[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 546-559]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




           INCREASING THE STATUTORY LIMIT ON THE PUBLIC DEBT

  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the 
Senate will resume consideration of H.J. Res. 45, which the clerk will 
report.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       A joint resolution (H.J. Res 45) increasing the statutory 
     limit on the public debt.

  Pending:

       Baucus (for Reid) amendment No. 3299, in the nature of a 
     substitute.
       Baucus amendment No. 3300 (to amendment No. 3299), to 
     protect Social Security.
       Conrad/Gregg amendment No. 3302 (to amendment No. 3299), to 
     establish a Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal 
     Action, to assure the long-term fiscal stability and economic 
     security of the Federal Government of the United States, and 
     to expand future prosperity and growth for all Americans.

  Mr. REID. 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. BAUCUS. 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the quorum call be rescinded.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.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, today the Senate resumes its third day of 
consideration of the joint resolution to increase the debt limit. We 
continue our discussion of whether Congress will allow the government 
to honor its commitments to pay its bills.
  Yesterday, the Senate disposed of the Thune amendment to terminate 
the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program. Today, three 
amendments remain pending: the substitute amendment raising the amount 
of the debt limit, this Senator's amendment to protect Social Security, 
and the Conrad-Gregg amendment to create a fast-track process to 
consider a budget commission's recommendations. Up to eight other 
amendments remain in order to the joint resolution. The Senator from 
Alaska has the right to offer an amendment on the Environmental 
Protection Agency's endangerment finding. The Senator from Alaska spoke 
on this subject yesterday, and although I do not by any means wish to 
speak for the Senator from Alaska, it appears from a statement 
yesterday that she seeks to address the subject matter as a 
freestanding resolution of disapproval rather than an amendment. The 
majority leader also has the right to offer an amendment reinstituting 
the statutory pay-as-you-go budget law. We hope we might see that 
amendment today. The six remaining amendments in order are a Coburn 
amendment proposing a package of rescissions; a Sessions amendment 
creating caps on appropriated spending; an amendment by the Republican 
leader's designee relevant to any on the list; an amendment by the 
majority leader relevant to any on the list; and two amendments by this 
Senator regarding the budget commission.
  Under the previous order, every amendment to this joint resolution 
will be subject to an affirmative 60-vote threshold. The Senate will 
not, however, conduct any rollcall votes today. We expect the next 
rollcall vote will occur no earlier than Monday afternoon. The Senate 
is open for business this morning for any of these Senators to offer 
their amendments, and the Senate is available for the statements, 
obviously, of all Senators. We will work toward developing an agreement 
for the offering of all amendments by sometime early next week. We hope 
to conclude action on this measure shortly thereafter.
  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. WHITEHOUSE. 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 National Debt

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as we continue to debate our Nation's 
debt limit on the Senate floor, I rise today to review how we came to 
this point of serious budgetary imbalance and, in particular, how $9 
trillion of it is Bush-Republican debt.
  At a time when tens of millions of Americans are out of work and 
families across the Nation are struggling to heat their homes and pay 
their bills

[[Page 547]]

and buy their prescriptions and put food on the table, our constituents 
are rightly frustrated at America's lack of fiscal restraint. They 
deserve to hear the whole story. The unfortunate truth is that 
President Bush left us with a budget so warped and imbalanced and an 
economy in such disarray that President Obama and this Congress have 
had no choice but to run temporary deficits. The previous 
administration must bear at least $9 trillion worth of the blame.
  Let's roll back to the time when George Bush took the oath of office 
as President of the United States. In his first address to the Nation, 
he pledged to ``call for responsibility and try to live it as well.'' 
It had been a divisive election, and many Americans now found some 
comfort and hope in those words. They were to be disappointed. But on 
the budgetary front, there was good reason for optimism on that January 
morning in 2001. After decades of deficit spending, President William 
Jefferson Clinton had set the Nation on its healthiest fiscal path in 
generations.
  After 28 straight years of multibillion-dollar budget deficits, our 
Nation saw surpluses beginning in 1998 under President Clinton.
  In President Clinton's last full year in office, we saw the largest 
budget surplus in our Nation's history--a budget surplus of $236 
billion under President Clinton--and that good budgetary news looked 
forward as well.
  The month George Bush first moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, our 
Congressional Budget Office--the nonpartisan accounting arm of 
Congress--projected that we would continue to see surpluses throughout 
the following decade.
  Those budget surpluses, the product of responsible governing--some 
might even say fiscally conservative governing--were projected to be 
enough to completely wipe out our national debt by 2009. That was the 
picture we looked forward to when George Bush took office in 2001--
predictions by the Congressional Budget Office that our national debt 
would be zero by 2009.
  Indeed, there was actually debate in academic circles about whether a 
debt-free America was a good idea. That discussion seems rather bitter 
now.
  In other words, at that time, the hard work had been done. The Nation 
was on a strong financial course. If President Bush had stayed that 
course of fiscal responsibility, he could have been the first President 
since Andrew Jackson in 1836 to govern a debt-free United States of 
America. If President Bush had chosen the responsible path, we would be 
having a very different debate today.
  Of course, President Bush and the Republicans who governed Congress 
did not choose the responsible path. This chart illustrates the 
difference between the surpluses that George Bush inherited and the 
deficits he created. This top line, at the top of the red, shows the 
CBO budget outlook I have described that was projected by CBO in 
January of 2001, climbing with increased surpluses over the years to 
come. The bottom line at the bottom of the red shows what the Bush 
administration actually did, the budget results under the Bush 
administration.
  The difference between the anticipated path President Clinton left 
this country on and what President Bush actually did is a mind-boggling 
$8.9 trillion. For purposes of rounding, I will call it $9 trillion. 
That is a conservative figure that does not include the likely cost of 
servicing that debt over the years. We have to pay interest and not 
just pay back our borrowing. It also does not include the spending 
President Obama had to do to offset fiscal disaster because of the 
financial meltdown he inherited. That spending by President Obama was 
not anything President Obama wanted to do. It was not anything he 
campaigned on. It was not on his agenda. It was an emergency measure 
necessary to clean up the economic wreckage left by the Bush 
administration.
  Look at one particular contrast. Our current majority leader, Harry 
Reid, has worked to craft a health care reform bill that would not only 
achieve near universal coverage but would do so without adding one 
penny to the national debt. In contrast, when George Bush and his 
Republican allies in Congress designed a Medicare prescription drug 
benefit, they did so without offsetting at all the hundreds of billions 
of dollars in new spending. Indeed, they even larded it up with special 
deals for the pharmaceutical industry. In other words, the Republicans 
relied entirely on deficit spending to fund a huge new entitlement 
program. That was the way they actually did business. The Republicans 
relied entirely on deficit spending to fund a huge new entitlement 
program. That is the fact.
  Now Republicans inaccurately and, frankly, hypocritically, rail on 
budgetary grounds against our efforts to extend health care coverage. 
But unlike their costly prescription drug bill, our health care bill 
improves our budget baseline.
  The baseline we inherited from President Bush desperately needs 
improvement. This next chart shows the deterioration of annual deficits 
under the previous administration. The facts are plain. George Bush 
vastly increased spending while cutting tax revenues. The structural 
deficit he built in and left to President Obama simply cannot be 
sustained. But how soon our friends on the other side of the aisle 
forget.
  In fact, as this next chart shows, the national debt limit had to be 
increased seven times--seven times--while George Bush was President. 
President Bush inherited from President Clinton a $5.95 trillion 
national debt limit. By the time he left office, his reckless spending 
and his tax policies favoring the rich at the expense of working 
Americans necessitated a debt limit almost twice as high, at $11.52 
trillion.
  We should not take lightly the borrowing expansion we are now forced 
to pursue to help recover from the Bush economic meltdown. But we 
should also not forget how we ended up in this position.
  Each borrowed dollar, borrowed under the Bush administration, 
involves a debt service cost, and the Republican explosion of debt 
between 2001 and 2009 now makes everything we do, from running the 
government to stimulating the economy, more expensive.
  Balancing our budget is a priority at which Democrats have succeeded 
in the past. It is one of the legacies of President Clinton. I am 
confident Democrats will succeed at it again because we believe in 
responsible governance.
  But now is not the time to play games with our Nation's finances and 
put essential programs on which families depend at risk. In the worst 
economic recession since the Great Depression, the analogy between 
family budgets and the Federal budget is a false one. If the Federal 
Government contracted its spending, shrunk its spending at the time 
when States, municipalities, companies, and families are all shrinking 
and constraining their spending, it would further shrink the economy. 
It would worsen the recession. It would make things worse for American 
families. Period. Saying anything else is simply false.
  Unemployment hovers around 10 percent nationwide and even higher in 
hard-hit places such as my home State of Rhode Island. Economic 
recovery must remain our top national priority. Indeed, we need to do 
even more to put Americans back to work. The increased borrowing power 
we are now considering will give us the flexibility to enact new job-
creating legislation.
  Let me make one point very clear. An upfront commitment of resources 
to creating jobs need not add to our Nation's long-term liabilities. 
Let me give some examples.
  Throughout the Nation, there are bridges condemned or under weight 
restrictions. We have bridges in Rhode Island that are condemned or 
under weight restrictions. There are roadways that the U.S. Department 
of Transportation has deemed unfit for further maintenance. In my 
State, the Providence viaduct is in that condition. We have, across the 
country, water treatment facilities that release raw sewage into our 
waterways after it rains. We have old school buildings that pose 
demonstrated safety hazards for our students. We have numerous other 
structures in demonstrable disrepair. We have an infrastructure 
deficit.

[[Page 548]]

  All these projects need repair, and repairing them is going to 
require our attention sooner or later. Thus, getting that work done now 
would not add in a meaningful way to our national long-term 
liabilities. We have to rebuild this failed infrastructure. We are not 
going to let those bridges fall into the rivers. Why not do it now when 
we need the jobs? Why not do it now when the old adage ``a stitch in 
time saves nine'' prevails?
  Every American understands, whether they are working on their car or 
making repairs on their house, that when you get after maintenance 
earlier, the cost is always lower. So there is no need to be concerned 
about the Nation's fiscal liabilities when we are engaged in the repair 
of decrepit infrastructure.
  A vote to increase the debt limit should be taken in proper context. 
When he was sworn in, President Obama faced the twin evils of a deep 
recession--a recession that for many American workers is as bad as the 
Great Depression--and he faced the $9 trillion Bush debt, run up in a 
time when things were fine. It was fair-weather spending, fair-weather 
debt.
  Our top priority now must be to continue working on job creation 
until our economic prosperity is restored, until we have recovered from 
this great recession. We must not sit still for lectures in fiscal 
probity from the party that ran up $9 trillion in fair-weather debt to 
fund a war that need not have been embarked on, to fund tax cuts for 
the wealthiest Americans who did not need them, and to pursue economic 
policies that led to the recession we are trapped in now. Those 
policies lit the fires President Obama still is fighting to put out.
  I yield the floor. 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. NELSON of Florida. 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.
  Mr. NELSON of Florida. I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning 
business up to 15 minutes.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.


