One, we 
do the amendment with respect to what my substitute amendment does; 
and, secondly, that the extraneous amendments, financial amendments 
which the Republicans do not like, they can put up that amendment. Now, 
they have said nobody on their side will vote for our amendment on the 
theory that it didn't come before they had a chance to take out the 
extraneous amendments. So I would say to my distinguished friend, 
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, offer your amendment right now, right 
now. Offer it. You may find a more welcome audience than you think.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Montana is recognized.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Madam President, it is frankly unfortunate that we are 
getting all high bound here and wrapped up around the axle. The action 
by the majority leader, as I understand it, in effect has adopted the 
Durbin amendment, which off the top I think is regrettable. I think it 
is important that this body protect pension plans--all pension plans--
and the effect of the substitute would be to let a certain airline off 
the hook in providing enough protection to the plans. It has made big 
promises, but it is not fully funding the plan.
  Second, it is a bit disturbing that things have developed this way 
because I had discussions with the majority leader as to how we can 
resolve the Durbin amendment, how we can resolve that issue. It was my 
hope we could continue those negotiations and discussions to possibly 
take that issue off the table.
  I say to my good friend from Texas and to all Members, the leader 
asked me to work with Senator Rockefeller to come up with a bill that 
merges both the Commerce Committee bill and the Finance Committee bill. 
Senator Rockefeller and I did that. We sat down and worked out an 
agreement on the bill. It is unfortunate we are not starting with that 
agreement because it is a good-faith agreement and it also included tax 
provisions. We have to have tax provisions to pay for our airlines, for 
the trust fund, the airline trust fund. We have to have tax provisions 
to pay for the highway trust fund. Again, we negotiated this out, the 
chairman and I did, Senator Rockefeller and I did in good faith and we 
came up with the measure which I think is fair.
  Now, fairly, Senators have the right to offer amendments and should 
offer amendments. After all, this is the Senate. I think there is a way 
to work out the Durbin amendment. I made a suggestion to the majority 
leader as to how to do that, and I think it would be helpful if those 
negotiations could continue as we unwind one of the problems we are 
faced with. But second, I hope we can get away from the situation the 
minority leader described, which is filling up the tree which tends to 
get us stuck. The goal is not to get stuck; the goal is to seek an 
expeditious process and to move along quickly.
  We have been spending all afternoon doing nothing, frankly. I made a 
suggestion as to how to deal with at least one significant part and 
that is the Durbin amendment, and it would be my hope that, as has been 
suggested, when the Sun rises tomorrow and we all sleep on this a 
little bit, cooler heads prevail, and we can find a way to get from 
here to there. That means passing the FAA bill, which deals with issues 
Senator Hutchison has talked about and which also finances the airport 
trust fund and the highway trust fund--that is, the plussed-up highway 
trust fund--and also a way to resolve the Durbin amendment in a fair 
and equitable way. Because nobody is 100 percent right here. Senator 
Durbin is not 100 percent right and I am not 100 percent right. But I 
do think there is a way to resolve this, and I hope this evening we can 
think about it, sleep on it, and work it out.
  Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I wish to thank the Senator from 
Montana. We have had some words today, some positive and some not so 
positive, but I hope we can follow through on this conversation and 
this dialogue and try to see if there is common ground. I don't know if 
there is, but I am willing to try, and I hope we can see if we can 
achieve it.
  I offered with Senator Hutchison to have a vote earlier today and 
that didn't happen. But at this point I hope we can find a way to reach 
an amicable solution. This pension issue is a very important issue to 
thousands and thousands of workers and to many communities that are 
served by these airlines. We worked hard and I think had a sizable 
number of Senators who supported our position, but you never know until 
you take the actual vote. I will say the underlying bill, after all 
this conversation about the pension plans affecting five airlines--and 
the tax provisions, which, frankly, I support--I think the tax 
provisions in this bill are good, relative to rail bonds, to the New 
York situation, and to the highway trust fund. I support that. I am 
happy to support it. But we want to make sure that at the end of the 
day, the underlying bill is enacted into law. This is long overdue to 
bring modernization and safety to our skies, and I know the work that 
has been put into it by the Senator from Texas and especially the 
Senator from West Virginia.
  So I am prepared to sit down and meet with anyone in good faith to 
try to resolve this if we can. I hope that at the end of the day, 
though, what the majority leader said a few minutes ago is remembered. 
He is looking for any germane amendments relative to this bill and is 
prepared to engage a debate on both sides. He used this procedural 
approach to try to break a logjam, but he clearly is looking for a way 
to move to amendments and most importantly to pass this bill. I think 
that was a good-faith offer, and I know he is a man of his word. So we 
are prepared to work with Senator Rockefeller and Senator Hutchison and 
all the Members to try to resolve these differences.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Madam President, I appreciate what the Senator from 
Montana and the Senator from Illinois have said. I do hope we can 
continue to work on this. I know the situation, as it stands right now, 
would not be acceptable: having a major piece of legislation that needs 
to be debated, and we need to have the ability for the minority voice 
to be heard. I don't think that it is going to happen with this 
particular procedure, but that doesn't mean the door is closed.