                            Haitian Children

  Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I do not think there was any 
person who lives on planet Earth, who saw the clip on CNN this morning 
of dying children in Haiti, who did not have emotion overwhelm them, as 
my wife Grace and I, having been to Haiti many times. We saw the fact 
that children are dying in Haiti because they cannot get medicine and/
or cannot get medical supplies. It is an inexcusable and intolerable 
situation. If you hear emotion in my voice, you will understand that 
the Nelson office has been working on this crisis for over the past 
week since the earthquake hit because we have been talking to our 
doctors and we have so many of our Florida physicians who are down 
there doing heroic work.
  A lot of the work is being done by the University of Miami School of 
Medicine. A lot of it is being done with the coordinated efforts of 
Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, some of the children's hospitals in 
Florida. As we have been on the phone with the various agencies trying 
to cut the redtape so that the supplies can get in or, in the 
alternative, we can get the critically injured children out, whether it 
be to a third country, to another part of Haiti, or back to the United 
States--critically injured--in order to save their lives, we are still 
having difficulties.
  Since we are not going to be voting on this debt ceiling raising that 
would be a critical vote here, I am taking off at 4 o'clock in the 
morning with a bunch of doctors from a Tampa charity directly into 
Port-au-Prince, where I will meet with one of the greatest heroes, Dr. 
Barth Green, one of the lead physicians, a neurosurgeon from the 
University of Miami and Miami Jackson Memorial Hospital, who has been 
down there since the day after the earthquake and has been begging for 
help.
  What I want to do is cut through some of this redtape. I want to give 
you an example. Here is the latest plea from Dr. Green:

       There are 3 critically burned Haitian patients, one in our 
     [University of Miami]/Project Medishare Hospital and 2 on the 
     USNS Comfort--

  The naval hospital ship--

     that needed to be medevacced to the Ryder Burn Unit tomorrow 
     [morning].

  This is an e-mail plea from last night.

       We need ok from the US Embassy [for patient] #1 or #2 or #3 
     to authorize the US Military to take on C130 aircraft. Please 
     help save their lives. I need immediate [help] to do the 
     right thing.

  We are trying to cut through this redtape. If it takes me going down 
there to try to whack through it myself, that is what I am going to do. 
Six of us are crowding into a little jet in the morning at 4 a.m., five 
doctors and me, packed with medical supplies to do that.
  I know the State Department, the Defense Department, the Department 
of Homeland Security--we have been talking to all these folks--have 
been trying. But bureaucracy gets in the way. Let me share with you an 
e-mail from the State Department. Get this:

       Thank you for your email. We will provide information about 
     your U.S. citizen constituent to the U.S. Embassy in Port au 
     Prince as quickly as possible.

  That is a standardized e-mail. That doesn't say anything. It doesn't 
give specifics. I know they roll these things out, but don't send that 
kind of e-mail to me to try to placate me because it doesn't. I want 
action.
  I want to give another example. Senator Levin is making a plea. He 
called us when he found out I was going to Haiti. Senator Levin's 
office has a Haitian who is in Michigan, a dad. He is there legally. He 
is not a naturalized citizen, but he is there legally. His daughter is 
critically injured. This is addressed to me, and it is about getting 
this daughter air-vacced out of Haiti because she has critical 
injuries. This is from the Department of State. This is a little girl, 
a 17-year-old with a broken back. She is being denied being put on an 
aircraft.

       Mr. Nelson,
       Due to the fact that Samantha is neither an American 
     citizen nor a U.S. Lawful Permanent Resident, she would be 
     ineligible to board an aircraft to the United States. 
     Currently, all visa operations at the U.S. Embassy in Port au 
     Prince, including immigrant visas, have been suspended until 
     further notice while our Embassy focuses its resources to 
     assisting American citizens in Haiti.

  This little girl can't board an American aircraft because she has a 
broken back. She needs to be medevacced so that her life can be saved.
  We have another child with a collapsed lung. Dr. Green told us about 
this child. He cannot save that child with a routine procedure to save 
people with collapsed lungs unless he can get the proper medical 
attention and maybe they can get him out there onto that hospital ship. 
But this is the kind of bureaucracy we are running into. The Department 
of Homeland Security, which handles Customs and Border Patrol--and 
don't talk to me about people trying to sneak into the States. We live 
with this problem in Florida. We know what it is trying to make people 
legal in their immigrations. But the Department of Homeland Security--
Customs and Border Patrol is telling me their agents on the ground, 
when these critically injured children come in, have the authority to 
give, in essence, what is called a medical waiver for a child who is 
obviously in extremis, and they assured us that will be the case. Well, 
I hope so. That is why I have come to the floor of the Senate, because 
I get these other e-mails and I get these pleas from physicians such as 
Dr. Green who are saying kids are dying because they can't get them 
out.
  We are not talking about a lot. We are talking about 200 whom I know 
of right now in order to be able to get them out. I will continue to 
work this problem all the rest of this day, until I get on that 
aircraft at 4 o'clock in the morning. Then I will work this problem 
when I get on the ground in Port-au-Prince.

[[Page 549]]

  It is total chaos down there. The American military, the American 
civilian agencies, the State Department, the Department of Homeland 
Security, all the agencies, are making heroic efforts. It is mass chaos 
because of a critically poor nation that has no infrastructure. When a 
natural disaster such as this huge earthquake hits, it turns into 
ultimate chaos. Out of that chaos, we are trying to bring some order. I 
thank all those souls, American and otherwise, who are contributing to 
try to bring order out of this chaos. But sometimes we lose sight of 
the goal because we get so wound up in bureaucracy. That is what we 
need to get through. That is what I am sure we will get through.
  At the end of the day, we will find that Haiti will restore itself. 
Although Haiti's Government is in shambles, Haiti does, in fact, have a 
President who deeply cares and loves its people. President Preval is 
clean. You can't say that for all the past leaders of Haiti. I believe 
President Preval is clean. I don't believe all the people around him 
are clean, but I think he is. It is time for the industrialized nations 
of the world to come together and to help these people rebuild.
  The real crisis is right now, with the dying and the suffering we see 
in front of our eyes. That has to be attended to.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Minnesota.


                           Amendment No. 3302

  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise to speak in support of amendment 
No. 3302, the bipartisan task force for responsible fiscal action, 
offered by my colleagues Senator Conrad and Senator Gregg. I was an 
early sponsor of this amendment from the beginning, from when I first 
came to the Senate. I wish to thank them for their leadership on this 
issue.
  Under the previous administration, we saw the debt of the United 
States double. They were handed a budget surplus, and they turned it 
into an enormous budget deficit. Over the next 8 years, sadly, with no 
work, if we do nothing, it is projected to double again. Long-term 
projections vary, but it is clear this course is not the course we wish 
to take. Despite years of talk from both parties, little progress has 
been made, which is why I believe that to ensure the Nation's future 
economic security, we need to establish a budget commission dedicated 
to examining this problem in detail and coming up with recommendations 
to address the long-term fiscal challenges of the country.
  I don't want to have just a study that sits on a shelf. The American 
people deserve better than that. That is why I believe it is important 
to have a statutory commission with an up-or-down vote on the 
recommendations of the commission. It has worked before for Social 
Security. I believe it will work here.
  I appreciate the administration's work on this. The proposal they 
have made to have a Presidential-appointed commission obviously is a 
viable alternative. But I think the better alternative is this one, and 
that is why I urge my colleagues to vote for it.
  We can no longer afford to hide our heads in the sand, hoping the 
fiscal outlook will correct itself. We need to make changes, and we 
need to act now in order to keep our debt from spiraling permanently 
out of control. Difficult fiscal decisions have been put off for too 
long. We need to make tough decisions now because we are spending too 
much, and the path we are on is unsustainable.
  This was, of course, made more difficult by the economic crisis we 
faced last fall. On a bipartisan basis we had to do something to make 
sure we shored up the credit markets to make sure we ensured financial 
stability for our country. We had to invest in America and invest in 
jobs with targeted investments. But now we cannot keep going on this 
course.
  Gross debt is likely to exceed 100 percent of GDP within the next few 
years, nearing levels not seen since the end of World War II. Each 
citizen's share of today's debt is more than $38,000. The prior 
administration, as I noted, ran up the Federal debt to the point where 
today we are forced to spend over 8 percent of our budget simply to pay 
interest on the Federal debt.
  In 2008, American taxpayers paid more than $250 billion to our 
creditors in interest payments alone. That is money we are sending to 
other countries instead of spending it in the United States.
  The more we spend to service our debts, the less we have for 
infrastructure investments, health care, energy innovation, and other 
priorities that are so important to the American people.
  The threat our debt poses to the economic security of the United 
States cannot be ignored. As this economic crisis has shown, credit can 
dry up overnight. With almost 70 percent of our Nation's debt financed 
by foreign countries and investors, our government literally could not 
pay its bills without the help of China, our biggest creditor.
  If faith in the American economy were to falter and foreign countries 
stopped extending credit, we would be faced with a host of bad choices. 
Even without another crisis, many of these programs are on the path to 
insolvency, and economic growth cannot make up the difference. These 
are issues that must be addressed. That is why it is so important we 
step back and look at the long term, focus on this debt, at the same 
time knowing we have to have a safety net for the people of this 
country.
  If we look at the health care bill, we will see what we will come up 
with now as we look at changes to that bill. It actually saved--the 
Senate bill--$130 billion on the deficit in the first 10 years, $1.3 
trillion over the next 10 years. That clearly has to be a piece of this 
reform as we look at the cost to the American people--how we can 
deliver health care more efficiently.
  I believe it is time to change the way Washington works when it comes 
to our long-term fiscal outlook. It is not about being a Democrat; it 
is not about being a Republican; it is not about being an Independent; 
it is about guaranteeing we get something done for the people of this 
country.
  This bipartisan fiscal task force provides a path to restoring our 
financial stability by creating a bipartisan commission to study our 
spending and make recommendations to effectively reduce that spending.
  When I first heard about this idea, I was at one of our bipartisan 
breakfasts. I had just arrived in Washington, and I thought: Why would 
we need a commission to do this? Why can't the people in this body just 
do this? I have realized a few things over the years. One, we have not 
seen that kind of improvement. Two, we have not been able to get that 
kind of bipartisan work going that I have seen. Three, we have this 
idea of a commission that has worked in the past.
  So after being here for about a year, I decided: Do you know what. 
This is not a bad idea. You can have experts work on this. You can come 
up with some ideas on a bipartisan basis for reducing spending, for 
bringing down our deficit, for bringing down the debt. I have decided 
this is the way to go because right now there is no movement on this 
matter at all in this body or in the House.
  This is how this task force would work. First, it would be comprised 
of 18 members from both political parties, 10 Democrats and 8 
Republicans. Fourteen of the eighteen task force members would have to 
agree to report the recommendations to ensure that the recommendations 
the task force makes to Congress have bipartisan support.
  In order to fast-track the process, there is a set timeframe under 
which the task force would make recommendations and a set timeframe for 
ensuring that Congress would give them an up-or-down vote.
  This task force would not be used to force legislation through 
Congress. It would just force Congress to come to the table and make a 
decision.
  Let me address one final point. Some are arguing that projections for 
the near term are so bleak that any talk of deficit and debt reduction 
should be sidelined. I disagree. Everyone knows that when times are 
good, it becomes much harder to tighten the purse strings. This crisis 
has brought the

[[Page 550]]

issue of the deficit to the forefront. The people of this country know 
it. They know they have to watch their own checkbook, They know they 
have to balance their own checkbook, and they want to see Washington 
working on this issue.
  They understand we have had an economic crisis. They did not cause 
this crisis. People on Wall Street making bad decisions, people in 
government allowing some things like subprime mortgages to go through--
there are a lot of people who can be blamed. But they understand we not 
only have to work on the short-term issue of investment in our country, 
and transportation, and that we had to do something to shore up the 
financial crisis so that our whole financial system would not go down 
the tube--it is hard to swallow; when people think about it, they get 
that--but they also want to know the people who represent them are 
working on this debt for the long term, that we have a plan, that we 
are doing something to chisel away at this deficit to bring it down.
  That is what they expect from us. They do not want to send all this 
money in interest to China. They want to be spending it in the United 
States of America on roads and bridges, on their kids, on their 
families, on their kids' education, on their houses. That is where they 
want to be spending this money, not on interest over in China.
  So I urge my colleagues to vote for this bill. I understand it will 
most likely coming up next week. I think it is a very important effort 
going forward. I commend the White House, the economic team, for the 
work they have done with the group of us who has been working on this 
bill and trying to get this through. I think it is very important, not 
just for this year but for the generations to come. It is time to look 
past the next election to the next generation.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of Colorado). Without objection, it 
is so ordered.


                             Bank Investing

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, yesterday President Obama made some 
recommendations that have caused quite a stir, especially on the 
morning shows on television today. The President suggested something 
that is called radical by some of the commentators: he suggested that 
banks--commercial banks, FDIC-insured banks, insured by the American 
taxpayers--should not be essentially gambling or investing in risky 
instruments, risky securities on their own proprietary accounts. It has 
been going on for a long time. This President said let's stop that. We 
have seen such a financial wreck, in which our economy was steered 
right into the ditch, where something like $15 trillion of value had 
been lost by American households.
  The President said we need to make some fundamental changes. One 
change, which isn't even, in my judgment, a significant change--at 
least not in the context of what must be done and should be done--is to 
limit the ability of FDIC-insured financial institutions to invest in, 
speculate in, and buy and trade derivatives on their own proprietary 
accounts. That should not have been going on at all.
  Fifteen years ago, I wrote the cover story for the Washington Monthly 
magazine on this very subject. The title of the article was ``Very 
Risky Business.'' I talked then about how FDIC-insured banks in this 
country were trading on their own proprietary accounts in derivatives--
$16 trillion of value in derivatives at that time. They were trading on 
their own proprietary accounts, which puts taxpayers at risk. They 
might as well put a Keno table or a craps table in their lobby. It is 
flatout gambling. The President said yesterday: Let's have legislation 
that stops that. I agree.
  The President said something else that is very important: Let's limit 
the size of financial organizations that are ``too big to fail.'' We 
have a category in this capitalistic system of ours called ``too big to 
fail''--a category that is managed by the Federal Reserve Board. They 
have a list of which institutions are too big to fail. I thought this 
system of ours--capitalism--is that you succeed or fail based on your 
own merit. That is not the case. We have now witnessed in the last year 
and a half which institutions are not allowed to fail.
  We have people who go to work every day to a business they started 
with their own capital. They and their family have invested in a shoe 
store or a hardware store or gas station, and they open the door in the 
morning and they are open for business that day and the risk is all 
theirs. By the way, they are allowed to fail, and many have done so 
during this economic downturn, but not the biggest financial 
interests--they are too big to fail. That is called no-fault 
capitalism. They can gamble in their lobby, and the American taxpayer 
will pay the bill. That is what has been going on. This President 
says--and he is right--if you are too big to fail, you are too big. 
Let's begin limiting the size.
  This morning, I listened to some of the commentators have an 
apoplectic seizure. They said that if we cannot be bigger and bigger, 
how do we compete with the Europeans? That is exactly what we heard 
10\1/2\ years ago now--when the Congress passed legislation that took 
apart the protections put into place after the Great Depression. This 
legislation gave free rein to this unbelievable orgy of speculation in 
high finance that led this country right into the ditch, led this 
country's economy into a colossal wreck. The result of all of that has 
been catastrophic for the American people. The result of all of that 
has been trillions of dollars of lost value for American families and 
an unbelievable unemployment problem--people by the millions losing 
their jobs, their homes, and losing hope.
  The President made two recommendations yesterday, which I support. 
You would think he was suggesting somehow that he is going to 
completely take apart the American free enterprise system. That is 
absolutely absurd. I decided I wanted to give a little bit of history 
this morning because it is so easy for people to forget. Let's 
understand how we got to this place and what caused these 
recommendations to be made.
  Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, was 
involved in all of this. I know he wrote a book later implying he was 
exploring the surface of the Moon while all this was going on, but he 
wasn't. He was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He had a 
responsibility to provide oversight and to rein in these excesses, and 
he didn't. Here is what he said in testimony before the Congress:

       I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of 
     organizations, specifically banks and others, were best 
     capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity 
     in the firms.

  That notion that people will behave in their own self-interests and 
protect the shareholders and our country was pretty unbelievable 
because this occurred at the same time that the Chairman of the Federal 
Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Board itself had responsibilities 
to provide a regulatory oversight to what was going on in our financial 
system.
  At the same time that was the case, and they were doing nothing, we 
had new people come to Washington, DC, in the aftermath of the passage 
of the disastrous bill in 1999, the Financial Services Modernization 
Act, to be regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the 
CFTC--all of those organizations. People came here to assume those 
jobs, and they were boasting that they would be willfully blind: Let's 
take these regulatory jobs, and we promise not to look, we promise to 
close our eyes, and by the way, we are business friendly, so do what 
you want. It doesn't matter to us.
  In fact, we have circumstances where people came to the Securities 
and Exchange Commission with Mr. Madoff's issue going on, and they 
said: This guy is running a Ponzi scheme, a scam. We had people show up 
to the SEC and say:

[[Page 551]]

Investigate this, it is a massive scam. The SEC couldn't even 
investigate it when they had people saying, here is what is happening. 
It is unbelievable. During that entire time period, we had regulators, 
starting with the Federal Reserve Board and Mr. Greenspan and others, 
in regulatory capacities who boasted about not being willing to 
regulate. The result is that big financial firms in this country, and a 
lot of others, were engaged in an unbelievable orgy of greed.
  Let me show a little of what was going on. The Fed should have been 
attentive to this. It was their responsibility, among others. We all 
see these kinds of ads when we wake up and brush our teeth in the 
morning if we have a television set on. Here is one where Countrywide 
Mortgage said:

       Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late 
     mortgage payments? Have you ever been denied by other 
     lenders? Call us. We would like to loan you money. If you are 
     a bad credit risk, call us.

  How can that work? It didn't work. This company went bankrupt. The 
owner of the company is now under investigation, at long last. He went 
away with about $200 million, I believe. He left the party with a 
couple hundred million dollars. These advertisements saying: If you 
have bad credit, come to us--this is the biggest mortgage company, not 
some fly-by-night company.
  This one is an Internet company. It is called 
speedybadcreditloans.com. Isn't that great? What a country. What a 
system. Apparently, somebody has a business model to advertise speedy 
bad credit loans. It says:

       Bad credit, no problem. No credit, no problem. Bankruptcy, 
     no problem. Get guaranteed bad credit personal loans now.

  Does it surprise anybody, having watched over a decade of this, that 
this collapses?
  I won't go through all of them.
  Here is Millennium Mortgage:

       Twelve months, no mortgage payments. That's right. We will 
     give you the money to make your first 12 payments if you call 
     in the next 7 days. We pay it for you. Our loan program may 
     reduce your current monthly payment by as much as 50 percent 
     and allow you no payments for the first 12 months. Call us 
     today.

  Too good to be true? Get a loan from these guys and they will make 
the payment for you. They didn't tell you that they will put that 
around the back side of the loan and wrap it around higher interest 
rates.
  This is Zoom Credit:

       Credit approval is seconds away. Get on the fast track at 
     Zoom Credit. At the speed of light, Zoom Credit will 
     preapprove you for a car loan, home loan, or a credit card, 
     even if your credit is in the tank. Zoom Credit is like money 
     in the bank. Zoom Credit specializes in credit repair and 
     debt consolidation, too. Bankruptcy, slow credit, no credit, 
     who cares?

  We have all heard these for a long period of time and wondered: How 
does this work? What kind of business model is this? It was not a 
business model. It was a scam and a scheme that undermined the American 
economy and went on under the nose of, yes, Mr. Greenspan and so many 
others who had promised us they were interested in being regulators. 
The list goes on and on.
  Let me go back to 1999. We were told in this Chamber--and I was here 
then--we were told: America has to modernize its financial system, for 
if we do not, the Europeans and others are going to win this debate and 
win the economic competition. So we have to modernize. The things that 
were put in place after the Great Depression were probably important at 
some point but no longer necessary. We now have Mr. Greenspan 
protecting us and others. It is a sophisticated system. We need to be 
able to compete.
  They said: We need to have a financial modernization system to allow 
very large holding companies to put together all the financial 
systems--investment banks, commercial banks, real estate, and 
securities operations. By the way, if we can do all that, we can create 
one-stop financial shopping for the American people.
  I stood on the floor of the Senate at great length in 1999 and 
opposed this. I know it is a little cheesy probably to quote yourself, 
but I do want to provide some description of what concerned me prior to 
the passage of this legislation.
  Here are some of the things I said at that point. I said:

       I will bet one day somebody is going to look back at this 
     and they are going to say: How on Earth could we have thought 
     it made sense to allow the banking industry to concentrate, 
     through merger and acquisition, to become bigger and bigger 
     and bigger, far more firms in the category of too big to 
     fail? How did we think that was going to help this country?