[[Page 7405]]

  We do want to work on this bill because, as I have said many times, 
the underlying bill is one I fully support. It may be that one of the 
options would be to separate the tax part of the bill and the aviation 
part. I agree with the aviation tax part as well. Most people on our 
side of the aisle do. It is the taxes that have nothing to do with 
aviation that have been put into this bill that are the problem. That 
is what is killing this bill right now. If we can come to an agreement 
on the aviation taxes and the aviation bill and let the other tax 
provisions that relate to the subway and the railway and the highway 
fund, if those can be done in a separate package and then we have the 
votes up or down, then I think that is one option we ought to consider.
  So right now, in this particular procedure, I think we are going 
nowhere. But we are going to continue to talk, and perhaps one of these 
other options would be doable. The pension part is so important to me. 
I have worked with Senator Durbin all day and ever since I learned the 
pension part had been changed in the tax part of the package.
  I hope we can come to a conclusion. I would like to come to a 
conclusion with the Finance Committee because I think there are some 
compromises, perhaps, that could be made. But I know what is in the 
bill now would be very detrimental to some of the airlines in this 
country. I think, as a matter of fairness and equity and protection of 
employees, that we could not accept the language that is there. That 
doesn't mean the door isn't open to talk. But if we can do something in 
a separate bill and let the aviation bill--taxes and authorization--go 
forward, I would hope that would be an option to consider.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Casey). The Senator from Montana is 
recognized.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, first, I appreciate the words of the 
Senator from Illinois and the Senator from Texas and their willingness 
to work out an accommodation on the pension provision.
  Second, I caution this body about potentially separating these bills 
because the revenues provided in the bill are for the airport trust 
fund. I think that is very important. Also, the revenues are provided 
for NextGen, which is the next generation of air traffic control 
infrastructure, as they move from analog to satellite. European 
countries already have it. We need it here. We are behind the times. We 
need the money to get started. So I wonder about the advisability of 
separating those provisions.
  Third, our highway trust fund is in deep trouble because of 
inflation, fuel costs, and construction costs going up. It is important 
that we so-called plus-up the highway trust fund and revenues there. 
The ways we are paying for the highway trust fund have been agreed to 
by the Commerce Committee and the Finance Committee, Senator 
Rockefeller and myself. We agreed. That should not be an issue. The 
ways we are paying for the highway trust fund are provisions that are 
very meek and mild, not inflammatory at all. One is to limit fuel 
fraud. We should do that. Next, we should increase the solvency of the 
liability trust fund. That has not been opposed by anybody that I am 
aware of. That is jobs. We know this country and our growth rate is not 
what we would like it to be, and we could work this out.
  Again, here we are at about 7 o'clock this evening, and a lot of good 
words have been spoken in good faith. Let's follow up and try to find a 
solution tomorrow.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas is recognized.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, if I may respond briefly to the 
Senator from Montana, there is a lot of room for us to work on the 
highway trust fund issue. Everybody wants to replenish the highway 
trust fund. I do think there are issues with paying for it, and I think 
there is the view that we don't have to put a tax on some sectors in 
order to make this whole, because it is stimulative, and I think we 
could work on something that would get the highway trust fund 
replenished but not have to then find the issue of how we pay for it--
particularly, one of the things is the retroactive tax version which is 
a problem for some people.
  With the highway trust fund, I think we are replenishing something we 
can all agree is necessary. If we can come to terms on paying for it 
and in what manner it will be paid for, that is an area we would like 
to discuss.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia is recognized.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, I don't know if I am closing or not. 
I want to offer this observation. I have been here virtually all day. I 
have had plenty of rest--very little talking and very little learning. 
What strikes me, as this day closes, is that the people who are 
objecting in various ways to taking a vote--there will be no votes from 
our side on this or that or whatever--are missing the whole point of 
the bill. I support the Durbin position on pensions because it is part 
of the written law. It is not very difficult.
  Everybody wants their own little piece to win. I have heard almost no 
conversation today--and virtually none yesterday--about the perilous 
condition of our aviation industry, particularly the commercial 
aviation industry. There isn't any sense of urgency about the large 
matter. Maybe people have it in their hearts, but they don't choose to 
bring it out here because on the floor they want to win points or they 
have ideological considerations that we cannot raise taxes or whatever. 
But while we are sitting here doing nothing--and I am sure impressing 
the American people mightily with our vigor--we have an aviation 
industry that is on the verge of collapse.
  I pointed out a number of times that one out of every six employees 
has been laid off by commercial airlines. The fastest growing part of 
the aviation industry is the general aviation industry. I have very 
strong feelings about that, but for the sake of the chairman of the 
Finance Committee, I backed off of my solution for a fee of $25 per 
flight for a high-end private or corporate jet. I never really figured 
out how the $25 was going to bring them to the feet of catastrophe. 
Most of the jets that are made at the high end are sold elsewhere, 
overseas.
  So I am very frustrated, as chairman of the Aviation Subcommittee, 
that we are not really talking about how to fix aviation. We are 
talking about how to keep our turf, how you are going to get no votes 
on this until I get my votes on that. None of it is about the big 
picture. It is about little things inside the bill which people choose 
to put their feet down on and then not move.
  That is very depressing to me because I am very keenly aware that 
aviation is not a subject that has a great deal of appeal broadly. Most 
of our meetings on the Commerce Committee are attended by relatively 
few. There are relatively few on the floor of the Senate who really 
understand the condition of the aviation industry or the details 
pertaining to its condition, the history of that condition, and what 
the future holds.
  I hope that, as we go through this night of cooling down, we will 
become reflective about what the bill is about, which is trying to give 
the commercial aviation industry, as well as the general aviation 
industry, a chance to survive in one case and flourish in the other 
case.
  I made enormous compromises with the chairman of the Finance 
Committee--monumental, from my point of view. But so what. That is not 
even the point. The point is commercial airlines. So many of them are 
closing down. So many of them are in chapter 11 bankruptcy, in and out 
of chapter 11. Some are headed toward chapter 7. It is a national 
catastrophe--not to speak of our air traffic control system where we 
are at this point behind Mongolia.
  So these things are important, and evidently others don't think so 
because they want to win their points to keep their positions and let 
the aviation industry take care of itself. I have not heard anybody on 
the floor today discussing with any passion, any coherency, or logic 
the condition of our aviation industry. That is very disappointing to 
me.
  So I put up that caution and say that I hope we will be a wiser group 
tomorrow and that we will reach an accommodation because if we don't, 
we will

[[Page 7406]]

 not only not be the world class of aviation, we will be very far from 
it. It is not just the commercial airlines, it is the air traffic 
control system. And, yes, you do have to kind of raise taxes for that. 
You have to build a digital GPS satellite system at the same time as 
you maintain an analog system. It will take 10 or 12 years to build 
this modern air traffic control system which every other country in 
Europe has--Japan and probably China have it.
  It is discouraging to me for people not to be keeping their eye on 
the central force of this bill, which is to preserve what we need to do 
in commerce, to stay in touch with each other, to visit a dying mother, 
and do all kinds of things that are in the American way of life. Our 
debate today has not reflected the American way of life. It has 
reflected kind of a much more parochial view than I am comfortable 
with. But I am managing the bill, so I have to deal with that.
  So I just close by saying that I hope tomorrow will be a brighter 
day.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa is recognized.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I wasn't present on the floor when the 
maneuvering that just took place happened that puts this Senate in a 
very difficult position, but it gets us into a very bad and dangerous 
situation.
  The maneuvering of the Democratic leader and floor manager that was 
just done is not used very often in the Senate. In fact, substituting--
putting a modification of a substitute that was agreed to by two 
separate committees that jointly brought this to the floor is something 
that I think is very unprecedented. This process of filling the tree so 
that only the majority party can decide what amendments can come up is 
not only dangerous and can keep this very important piece of 
legislation from being passed, but it is dangerous for the whole 
process of the Senate's comity in getting the job done.
  As I said, this substitute was the product of two committees--not one 
committee but two committees--and by the overwhelming support of people 
on those committees that we needed to not only reauthorize the Federal 
Aviation Administration and do everything we can to improve airport 
safety, as well as airport facilities, but also the financing of it, to 
make sure there is plenty of money available to get the job done.
  On safety at the airports, we have the Commerce Committee doing their 
work. On financing it, we have the tax-writing Finance Committee making 
sure the money is available. These two committees do their work almost 
in a unanimous way, and it comes to the Senate floor. That ought to be 
a procedure that gets this bill through this body quickly, without a 
lot of controversy, and by an overwhelming vote that reflects the 
comity that went into it and that reflects the need of the airline 
industry, both for commerce and for the passenger.
  These joint deals should not be taken lightly, and because one 
amendment is offered that a few powerful Senators do not like, and 
their unwillingness to set it aside so we could work on other 
amendments as we tried to work out a compromise was not accepted, they 
take this extraordinary measure that only a manager of a bill can do to 
ask to modify an amendment by taking out the provision of the bill 
which dealt with the Durbin amendment that was before the Senate. That 
is nothing else, just blatant political power to get around something 
that people did not want to deal with. This was something that was 
agreed to between the two committees. That move breaches the deal.
  What is more, the Democratic leader has backstopped the breach of the 
deal by this procedure we call ``filling the tree'' so that only 
amendments can be offered that can get unanimous consent to offer them, 
and that is very difficult to do and is only done for the sole purpose 
of keeping the issue dealing with the Durbin amendment from debate and 
finality on the floor of the Senate.
  All day long the floor managers could have set aside the Durbin 
amendment, as I said, and moved along to other business. That is what 
the Finance Committee does in similar situations. We have already heard 
speakers before me say there are very real possibilities of working out 
compromises on that amendment that the majority manager did not like.
  Let it be clear that we could have processed other business if 
Senator Durbin would have deferred action on his amendment, and we 
would have been moving along. We would not be in this position that is 
dangerous from two standpoints: dangerous whether or not this important 
legislation can be passed, and dangerous from the standpoint of working 
together on other legislation that needs to be done in future weeks.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
  (The remarks of Mr. Brown are located in today's Record under 
``Statements on Introduced bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mr. BROWN. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the 
quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Brown). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.