  That was May 6, 1999.
  The same day I said:

       I say to the people who own banks: If you want to gamble, 
     go to Las Vegas. If you want to trade in derivatives, God 
     bless you. Do it with your own money. Do not do it through 
     deposits that are guaranteed by the American people and by 
     deposit insurance.

  The same day I said:

       This bill--

  The Financial Services Modernization Act--

     will, in my judgment, raise the likelihood of future massive 
     taxpayer bailouts. It will fuel the consolidation and mergers 
     in the bank and financial services industry at the expense of 
     customers, farm businesses, family farmers, and others.

  I said:

       I think it is a fundamental mistake to decide to repeal 
     Glass-Steagall and allow banks and all of their financial 
     industries to merge into a smorgasbord of financial services. 
     Those who were around to vote to bail out the failed savings 
     and loan industry, $500 billion of taxpayers' money, are they 
     going to want to be around 10, 15 years from now when we see 
     bailouts of hedge funds putting banks at risk? Or how about 
     banks not just bailing out hedge funds, but banks having 
     ownership of hedge funds?

  I said: We also have another doctrine at the Federal Reserve Board 
called too big to fail.

       Remember that term ``too big to fail''? They cannot be 
     allowed to fail because the consequences to the economy are 
     catastrophic and therefore these banks are too big to fail. 
     That is no-fault capitalism. Does the Federal Reserve care 
     about that? Apparently not.
       Fusing together the idea of banks which requires not just 
     safety and soundness to be successful but the perception of 
     safety and soundness with other inherently risky speculative 
     activity is, in my judgment, unwise.

  Finally--these are about four or five speeches I gave in 1999:

       We will, in 10 years' time, look back and say: We should 
     not have done that because we forgot the lessons of the past.

  So here we are, trillions and trillions of dollars. There have been, 
we believe, $11 trillion or so lent, spent or committed by the Federal 
Government to try to keep afloat some of the largest financial firms in 
our country because they did what they wanted to do. They engaged in 
unbelievable amounts of risk.
  I showed the examples of advertising to people who come to get 
mortgages when they had bad credit. That was not just people who had 
bad credit. People who had existing loans were enticed by these 
companies that said: Are you paying 7 percent or 8 or 9 percent 
interest? Come to us. We want to give you a loan in which you do not 
have to pay the first 12 months. Come to us. We are going to give you 
what we call a no-doc loan. You do not even have to document your 
income to us. Come to us. We will give you a liar's loan. They did not 
call it a liar's loan, but that is a no-doc loan. Come to us. We will 
give you a loan where you do not pay any of the interest. We will give 
a loan where you do not pay any of the interest or any of the 
principal. All these were entreaties to people to come to these 
companies and redo their mortgages.
  What happened to these mortgages when they were put together? They 
wrapped them into a security, a mortgage security, and then the 
mortgage company, Countrywide, for example, would sell it. They would 
sell it perhaps to a hedge fund or an investment bank. It was rated as 
a security. By the way, most of them were rated triple A. The ones that 
went bad were rated triple A.
  What happened was those who placed the mortgages no longer had the 
risk because they sold the risk to others. They sold it to hedge funds, 
investment banks. All the brokers making money, the people putting out 
the mortgages at the bottom, they were making $5,000, $10,000, $25,000 
in bonuses, brokers' fees. The mortgage companies were awash in cash.

[[Page 552]]

  I mentioned Countrywide's CEO left with a couple hundred million 
dollars, now under investigation, by the way. The hedge funds were 
making massive amounts of money. They could not count it fast enough. 
Just before the economy collapsed, the highest earner in the country 
was a hedge fund manager who earned $3.6 billion--$3.6 billion. Think 
about that person coming home from work and the spouse says: How are 
you doing? I am doing pretty well; $300 million a month. By the way, I 
am only paying 15 percent income tax because I get a special deal. I 
pay a 15-percent rate. Nobody else does. I get to pay some of the 
lowest income tax rates in America. These folks do because they have a 
deal called carried interest. They were all making money, all awash in 
cash, giant bonuses, bonuses that were unreal--$15 million, $20 million 
a year, some of the folks who were running the security agencies, some 
of the salespeople, and others in these investment banks.
  By the way, all these institutions would have collapsed and failed. 
Even the ones that this morning are reporting record profits, they were 
about to collapse were it not for the American people who, through 
their government, saved them.
  Now they are willing to complain about everything, and they are 
ramping up a huge effort in this town to prevent any effort to change 
the way things were. This President has said: Let's decide, at least, 
to stop the pernicious practice of having FDIC-insured banks trading in 
derivatives and other risky instruments on their own proprietary 
accounts. I think that is nuts to allow that to continue, and this 
President is right to try to stop it. They are even now gathering an 
army to try to oppose it.
  This issue of too big to fail, the President is right about that, 
absolutely right.
  This shows the house of cards. We have all seen it. We saw it 
collapsed or nearly collapsed. Were it not for the Congress, the 
President, the American people in backstopping these largest investment 
banks, they would be gone. Now, all of a sudden, they are reporting 
record profits and are on the edge and verge of providing record 
bonuses at a time when a whole lot of folks are in lines trying to get 
to a soup kitchen or in lines trying to find a job.
  The President of the Dallas Federal Reserve Board, in an editorial 
review in the Dallas Morning News, said:

       Too bill to fail is not a policy. It's a problem. Too big 
     to fail means too big.

  I am glad he said that. I say that. I am glad he said that. He is 
president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Board.
  Joseph Stiglitz--I believe he was a Nobel Prize winner--said:

       We have much to gain by breaking up these behemoths.

  Talking about the large financial institutions.

       We need to begin now the admittedly gargantuan task of 
     breaking out their commingled activities.

  There has been discussion in the last couple days about Paul Volcker, 
former Federal Reserve Board Chairman. I had an opportunity to meet 
with him in the last several weeks. Paul Volcker has spoken very 
strongly in support of the policy the President has now embraced. Paul 
Volcker says:

       I would exclude from commercial banking institutions 
     ownership or sponsorship of hedge funds and private equity 
     funds. So should, in my view, a heavy volume of proprietary 
     trading with its inherent risks.

  It is common sense for us to begin to shut down those kinds of 
activities.
  Let me quickly say, I understand the need for financial institutions. 
I understand that. It is a very important part of this country's 
economy. But I also understand, having studied economics and taught 
economics ever so briefly, that we have in this country, for 200 years, 
had a contest about who rules the roost--those who produce or those who 
finance production. I am telling you, in recent decades, those who 
finance production have had an unbelievable amount of influence in this 
country. I must say I do not think it contributes one thing to this 
country's economy to have big financial institutions trading synthetic 
derivatives.
  Does anyone know what a synthetic derivative is? A derivative is 
something that derives value from something else. Presumably, whatever 
the value on the front end or something elsewhere has some value, 
something that is tangible. A synthetic derivative is wagering, 
gambling, a derivative that is created with nothing on either side of 
it, except you are making a wager or a bet. That is going on in this 
country with respect to big financial institutions. It has in the past, 
aggressively. That is where they made a lot of money. It continues to 
go on to this day, and it makes no sense.
  Does anybody think that contributes very much to this economy? It 
does not. The fact is, it darn near ruined this economy with that 
unbelievable amount of speculation, starting right down at the broker 
placing loans that should not have been placed that created the 
subprime scandal and all the way up with credit default swaps and CDOs 
and synthetic derivatives and all these issues.
  A former colleague once described investment banks by saying 
investment banking is to productive enterprise like mud wrestling is to 
the performing arts. I do not put it quite that way. But his point was 
a whole lot of what goes on is pretty worthless. A whole lot of what 
can go on and should go on is very important in investment banking. 
That is the part of our banking structure that provides loans in 
riskier categories. You put loans out there to businesses with ideas 
and so on. That is very important. Community banks are very important. 
Commercial FDIC-insured banks are important. Investment banks are 
important.
  My point is not to suggest that our economy can exist without them. 
That is not the case. But I wish to make a very important point. You 
look at the heyday of production in this country. I am talking about 
when our manufacturing plants were humming, when we were turning 
products out, the best in the world. We were expanding the middle 
class. We were putting men and women in factories with good jobs that 
paid well, with benefits.
  Look at that period of time in this country and ask yourself: Under 
what kind of conditions did that exist? It existed before all these 
changes were made to the financing system of this country that let the 
finance industries decide to coagulate and combine and create these 
behemoth organizations with so-called firewalls that turned out to be 
made of tissue paper.
  People suggested somehow we were old-fashioned prior to 1999 and we 
needed to modernize to compete with somebody else to allow all our 
financial systems to come together, to merge, to get bigger, to engage 
in all these activities and create unbelievably exotic instruments, 
instruments that many of those who trade cannot even explain, thought 
that was somehow essential to the economic health of this country?
  The economic health of this country was much better prior to the 
enactment of those changes. I did not vote for those changes I just 
described. I stood on the floor and fought like the devil against them. 
Eight of us in the Senate voted no on the Financial Services 
Modernization Act. Eight voted no. The fact is, it set this country up 
for an unbelievable fall.
  So now here we are. The question is, What next? Where do we go from 
here? I understand, in this country, it is reasonable for every 
interest group to organize to support their vested interests. I 
understand that completely. But I also understand there is a higher 
purpose and a much larger issue for the American people and for our 
future.
  What kind of future do we want? What kinds of activities, what kinds 
of things can we do to put our country back on track, to restart the 
economic engine, to put people back on payrolls once again? There is 
nothing we can do in this Chamber that is much more important, as far 
as I am concerned, than finding a way to create jobs to put people back 
to work. There is no social program that is as important as a good job 
that pays well and allows people to take care of their families. That 
is just a fact, and we have seen in this country how you expand the 
middle class--with good jobs that pay well.
  I am going to speak later in this next couple of months again about 
the issue of trade. I have written a book about

[[Page 553]]

that subject, but I am going to speak at greater length about it 
because, in the middle of an economic downturn, when we talk about 
jobs, if we are hemorrhaging jobs once again outside of this country in 
search of 50-cent-an-hour labor, and we have people lining up here 
looking for work, that doesn't work for me. That is a lot like filling 
a bathtub with the drain open. So there are a lot of things that are 
elements in this.
  What I wanted to talk about this morning was to say that it is not a 
coincidence we have ended up at this intersection in deep financial 
trouble trying to find a way to see if we can rebuild the economy, to 
start putting people back to work again. It is not a surprise we have 
wound up here, anybody who watched what happened with the creation of 
bubbles and unbelievable speculation that was going on, and the massive 
amount of money ricocheting around and the creation of exotic financial 
instruments and no regulation at all, with people in regulatory 
authority who covered their eyes, and the head of the Fed, who actually 
was a cheerleader for all of it, who said: We don't need to regulate 
hedge funds or regulate derivatives. I oppose all of that. It isn't a 
surprise to us that this thing collapsed. It certainly isn't to me. The 
question is: How do we set it right?
  This President--though I don't agree with him on everything--
inherited the biggest economic wreck since the Great Depression. That 
is a plain fact. Had he gone to sleep from January, when he was 
inaugurated, and done nothing until today, there was going to be a $1.3 
trillion budget deficit. That is what he walked into the White House 
and assumed. It is not just this financial situation, this is most of 
it, but we went to war and decided not to pay for a penny of it. We 
sent young men and women to fight and die and risk their lives day 
after day after day in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and we decided 
we weren't going to pay for one penny of it.
  Some of us in the Senate, by the way, said we ought to at least find 
a way to pay for some of this cost. We are going to send kids to fight 
and risk their lives, and we don't have the courage to begin to pay for 
it? We went 8 years and didn't pay for a penny. Every bit of it went to 
the debt. To those of us who said let's pay for some of it, the last 
President said: If you do, and you pass that bill, I will veto it. I 
don't intend to allow for that at all. So that is another part of this.
  Look, this country knows better. The American people know better. 
That is not a policy that works.
  I talked yesterday about the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, 
Mr. Bernanke. I did not speak ill of him, I mean, despite the fact I 
think he has some ownership of these issues as well. He was part of the 
economic team at the Federal Reserve Board as well. I indicated 
yesterday, and I just want to make the point, his nomination is coming 
up, and I indicated I was not going to vote in favor of the nomination. 
When he decided to open the lending window at the Federal Reserve Board 
for the first time in the history of our country to investment banks, I 
didn't criticize him for it. I wasn't sure whether it was necessary, 
but I didn't criticize. We were in the middle of a very difficult time. 
But when he decided to do that, he put the American taxpayers' funds at 
risk.
  We waited, and I and a group of nine other Senators wrote him a 
letter about 6 months ago and said: All right. Now we want to 
understand who came to that window and how much money did they get and 
what were the terms. Who did you give the money to? Who has our money?
  He wrote back to us and said: I don't intend to tell you that. I 
don't intend to tell the Congress, and I don't intend to tell the 
American people, despite the fact that he said transparency is a big 
issue for him. Apparently not on this issue.
  So I don't think the Congress should proceed with his nomination 
until he tells us what was the consequence of opening the loan window 
at the Federal Reserve Board to investment banks for the first time in 
history.
  Well, Mr. President, I see my colleague from Kansas is here and would 
like to speak, perhaps. This is a long and tortured discussion about 
this country, its finances, and its future. There is plenty of 
criticism to go around. I have had kind of a belly full of standing in 
the Senate and hearing about President Obama and socialism and that 
sort of thing. The fact is, as I said, he inherited the biggest mess 
since the Great Depression, and had he done nothing, the budget deficit 
was going to be $1.3 trillion. So he is trying to do some things that 
will set this country back on track.
  We have gone through almost a lost decade in terms of smart, 
effective, good public policies that invest in this country's future. 
It has set us back a lot. What we need to do now, it seems to me, is to 
try to see if we can't find a way that what both political parties 
offer to this country can be brought together, to links arms and try to 
lift up this country.
  We see almost every single day people sawing away and ratcheting away 
about what is wrong with the country. I can spend a lot of time talking 
about what is wrong with America. But there is a whole lot right about 
this country, and it deserves, in my judgment, a lot more cooperation 
than I have seen in the Senate. It deserves the best of what both 
political parties have to offer America rather than the worst of each. 
I hope in the next 6 or 8 months we can find ways to ask people of both 
political parties to decide to stand up for tough things--for things 
that are going to require some courage and that will restart this 
economic engine, put America back on track, and try to make certain 
what has happened to us in the last couple of years will never happen 
again.
  Most importantly, we need to give people an understanding that their 
future can be better than the past. We need to restore confidence. It 
is hard for people to have confidence watching the proceedings in this 
Senate. I understand that. But confidence is everything. If people are 
confident about the future, they do the things that manifest that 
confidence and that expand this country's economy. That is just a fact. 
If they are not confident about the future, they do things that 
contract the economy--they defer and delay the kinds of things they 
would otherwise do to expand the economy.
  I hope in the near future we can find a way to create some jobs 
initiatives to put people back to work more quickly. But there are just 
a lot of issues that confront us, and I wanted today especially to talk 
about the two things this President mentioned yesterday, both of which 
are so right and so important, both of which this town will organize to 
oppose.
  The first is asking or deciding or telling FDIC-insured banks: You 
can't be investing and trading risky instruments on your own 
proprietary accounts and putting the American people at risk any 
longer. You can't do that anymore. That is not radical; it is right and 
it is long overdue. I wrote the first article about that 15 years ago 
as a cover story for the Washington monthly magazine titled ``Very 
Risky Business.''
  Second is the issue of too big to fail. If anybody in this Chamber 
wonders whether we ought to do something about too big to fail, go to 
any town cafe in this country and sit around and ask folks whether they 
think this capitalistic system works well when you say to almost 
everybody else: You risk your savings to start a business, and if you 
don't make it, tough luck. You are on your own. But, by the way, we 
have some big financial interests that can make record profits, pay the 
highest bonuses in history, and we have decided they can't fail. We 
have a special class for them. We will open loan windows at the Fed, we 
will lend or make $11 trillion available to them if they need it. We 
will do anything to prevent them from failing because they are too big 
to fail.
  That is no-fault capitalism. That is not what I believe to be the 
American way. That is something this President wants to change and 
something I support very strongly.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kansas is recognized.

[[Page 554]]




                           Pro-Life Movement

  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from North Dakota. 
I will miss his voice around here. He and I both are leaving this body 
at the end of this year, and I have appreciated the chance to serve 
with him and work on many different issues of significance and concern 
for the country. He has always had a strong voice, done an excellent 
job in representing his constituency and his point of view, and I will 
miss serving with him.
  Mr. President, right now, at this very minute, hundreds of thousands 
of people are amassing in this town for the 37th annual Right to Life 
March--hundreds of thousands. It will be a crowd where 80 percent will 
be under the age of 25. It is a young movement. It is a movement that 
believes in human dignity and that life begins at conception and goes 
to natural death. They are energized, motivated. They are here and they 
need to be heard. They stand to be a voice for the voiceless; to stand 
for a cause they believe in, that they believe is right, and I believe 
they are right. I believe they are winning this cause.
  In 1973, the Supreme Court banned most impediments to having an 
abortion in the United States. Since that tragic decision, many experts 
estimate that between 40 and 50 million--40 to 50 million--abortions 
have happened in the United States. It is a number that plagues our 
government and defies our constitution.
  This tragedy is why we continue to call for the end of abortion in 
the United States. Today, in memory of the 37th anniversary of Roe v. 
Wade, we want to talk about how the pro-life movement should be 
credited for changing America's attitude on the issue of abortion. The 
President's campaign theme in 2008 on change is also relevant to the 
pro-life movement, which has effectively changed millions of hearts and 
minds by challenging the central tenets of the flawed Roe decision.
  The Roe decision, which took State law and said State laws can no 
longer cover the issue of abortion and federalized the whole issue, has 
been the centerpiece issue of this whole debate, saying this should be 
an issue decided at the State level. These protestors are here en masse 
to again call for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. The 
decision has been proven to be antithetical to individual liberties and 
to human dignity.
  There will be young people at the march who have learned they have 
lost siblings because of abortion. They will never know a younger 
brother, an older sister, and they are profoundly saddened by such a 
loss. There will be women at the march for life who have had abortions 
and now regret making that decision; they are still grieving for their 
lost children, and they will say that which is politically incorrect: 
Abortion hurts women. The number of women who have joined this ``Silent 
No More Campaign'' represents a fundamental change in attitudes 
regarding the controversy of the issue of abortion.
  I hope Congress will listen to those who mourn and advocate for their 
government to do something to right this wrong. If they do listen, they 
will notice that the country is changing in several significant ways. 
The pro-life movement has transcended beyond my generation into a new 
movement that is young, passionate, energetic, creative, and resilient. 
President Obama said during his campaign last year:

       A new generation inspires an old generation, and that is 
     how change happens in America. It doesn't just happen in 
     elections and campaigns. We know that young people everywhere 
     are imagining something different than what is.

  I believe that this younger generation is inspiring an older 
generation. Today, there will be hundreds of thousands of Americans--
many of them young people, who believe in defending innocent human 
life--who will march across the National Mall for real change.
  We found out earlier this week, with the upset victory by Scott Brown 
in Massachusetts--one of the bluest of blue States--that politicians 
have to respect the voters on the issues they care about. The American 
people are dismayed at our government's radical approach to promoting 
abortion. The American people don't want government-run health care 
that includes abortion mandates and Federal subsidies for abortion. 
They don't want foreign aid going abroad to promote abortion. They 
don't want to relax commonsense regulations that are proven to reduce 
the incidence of abortion.
  Even for those who are pro-choice, the mantra around here for some 
period of time was to have abortion be safe, legal, and rare. The 
policies I just listed are all policies that would expand abortion. The 
last time the Federal Government paid for elective abortions, we paid 
for nearly 300,000 a year--a shocking number and certainly not a 
rarity.
  People are realizing that abortion had promised liberty but instead 
has brought death. Doubters have turned into believers and people are 
waking up to the reality and the truth about abortion. Our movement is 
truly changing hearts and minds.
  Although it is true the pro-life movement saw many setbacks this past 
year, we also have much to be thankful for and hopeful for in the 
future. A Gallup poll earlier this year--for the first time since 
Gallop started asking this question in 1995--showed our country to be a 
pro-life majority country. This year, 51 percent of Americans called 
themselves pro-life on the issue of abortion and 42 percent pro-choice.
  In 1995, 56 percent of Americans called themselves pro-choice, and in 
2008 that number was 50 percent. I see our movement changing, striving 
to continue getting a little better each day.
  The movement continues to value people over ideology and political 
parties. Pro-lifers found a hero and strong ally in Democratic 
Congressman Bart Stupak this year for taking the tough stance in 
defense of life in the health care reform debate. It was a blow to the 
abortion advocates when Democratic Congressman Stupak led the charge 
and continues to lead the charge in that fight. The pro-life movement 
is changing because it has rallied new leaders from both major 
political parties, which is something for which we should be very 
grateful.
  Another way our movement is changing is through new outreach tools. 
Pro-lifers are sharing the truth about abortion with friends on 
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iPhone, and countless other new 
technologies. Young people are utilizing these new media tools to 
uncover and expose an abortion industry. I am excited about this 
because I know the pro-life movement's focus and energy has never been 
so devoted or determined.
  The movement's message is more expansive. We have changed and 
attracted a majority of the country to our cause with compassion for 
all human life--being pro-life and whole life. Our movement has become 
more consistent and attractive because the pro-life movement speaks to 
the respect for human life in all places and in all stages--for those 
who are in the womb, for those who are in prison, for those who are in 
Africa, for those who are in poverty, for those who have plenty, for 
those who have experienced natural disasters such as the recent 
earthquake in Haiti.
  The pro-life movement has been successful because it has changed 
people's views on the issue. We are now seeing more and more studies 
coming out about the impact on people who have had abortions. Even the 
evidence has been changing and we now know that 80 to 90 percent of 
children diagnosed with genetic defects such as Down syndrome are 
aborted. We are getting that evidence in. We also have evidence now 
that shows children in the womb feel pain when they are aborted. New 
science, ultrasound equipment, and other advances in technology are 
giving new-found hope in spreading the truth about abortion.
  Ultimately, the cause for human dignity cannot be silenced and will 
not stay still. Human liberty and freedom will prevail and I hope this 
year's March for Life will again inspire a country that longs for 
change and that many hope will embrace, fully embrace, the culture of 
life.
  I yield the floor.