                                  IRAQ

  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I rise tonight to talk about the war in 
Iraq, from two different vantage points. One, the first vantage point, 
is from the perspective of those who have served--some of our fighting 
men and women who happen to be in the Reserves. I also wish to talk 
about a victim of this war and some thoughts I have in my heart today 
about the war and about this particular victim and what it tells about 
our country. First of all, with regard to a particular problem and then 
some legislation I introduced to correct it.
  We have a policy right now, which I would regard as unfair, that if 
it is fully implemented would hurt numerous Army Reserve members and 
consequently our national security. Last year, the Army implemented a 
new policy whereby Reserve members who were called to Active Duty for a 
period of time exceeding 180 days, will be given an option--an option 
of a permanent change in station assignment or a waiver request to 
receive a significantly reduced per diem rate for the locality to which 
they are temporarily assigned. This could tremendously disadvantage 
those who happen to be serving in the Army Reserves.
  While on its face it might seem harmless because it gets fairly 
technical, its unintended ramifications could be very costly. Reserve 
Members from across Pennsylvania and across the country have described 
this policy as a hardship that could potentially cause future problems 
for retention and enlistment rates. For instance, under this new 
policy, an Army reservist living in Philadelphia who is deployed for a 
temporary mobilization, as short as 9 or 12 months, for example--and 
this is an increasingly common occurrence because of the strain the war 
in Iraq has placed on our military, but this particular example means 
that person could face the financial necessity of selling his or her 
home if he or she is unable to afford to maintain both their primary 
residence and their temporary housing on a reduced per diem rate. In 
other words, they are not being helped in that interim period of, say, 
9 to 12 months. This is not only a story about Pennsylvania, but it is 
a story that could be replicated, unfortunately, across the country.
  I introduced legislation yesterday entitled ``The Reserve Residence 
Protection Act of 2008,'' which would correct this fundamentally unfair 
policy. The legislation would provide a basic allowance for housing to 
cover the costs of maintaining the primary residence of National Guard 
or Reserve members when they are mobilized outside their local area.
  In addition, it would pay a lower second basic allowance at their 
mission location, if onbase housing is not provided. In January, when 
we passed the fiscal year 2007 National Defense Authorization Act, we 
passed a provision providing for the second basic housing

[[Page 7407]]