[[Page 555]]

  I suggest the absence a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. LEAHY. 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.


                                 Haiti

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, we have all watched the widespread 
devastation and loss of life in Haiti caused by last Tuesday's 
earthquake. It is a tragedy on a scale that words cannot adequately 
describe. I have talked with a number of people who have been down 
there. No matter how horrific the photographs we have seen, in reality 
it is even worse.
  Haiti is the hemisphere's poorest country, a history of repeated 
calamities, some, of course, caused by natural disasters, but some by 
past corrupt and abusive governments. Now it faces a humanitarian 
emergency, but also reconstruction needs of daunting proportions: 3 
million people affected, hundreds of thousands left homeless, and an 
estimated 100,000--perhaps twice that many--lives lost, countless 
children injured and many orphaned.
  The Haitian Government, which already has limited capacity, has been 
severely damaged. The U.N. mission in Haiti, which is doing heroic 
work, suffered catastrophic losses.
  Americans and people around the world have reacted with compassion 
and generosity. A massive relief effort is underway. Search and rescue 
teams from the United States and other countries continue to pull 
survivors from the rubble more than a week after the buildings 
collapsed. The U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Agency for International 
Development, the Departments of State and Defense, and many other 
Federal agencies have personnel on the ground.
  Our military sent ships and planes and troops. We have responded as 
America does. We are, after all, the wealthiest, most powerful Nation 
on Earth. Morality requires us to help those, especially neighbors, so 
severely damaged.
  I have visited Haiti as chairman of the State and Foreign Operations 
Subcommittee, and each year I have worked to increase United States 
assistance for Haiti. I can tell you, this earthquake could not have 
come at a worse time.
  There was hope that Haiti, after recovering from three severe 
hurricanes in 2008 which left most of the country's infrastructure 
damaged or destroyed, was poised to finally make some real strides 
toward political stability and economic development. All of us who care 
for Haiti thought finally things were getting better. Last Tuesday, in 
a few terrifying minutes, that hope was buried in rubble. The immediate 
focus, of course, is saving lives, helping those people who have no 
place to live and no way to support themselves. I do thank the many 
humanitarian relief organizations as well as the United Nations, OAS, 
the Pan-American Health Organization, the International Committee of 
the Red Cross, other international organizations, and other countries 
that have sent relief workers to help. They mobilized quickly. We have 
seen their doctors, nurses and other relief personnel working day and 
night since shortly after the earthquake hit. They are doing an 
outstanding job under the worst possible conditions.
  I want to express my condolences to the Haitian people, and my 
admiration for them. They have shown remarkable fortitude and patience 
in the wake of this catastrophe. Even in the midst of so much misery, 
there are already glimpses of a recovery.
  Some press reports have focused on incidents of looting, and crowds 
of people surrounding UN vehicles or scrambling for whatever food or 
water they can find. But in fact those incidents have been the 
exception. The vast majority of the survivors, in the midst of a 
destroyed city with little food, water or shelter, have refrained from 
violence and instead tried to help each other.
  To the families of others who died or suffered severe injuries, 
particularly American citizens who were in Haiti, several of whom were 
Vermonters or who had relatives in Vermont and who lost their lives 
when the buildings collapsed, our hearts go out to them. How much we 
wish we could turn the clock back and bring them home.
  A great deal is being done to alleviate the suffering, but I also 
think there are important lessons from this experience that will enable 
us to respond even more quickly and more effectively when the next 
disaster strikes. It is more than a week after the earthquake struck 
and many people left homeless have yet to receive food or water and 
they have no shelter.
  The Central America-Caribbean region is among the most disaster prone 
in the world due to the many volcanoes, earthquake fault lines and 
tropical storms. There are things we can do to be better prepared and 
to deliver aid more efficiently next time.
  This is in no way to detract from the heroic efforts of those not 
only from the United States but from nongovernmental organizations and 
from other countries who have worked against almost insurmountable odds 
to get aid to those who need it.
  I am concerned with reports that some humanitarian organizations have 
been unable to obtain access to the Port-au-Prince airport for several 
days. Many tons of relief supplies have reportedly been flown instead 
to the Dominican Republic and then trucked by land to Port-au-Prince, 
which is not only expensive but time-consuming, and they are needed 
now. If you are a child, dehydrated and dying, and food and water are 
only a few miles away, or you are a parent to that child, you cannot 
wait.
  The outpouring of generosity by Americans of all ages to the people 
of Haiti has been extraordinary. Millions of dollars have been donated. 
There have been far more offers to volunteer than the relief 
organizations can accommodate. I am very proud of the many Vermonters, 
from nurses to elementary school students, who have sent money or gone 
to Haiti to help.
  While Haiti has suffered this devastating blow, our ties to Haiti and 
the Haitian people are stronger than ever. We will not only help the 
Haitian people through this crisis, we will work with them to transform 
this disaster into an opportunity to rebuild their country better than 
it was before.
  That is what the State, Foreign Operations subcommittee will seek to 
do when we look at the next budget request for Haiti. We will ask: How 
can we make it better? How can we make them better prepared if disaster 
strikes again? How can we help the people of Haiti who want and deserve 
a better life? That is showing a sense of morality. As Americans, that 
is what we should do.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kirk). The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                       Nomination of Ben Bernanke

  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about the challenge 
of putting our economy back on track and the type of leadership we need 
to take us forward. Much of this last year we have been absorbed in 
addressing the challenge of major financial institutions failing and 
the importance of preventing them from failing in order to not have the 
second Great Depression. So that has put a lot of attention on Wall 
Street.
  But to go forward as a nation, we need to turn our attention to Main 
Street. We need to rebuild the financial foundations for our families. 
That is why I am rising today to oppose the nomination of Chair 
Bernanke for a second term as head of the Federal Reserve.
  I want to take a moment to explain why, when his nomination was in 
the Banking Committee, I voted against that nomination. I voted against 
that nomination because I believe Chair Bernanke is not the right 
person to take us forward.

[[Page 556]]

  I will acknowledge he has been quite handy with the fire hose; that 
is, he has been quite handy in addressing and putting out the fire that 
has affected our economy over this last year. We are not in a great 
depression, but we are in a severe recession. But do you hand the job 
of rebuilding a house that has been burnt down by a fire to the person 
who helped set the fire to begin with? And Ben Bernanke helped set the 
fire.
  Ben Bernanke was on the Board of Governors of the Fed from 2002 to 
2005. He was chair of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2005 to 
2006, and he was Chairman of the Fed from 2006 until now. He has been 
at the table of economic policymaking in this country for 8 years, when 
mistake after mistake after mistake has been made.
  That is how the house was set on fire. Now that it has burned to the 
ground, we do not need a fireman to rebuild the house; we need a 
carpenter. We need somebody who understands that short-term wealth on 
Wall Street is not the goal of our national economic policy. The goal 
of our policy is to build the financial foundations for our families, 
the success of our families.
  Let me mention some of the things that happened while Ben Bernanke 
was sitting at the table making economic policy. First, there was an 
enormous explosion in derivatives. ``Derivatives'' is a term that is 
hard to get your hands around, but let me translate. It is essentially 
bets on the future aspects of the economy--bets on future interest 
rates, bets on future bond prices, bets on future stock prices. You can 
place bets on things you own yourself, and that is akin to an insurance 
policy, but you can also place bets that are not on assets you own, and 
then it is pure speculation. Those derivative contracts--those 
contracts that were essentially speculation on the future--created a 
web of risk tying one financial institution to the next financial 
institution, setting them up like dominoes, so if one failed, they 
endangered the next failing. While this derivatives market exploded--
and there was not a clearinghouse, and there was not an exchange--we 
heard nothing from Ben Bernanke about the need to address that risk.
  Then there is the question of leverage, that the Securities and 
Exchange Commission lifted the leverage requirements on the five 
largest investment banks, and they proceeded to invest with 30-to-1 
leverage ratios. If you have $1, and with that $1 you can borrow $30 
and invest those $30, when things go up in value you are going to make 
enormous money, enormous profit. But, just as assuredly, when they go 
down in value, you are going to lose your money instantly--very 
quickly.
  We do not know when the markets will go up and when the markets will 
go down, but what we do know is they will go up and down over time, and 
you need to have a system that is not designed just to reap great 
benefits on the way up and blow up on the way down. We heard nothing 
from Ben Bernanke about this risk.
  It is during this period that proprietary trading increased 
dramatically. What is proprietary trading? We think of our banks as 
organizations that take in deposits and make loans. But they also can 
trade on their own account, and they can borrow money to trade on their 
own account. You can think of them as day traders in the financial 
world, only at levels of extreme size, very large size. The risks that 
are taken in proprietary trading can produce tremendous profits and, 
when the markets go down, when the bets go bad, enormous losses. Again, 
we did not hear from Ben Bernanke about the risk that proprietary 
trading was placing on our depository, lending, banking institutions.
  Let's address consumer protection. The Fed has the mission of 
consumer protection. But under Mr. Bernanke's leadership, the 
responsibility for monetary policy was in the penthouse; safety and 
soundness were on the upper floors; and consumer protection was put 
deep in the basement, never to be heard from again.
  Why was this so important to our financial system? Certain practices 
grew that completely imperiled our financial system based on consumer 
protection issues. Specifically, one of those was prepayment penalties 
in home mortgages and the other was steering payments.
  Let me explain those a little bit. A steering payment is a payment 
that a group that is lending the funds makes to a broker to reward them 
for steering a client into a very expensive loan.
  As an American family buying a home--say, for example, you have come 
from your real estate broker. Your real estate broker follows a very 
strict code of conduct and makes sure everything is absolutely 
disclosed in a straightforward manner and makes sure you understand 
whether they are representing the seller or the buyer or both of you. 
You go to your broker. You are paying your broker, and you think that 
broker is going to do the best by you.
  Indeed, your broker might say to you: Home mortgages have become very 
complicated, and I will serve as your financial adviser. So I will make 
sure you get the best loan. But what you do not know is that broker is 
taking a huge fee, a huge steering fee, if you will, to convince you to 
put your name on a loan that is not in your best interest--a loan that 
has an exploding interest rate, a loan that has a triple option that 
will go to a low payment, to a high payment, and a loan that has a 
prepayment penalty that keeps you locked into that loan and unable to 
refinance it without several pounds of flesh.
  Those practices were very valuable to the lender. That is why they 
paid these payments to the broker, because they could then sell that 
loan to Wall Street and say: Look how valuable this loan is. The 
interest rate is going to go way up and the homeowner cannot get out of 
the loan. That is a valuable asset. Wall Street took those subprime 
loans and they proceeded to turn them into securities, and they started 
to sell them to financial institutions throughout the world.
  So the failure to protect the homeowner from these abusive practices 
led to systemic risk, not just here in America but financial 
institutions throughout the world. That responsibility for consumer 
protection was the Federal Reserve's responsibility.
  I want to note several things. The first is, I have found, in dealing 
with Chair Bernanke, that he has been very forthcoming in 
conversations. He has been very professional. He has been very 
knowledgeable. And he has been very likable. So nothing I am saying 
right now is based on any sort of personal feelings. Instead, it is 
about this: How do we put this economy on track for our families, for 
the financial future of our families?
  I have to say, our families have suffered enormously as our national 
economic house has burned down. They have lost jobs. They have lost 
their savings. They have often lost their health care that went with 
their jobs. They have often lost their retirement accounts because the 
value of the assets they had plunged in that retirement account. Folks 
who had planned that they were going to have some golden years now are 
thinking they might have to keep working as long as they are able. 
Families have lost a great deal. Families are stressed about the 
future. So these economic mistakes had a huge consequence.
  We need to have a Chair of the Federal Reserve who will lean into the 
wind; that is, when something is unpopular but important to address 
systemic risk, someone who is willing to say to powerful economic 
entities: This practice is not acceptable. The lack of reserves is not 
acceptable. Prepayment penalties and steering payments in mortgages are 
not acceptable. Undisclosed derivatives that tie financial institutions 
together in a web of risk is not acceptable. Proprietary trading that 
can make huge profits for a depository-lending institution in one 
quarter but bring down that same institution in the next must be 
regulated. We must have a Chairman of the Federal Reserve who will lean 
into the wind and say these things are important, these lane markers 
are important, these traffic signals are important. We can think of it 
akin to a traffic system. You do not want a stop sign on every corner.

[[Page 557]]

You do not want paralyzed traffic from overregulation. But you also do 
not want to strip away the traffic signals, strip away the lane 
markers, and have the sort of chaos that results in all kinds of 
traffic accidents and wreckage. Yet that is what happened in our 
financial system over the 8 years Ben Bernanke was at the table of 
economic policymaking.
  You may think that maybe I am overstating the mistakes that were 
made. I would encourage anyone to look up the Washington Post article 
written on December 21, 2009, a month and a half ago. This article is 
an extensive review of decisions the Fed made and their impact in the 
system. I thought I would give you a sampling from this one article of 
things you might find interesting and important in this conversation 
about the economic leadership we had.
  The article starts out noting that:

       Foreclosures already pocked Chicago's poorer neighborhoods 
     but the downtown still was booming as the Federal Reserve 
     Bank of Chicago convened its annual conference in May 2007.

  Quoting further from the article:

       The keynote speaker, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. 
     Bernanke, assured the bankers and businessmen gathered at the 
     Westin Hotel . . . that their prosperity was not threatened 
     by the plight of borrowers struggling to repay high-cost 
     subprime loans.

  I quote from Mr. Bernanke. He said to the audience:

       Importantly, we see no serious broad spillover to banks or 
     thrift institutions from the problems in the subprime market. 
     The troubled lenders, for the most part, have not been 
     institutions with federally insured deposits.

  The article goes on to note:

       The Fed's failure to foresee the crisis to require adequate 
     safeguards happened in part because it did not understand the 
     risks that banks were taking, according to documents and 
     interviews with more than three dozen current and former 
     government officials, bank executives and regulatory experts.

  So that is one example.
  A second example is, Bernanke had reached a conclusion that 
essentially the financial system would self-regulate. Reading from the 
article now:

       Bernanke said the economy had entered an era of smaller and 
     less frequent downturns, which he and others called ``the 
     great moderation.''

  It notes--and I make this as a third point from this article:

       The Fed let Citigroup make vast investments without setting 
     aside enough money to cover its eventual losses.

  This article goes on to explain the story with Citigroup and that the 
reserves were tied into a decision by the Fed; specifically, that a 
decision was made under accounting rules that when they bought into a 
pool of securities, those securities were viewed as so stable they 
didn't need to set aside significant reserves. Here is the interesting 
point: Even though they had bought those securities and then sold them, 
they had pledged to cover losses if borrowers defaulted. So they had a 
significant risk even after these securities had been sold, but that 
risk was not taken into account when the reserve requirement was set.
  We can turn to another piece of this. There was a report done by the 
Fed called the ``Large Financial Institutions' Perspectives on Risk'' 
and it found: ``No substantial issues of supervisory concern for large 
financial institutions.''
  As you all might recall, many financial institutions were doing 
regulatory shopping, looking for the regulator who would give them the 
best deal or the regulator who knew the least about their affairs so 
they could hardly even ask the right questions. That was certainly a 
factor in AIG going down. The Fed regulators looked at National City's 
books and its management and again found nothing amiss.

       In reality, the bank was ailing. Its subprime borrowers 
     were starting to default on their loans. Less than two months 
     after the Fed approved the merger, National City reported a 
     net loss of $19 million. The company never returned to 
     profitability.

  I am, again, quoting from that Washington Post analysis:

       The Fed's failure to see the rot inside National City 
     resulted from the central bank's reliance on others to 
     identify problems.

  They weren't asking the right questions. They didn't have a team who 
was going out making sure they understood what was going on.
  There was another example of this:

       In January 2005, National City's chief economist had 
     delivered a prescient warning to the Fed's board of 
     governors: An increasingly overvalued housing market posed a 
     threat to the broader economy.

  This message, the article says, was not well received. One board 
member expressed particular skepticism, and that board member was Ben 
Bernanke. Bernanke said:

       ``Where do you think it will be the worst,'' he asked, 
     according to people attending the meeting. ``I'd have to say 
     California,'' said the economist. Bernanke replied, ``They 
     have been saying that about California since I bought my 
     first house in 1979.''

  Ben Bernanke did not think there was an issue even to be thoroughly 
explored and wrestled with.
  There is additional information in this article about the Fed's power 
when mergers occur and it notes:

       The Fed's power to reject a merger application involving 
     Golden West and Wachovia was a potentially important check on 
     the wave of mergers that created banks so large that their 
     distress would threaten the economy. But from 1999 through 
     last month, the Fed approved 5,670 applications to create or 
     buy a bank and in that time denied only one.

  Well, that power of the Fed regarding mergers was not utilized.
  Then, finally, let me note an issue regarding Basel II. Again, I 
quote from the Washington Post Analysis:

       Even on the verge of the financial crisis, the Fed 
     continued to push for new international rules that would let 
     many large banks hold less capital. Under the proposed rules, 
     called Basel II after the Swiss city where they were drafted, 
     regulators further increased their reliance on the bank's 
     risk assessments.

  Sheila Bair, Chairman of the FDIC, warned as follows. She said the 
new rules ``come uncomfortably close to letting banks set their own 
capital requirements.''
  Again, Ben Bernanke, this last year, has done a good job with the 
firehose, but now we need to rebuild the economic house for the 
prosperity of our families. The person to rebuild this house is not the 
person who sat at the table and made mistake after mistake after 
mistake over an 8-year period that led to this financial house of ours 
burning down, with catastrophic results for our families across this 
Nation. This is why I opposed Ben Bernanke's nomination to again be 
Chairman of the Fed when I was in the Banking Committee last month, and 
this is why I will oppose this nomination on the floor of this Senate.
  Thank you very much.
  I note the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                       Terrorism on Christmas Day

  Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about the incident 
that occurred on Christmas Day, when our Nation was targeted by a 
terrorist who attempted to bring down a plane with 278 passengers and 
11 crew members. This attack would have resulted in mass casualties. 
Thankfully, it did not occur. Much in part due to the vigilance of 
nearby passengers and for the grace of God, this terrorist was unable 
to detonate the explosives he carried with him under his clothes.
  We should be responding as if the worst happened. What would we be 
doing today if that plane had exploded over the skies of Michigan and 
all of its passengers had died?
  When the plane landed, the Nigerian terrorist, Umar Farouk 
Abdulmatallab, was taken into custody and questioned by authorities. 
But what happened next is very worrisome. Instead of treating Mr. 
Abdulmutallab like the terrorist and enemy combatant he is, he was 
afforded all of the protections of the U.S. Constitution, as if he were 
a U.S. citizen. He was provided his Miranda rights--the right to remain 
silent, the right to have an attorney, and the information that if he 
did not remain silent, it could be used against him. Of course, as best 
we know, once he was provided with these rights, he