allowance to protect the residence of Reserve members without 
dependents, but we left out--it is hard to believe this but we did--
this body left out members with dependents. So if you had dependents 
and you are in this dilemma, you were left out. This legislation 
corrects this very important oversight.
  Our Nation today is relying more than ever on National Guard and 
Reserve troops to fulfill our missions around the world and especially 
to carry on the work these men and women are doing in Iraq. Without 
these citizen soldiers placing their lives on the line to contribute to 
our national security, we could not carry out all our vital missions. 
National Guard and Reserve members know the sacrifices they need to 
make whether they enlist, but no Reserve members should be forced to 
choose--as they are now, if this policy is implemented without the bill 
passing--no Reserve member should be forced to choose selling his or 
her primary residence in order to fulfill a temporary mobilization 
order or deciding not to reenlist due to this unnecessary burden. In 
addition to being unfair in the first instance, it acts as a 
disincentive to those who might want to give even more service to their 
country.
  When citizen soldiers enlist, they sign agreements to train and 
deploy when they are called up. That is the commitment they make to us 
and to our national security. However, I do not believe, and no one in 
this Chamber believes, that this is a one-way street or a one-way deal. 
The Nation, at the end of this bargain, promises to acknowledge their 
unique role as citizen soldiers and to aid in the transition between 
Active and Reserve Duty.
  I am proud to have introduced the Reserve Residence Protection Act of 
2008 because it will ensure that America is keeping its promise, 
keeping our promise to those who serve in our National Guard and 
Reserve, and we are keeping our promise to their families as well.
  In conclusion tonight, I wish to talk about the war for a few 
moments, from the perspective of one victim, but I think this one 
victim tells a very dear and sad story. Today's Washington Post had a 
picture on the front above the headline. The headline read: ``U.S. Role 
Deepens in Sadr City.'' The subheadline reads, ``Fierce Battle Against 
Shiite Militiamen Echoes First Years Of War.''
  I would say this in the context of where we are today. Tomorrow is 
the fifth anniversary of President Bush declaring, ``Mission 
Accomplished.'' That is one thing we are thinking about today and 
tomorrow--all the time that has passed, all the trauma to our country 
and to the people of Iraq since then. But also we note, in yesterday's 
press, in the month of April, as of April 29, yesterday, 44 Americans 
died in Iraq, the highest number since September of 2007.
  So why do I say that in the context of this story? The story, which 
is an ominous sign for what is happening in Sadr City with regard to 
our troops--and we have seen the loss of life this week. But above that 
story is this horrific picture. I know you may not be able to see it 
from a distance, but many have seen it today. I will read the caption 
before I show the picture.
  The caption reads: ``Ali Hussein is pulled from the rubble of his 
home after a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad's Sadr City. The 2-year-old died 
at a hospital.''
  The picture depicts two men, one holding this 2-year-old child above 
his head. The 2-year-old, this child, would look like any child in 
America with the kind of sandals you can connect with Velcro. He has 
shorts on and a shirt.
  Unfortunately, I know you cannot see it from here, unfortunately for 
this child, who later died, apparently when this picture was taken he 
is still alive, he looks at that moment, in fact, dead. His eyes are 
closed, his mouth is open. You can see the soot or the dust from an 
explosion covering his body. So at that moment he had not died, but he 
died a short time after. And what does this mean? Well, it means a lot 
of things. It means this war grinds on, and that the lives of our 
soldiers, the effect on their families, and we see other victims--we do 
not see pictures like this very often of children dying in Iraq.
  This is not the fault of any one person or any side of the aisle 
here. It is something we have got to be more cognizant of, especially 
in the context of this raging debate we are having in America about our 
economy. And it is so important that we have a debate about our 
economy. It is so important that we focus on those who have lost their 
jobs, focus on those who have been devastated by the loss of their 
homes, focus on the increasingly difficult challenge that people have 
paying to fill their gas tank; all of the horrific and traumatic 
economic circumstances we face.
  But as that debate is taking place, we are still at war. We still 
have soldiers coming home who, as Lincoln said, in his second inaugural 
when he spoke of ``him who has borne the battle and his widow and his 
orphan.''
  So many soldiers are coming home either maimed or coming home dead 
for their final rest. And even victims in Iraq, young victims such as 
this young boy, 2 years old. He lost his life in an airstrike. So 
whether it is a 2-year-old in Sadr City who happened to be Iraqi or 
whether it is a 2-year-old boy or girl here in America who lost their 
mother or their father in Iraq serving our country, we have to remind 
ourselves that this anniversary challenges all of us to do all we can 
to bring this conflict to an end.
  No one has a corner on the market of truth. No one knows the only way 
to do this. But we have to continue to worry about it and think about 
this war and its victims, and we have to figure out a way to get our 
troops out of this civil war.
  As we do that, unfortunately, these pictures of the victims, whether 
they are nameless and faceless, or whether they are, in fact, 
identified, as this poor child was identified, must be reminders to all 
of us that we have a lot of unfinished business in the Senate and in 
Washington when it comes to the policy that has led to the loss of life 
we have seen here in America.
  In my home State of Pennsylvania, like the Presiding Officer's, Ohio, 
we are up to 184 deaths and more than 1,200 wounded, in many cases 
grievously, permanently, irreparably wounded.
  So this picture reminds us that we have a lot of work to do when it 
comes to the policy as it relates to the war in Iraq.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Casey). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

                          ____________________