[[Page 558]]

stopped talking to those who were questioning him.
  What information did we fail to learn? What information about Yemen, 
the newest breeding ground for al-Qaida and other terrorist groups 
launching attacks against our country, did we fail to learn? What did 
we fail to learn about the next attack that is coming, whether it will 
be again in an airplane or another type of terrorist attack?
  Those questions were not asked, and they could not be answered 
because we treated the terrorist like an American citizen. We gave him 
all of the constitutional protections. Yet those protections were never 
meant for people we are fighting against in a war.
  That is why I come today to the floor of the Senate because we are 
treating these terrorists--from the Christmas Day bomber to Khalid 
Sheikh Mohammed, whom we are going to try in a Federal court, a civil 
court in New York--as if they are common criminals. In so doing, we are 
losing ground in the war on terrorism. We cheapen the value of being an 
American citizen, with all the rights that are afforded to us, when we 
grant terrorists who seek to end our way of life with those same 
protections.
  Why are we providing Miranda rights and other constitutional 
protections to terrorists at the expense of the security of the 
American people? Who in our government is making this decision? Who is 
saying these terrorists should have these rights? Who made the decision 
to Mirandize the Christmas Day bomber and treat him as a criminal 
defendant instead of an unlawful enemy combatant?
  Instead of treating this as a criminal law enforcement action, we 
need to recognize that we are at war. It is not the kind of war that 
our grandfathers fought in World War II or the one our fathers fought 
in Vietnam; it is what they call an asymmetrical war. But it is a war 
nonetheless. The people who are waging this war against us are trying 
to destroy America as we know it--not unlike the enemies we have had in 
our past wars.
  We lose the edge against these enemies in this war by failing to gain 
the information that we could gain, and should gain, from lawful and 
proper interrogation--information that is not gained as soon as Miranda 
rights are given.
  This week the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, the 
National Counterterrorism Center Director, Michael Leiter, and the 
Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, all 
testified before committees of the Congress and the Senate surrounding 
the incident concerning Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Each of them 
admitted they were not consulted by anybody in the administration, 
specifically the Department of Justice, on prosecuting Abdulmutallab in 
a civilian rather than a military court. These are the people who are 
supposedly on the frontlines of protecting the homeland and fighting 
against terrorism.
  The Director of National Intelligence, a position created to stand on 
top of all of the other intelligence-gathering organizations, to break 
down the silo so we could gain information and connect the dots--which 
as you hear, of course, did not happen for this event--but the chief 
intelligence officer of the United States of America was not informed 
as to why we were prosecuting him as a civilian.
  I had the opportunity to question Michael Leiter, the head of the 
National Counterterrorism Center, who is trying to counter the 
terrorism that is affecting our country. Although he was careful not to 
contradict the administration, it is clear to me that he would rather 
we treat these enemy combatants as what they are and not as common 
criminals.
  So who made this decision? Was it the Attorney General of the United 
States? Was it the President? Whoever made this decision, we need to 
know. That information needs to be before the Senate because it is a 
questionable call at best. In fact, I submit it is the wrong call to 
treat these non-American citizens as if they had all the rights we do. 
We are losing the war on terrorism if we do not gain the valuable 
information to stop terrorist attacks before they start. Someone from 
this administration needs to come forward and own up to this decision. 
I call upon the administration to do so. The American people deserve 
answers. Our policymakers have to come clean. We should be able to ask 
them questions and ask the right person questions as to why this 
decision was made.
  We should not be trying terrorists in civilian courts. We should not 
be giving them Miranda rights and other constitutional protections. We 
should be fighting the war on terrorism as if our very lives depend 
upon it because they do.


                                 Haiti

  Mr. President, I wish to speak about the situation in Haiti and the 
tragic events that occurred last Tuesday around 5 p.m. when a massive 
earthquake, measuring 7 points on the Richter scale, occurred near 
Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti.
  As a Senator from Florida, I have a deep connection to the Haitian 
people because we have more than 200,000 Haitians in our community in 
Florida. Watching what happened on television and the graphic pictures 
we have all seen on the news of the tragedy that has occurred--families 
have been separated and lost, children have been orphaned--we have also 
seen encouraging shots, those of people being rescued. We all saw the 
shot a couple days ago of the 75-year-old lady who was rescued, and 
yesterday a small boy and his sister were pulled out of the rubble, 
amazingly buried alive for a week and they made it out. It gives us 
hope. But the projections are grim with perhaps as many as 150,000 
Haitians dead. It is a staggering figure. It is a tragic loss of 
humanity.
  Last week, I was in Miami, along with the Governor and other 
officials, as we met to talk about what our response would be. We 
worked with the Coast Guard and Southern Command to make sure our 
rescue teams from Miami that have done work all around the world would 
have the opportunity to join the other search-and-rescue teams to help 
bring out the living and to find the dead to return them home. We have 
been very successful in doing that. We are very thankful for all of 
those Americans and very proud, as I am, especially of the ones from 
Florida, who have been doing such great work.
  While I was down in Miami, I had the chance to go to Little Haiti, 
which is our largest Haitian-American community, and visit the students 
at St. Mary's School. It is the school next to the Catholic cathedral 
in Miami, Dade County. I visited with Monsignor Terence Hogan and 
Sister Jane Stoecker, who is the principal of the school. I saw these 
beautiful Haitian children who were there in their school uniforms. 
They came to school that morning, the day after the earthquake, crying 
because they have family and loved ones on the island of Hispaniola. 
They put their pennies and quarters together to raise $500 to send to 
rescue and help the Haitian people. It is a touching story.
  The American people have been touched, too, because now we know tens 
of millions of dollars have been raised. Former President Bush and 
former President Clinton have come together under the request of 
President Obama to lead a relief effort so that we all can contribute, 
and we all must and we all should.
  I am thankful to RADM Steve Branham of the 7th District of the U.S. 
Coast Guard who has been on the ground and instrumental in making sure 
the relief efforts and the Coast Guard could be there to help these 
folks. One thing specifically he has been able to help with, which I 
will talk about in a moment, concerns the students from Lynn University 
in Boca Raton.
  I would like to talk about some of the heroes, some of our Floridians 
who have been so instrumental in helping the Haitian people.
  I wish to talk about a Fort Pierce-based nonprofit organization 
called Missionary Flights International that began flying food and 
supplies to Haiti daily. Since the earthquake, the organization has 
collected donations and gathered volunteers to load food,

[[Page 559]]

water, and supplies on their planes. In 1 day alone, the organization 
sent more than 400,000 ready meals to be eaten in Haiti.
  Another organization, the Big Heart Brigade in Palm Beach, is 
shipping 140,000 meals ready to eat this week. The Big Heart Brigade 
provides meals to many in South Florida, but in the wake of the 
tragedy, they have focused their efforts on Haiti.
  I wish to talk about Mr. Hank Asher in Boca Raton, FL, whom I happen 
to know well, who immediately took his plane and started flying doctors 
and nurses from Jackson Memorial and needed supplies into Haiti and 
brought back the wounded and the injured to Florida. We were able to 
give them some assistance in getting in and out shortly after the 
disaster.
  The good people of Florida and the good people of this country are 
opening their hearts and wallets and pocketbooks to help the people of 
Haiti, as they should. I look forward to going to Haiti once the 
search-and-rescue portion is over to assess the situation myself to see 
what I can do to help that nation recover.
  Also, as I mentioned a moment ago, I wish to talk about Lynn 
University students. Many folks watching on television today have seen 
the parents of these students. There were 12 there with faculty 
members. Some of them were able to get home. They were recovered and 
returned but alive. Now we know there are four students still missing 
and two faculty still missing. We remain hopeful that these young 
ladies and their two faculty members will make it back home to Florida. 
We have Christine Gianacaci, Stephanie Crispinelli, Courtney Hayes, and 
Britney Gengel, along with faculty members Patrick Hartwick and Richard 
Bruno.
  I have been talking with Dr. Ross, the president of Lynn University. 
My office, with other Members of Congress, is trying to assist in the 
efforts to find these students who were in the Hotel Montana, which 
fell shortly after the earthquake.
  Yesterday, I sent a letter to Secretary Clinton, Administrator Shah, 
and Secretary Gates. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the 
Record a copy of this letter dated January 21, 2010, at the conclusion 
of my remarks.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 1.)
  Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, in that letter we have asked that the 
search-and-rescue efforts continue. We saw the miraculous discovery of 
that young boy and young girl yesterday. There are people potentially 
alive still buried in the rubble. We must continue while there is some 
hope to look for survivors. But if there are no survivors, we request 
in this letter that their loved ones be brought home so they can be 
here in the United States. It is a request I think we all understand. 
We have been working with Secretary Clinton's office. We know they 
share the same view. I wanted to bring that to the attention of the 
Senate.
  As a parent of young children, I cannot imagine the loss and the 
feeling of loss of these parents from Lynn University and others who 
are still waiting for the potential recovery, as the days grow longer 
and the hours go by, of their family members, especially the loss it 
must be for these parents, the idea of losing a child. There is nothing 
more tragic one can think of. Our hearts go out to them. They are in 
our prayers. We look forward to the hopeful return of these students 
and faculty, but if not their return alive, then at least bringing them 
home so they can have rest and peace back in the United States of 
America.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.

                               Exhibit 1


                                                  U.S. Senate,

                                 Washington, DC, January 21, 2010.
     Re Locating and Returning Americans Missing in Haiti.

     Hon. Hillary Clinton,
     Secretary, U.S. Department of State,
     Washington, DC.
     Hon. Robert Gates,
     Secretary, U.S. Department of Defense,
     Washington, DC.
     Dr. Rajiv Shah,
     Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development,
     Washington, DC.
       Dear Madam Secretary Clinton, Mr. Secretary Gates, and 
     Administrator Shah: Over the past week, the immense scale of 
     the tragedy in Haiti has been revealed. The outpouring of 
     support from Americans for the Haitian people has been 
     significant and heart-warming.
       Americans' commitment to the renewal of Haiti existed 
     before last week's devastating earthquake. As a result, 
     thousands of Americans were working, studying, and serving in 
     Haiti when the quake struck. Many of them remain missing. 
     Among the missing are a number of my fellow Floridians.
       Because these Americans remain unaccounted for, please urge 
     all relevant U.S. officials to advocate for continuing search 
     and rescue efforts until the possibility of survival no 
     longer exists. Additionally, on behalf of the families of the 
     missing. I request you to do everything within your power to 
     ensure that every American known to be missing in Haiti is 
     located and returned home.
       Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter.
           Sincerely,
                                                George S. LeMieux,
                                            United States Senator.

  Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Leahy). The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Levin). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, what is the pending business?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Conrad amendment No. 3302.


                Amendment No. 3305 to Amendment No. 3299

             (Purpose: To reimpose statutory pay-as-you-go)

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that it be set 
aside, and I call up an amendment I have at the desk.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Nevada (Mr. Reid) proposes an amendment 
     numbered 3305 to Amendment No. 3299.

  Mr. REID. Mr. 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 printed in today's Record under ``Text of 
Amendments.'')

                          ____________________