Mr. President, my distinguished colleague, Senator Graham, has
been more than generous, and I thank him not just for today
but for the years to come. I do so genuinely in the sense that
his coming here as a Senator is like going over on the wall
and turning on the lights. Here I had somebody diligently
working to get things done. That is why I came to the Senate,
to get things done for South Carolina. And Senator Graham has
not only worked hard --we all work hard; there is no lazy
Senator in the 100 Senators -- but he has that secret of
making friends. After all, this is a political body, and you
cannot get things done unless you make friends.
He instantly came to the Chamber and started working with
Democratic Senators, which was a surprise to me. Things are so
confrontational at the present time in politics, to see that
occur, I said: That fellow is going to be here a long time.
And I believe it. He is going to be here a long time.
Just this past week, he got on to my crusade of trying to
get jobs and industry. He's following in the footsteps of, our
distinguished former colleague, the senior Senator from
Kentucky, Wendell Ford, who is on the floor and graces us. He
makes me feel like old times when he was our whip, and no one,
as chairman of the Rules Committee, did a better job. But
Lindsey Graham went out of his way to get things done.
This past week he has been taking around ambassadors from
various countries to prompt their interest in investing in
South Carolina. As Governor, I started going on trips in 1960
to encourage businesses to move to South Carolina, and now we
have 134 German companies in South Carolina. We have French
Michelin, and we have Japanese Hitachi, Fuji, and others. Now,
Senator Graham is working the beat. He is a realist, and he
knows how to get things done.
I cannot thank him enough for being already distinguished,
not just because we gave him the title, but because I have
heard from colleagues on both sides of the aisle: That fellow,
Lindsey Graham, is really a fine fellow. He is working, and
you really ought to be proud of him.
I address the distinguished Senator from South Carolina by
saying that the only way I can show my gratitude is to make
sure he gets this desk. I have the John C. Calhoun desk. You
will laugh, Wendell. When I got here I told Senator Russell, I
would like to have this desk. He said: Colleague, colleague,
colleague -- you know how he talked -- I guess you would like
to have this desk. My father sat at this desk, my mother sat
at this desk, and I am sitting at this desk.
I said: Excuse me, I didn't know all three of them had been
there.
He came to me the night before he left, and gave me the
Calhoun desk, and I am going to make sure the Sergeant at Arms
gets this desk to Senator Graham.
This is my chance to thank my colleagues for putting up
with me for 38 years. I thank the distinguished staff, not
just my staff and the committee staff, but particularly this
afternoon the floor staff, Marty and Lula and everybody else.
We couldn't get anything done without their wonderful help.
And I thank the poor reporters. If you can understand what I
am saying -- They are always asking later, Mr. President: What
did he say and how did he say it?
I will never forget politicking for President. I went up to
Worcester, MA. I kept calling it Worcester. I knocked on the
door and the lady said: Who are you? I said: Fritz Hollings.
She thought it was a German trucking company. I do thank the
reporters who have done an outstanding job for me over the
many years.
I started my career as a trial lawyer, and I made enough as
a good trial lawyer to afford to come to Washington and be in
the United States Senate. Senators don't make enough money.
You ought to double their pay, and I say that before leaving.
I have said that along with Ted Stevens for years. No little
young fledgling lawyer, such as Hollings, can afford to run,
keep up two homes, and everything else. It can't happen
anymore. You all are just politically using the salary and not
really attracting the best of the best.
I don't leave with the idea that the Senate is not what it
used to be in the sense of personnel. We have a way better
group of Senators. We had five drunks or six drunks when I
came here. There is nobody drunk in the United States Senate.
We don't have time to be drunk and, more than that, we have
the women. We had one woman early in my career. She was
outstanding, but she was outstandingly quiet. That was
Margaret Chase Smith from Maine, a wonderful lady. Now we have
14, and you can't shut them up. They keep on talking and
talking and talking. If you get into a debate with Barbara
Mikulski or Barbara Boxer, they will take your head off, I can
tell you that. They know how to present a viewpoint, and that
is very valuable.
The Senators have done a wonderful job. The Senate itself
is the greatest of institutions, but I know we can do better.
As a trial lawyer, I was overjoyed. When I came here, we had
the proceeding to learn the truth and we could hear the best
of witnesses. I had better clients as a United States Senator,
and obviously, I could make the final argument to the jury and
then go in the jury room and vote. That, to me, is a trial
lawyer. I had reached the ultimate.
Yet as I am leaving, I am very sensitive to the full docket
of unfinished business. I am constantly being asked about
legacy, legacy, legacy. I am thinking the things we ought to
have done long ago and have not done because rather than
seeking the truth -- and I say this advisedly -- we have
obscured it.
Take right now the issue that is going to confront us
tomorrow afternoon or Thursday of raising the debt limit. I
read the business page of the New York Times this morning. We
are spending at the rate of $600 billion more than we are
taking in. That is a deficit.
Don't give me this doubletalk of on-budget deficit,
off-budget, or Government debt and public debt. We are
spending $600 billion more than we are taking in, which is 6
percent of our GNP. In the European Union, if you exceed 3
percent of your gross national product, you are not eligible
to be in the European Union. Here we are telling the world
what they ought to do in diplomacy, international affairs
defense affairs, and fiscal affairs, and we would not even be
eligible to be in the European Union.
We have, Mr. President, the economy on steroids. Add it up.
Add up the deficit of 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 -- those 4
years -- and you have $1.7 trillion that we have goosed into
the economy with these tax cuts. We have not increased
spending on the war $1.7 trillion. No, no. We have tax cut,
tax cut, tax cut, and they still want more tax cuts. I am
talking bipartisan because both sides are guilty. I am not
talking in a partisan fashion.
We have to do something about that deficit. I was here when
we balanced the budget without Social Security in 1968.
President Clinton got the Government back into the black. But
when Bush came in he turned a $6 trillion projected surplus,
to a $5 trillion projected deficit, and now we have to
increase the debt limit. Now the dollar is in a deep dive.
Interest rates are going to have to go up. We are depending on
financing our debt some $700 billion by the Japanese, $170
billion by the Chinese, and $67 billion by Korea. Can you
imagine going with a tin cup to Korea, begging: Please finance
my debt because I need another tax cut?
What about Social Security? Let's tell the truth about it
because there isn't any question that we have been spending
Social Security moneys for any and everything but Social
Security, in violation of the law.
And don't give me this thing about, oh, yeah, Lyndon
Johnson used Social Security. He did not. Look at the record.
He balanced it, and we did not spend Social Security moneys
until the seventies when Wilbur Mills, the chairman of the
Ways and Means Committee on the House side, started giving
these inordinate COLAs. We started draining the fund.
We appointed the Greenspan Commission in 1983. The
Greenspan Commission came out with an inordinately high tax to
take care of the baby boomers in the next generation. Don't
misunderstand me. They act like the baby boomers are coming
along as a new problem. We foresaw that in 1983. We said, as a
result of this high tax, do not spend this money on anything
but Social Security.
I fought like a tiger, but we finally got it into law. On
November 5, 1990, George Herbert Walker Bush, signed into law
section 13301 that says that the President and the Congress
cannot use for budget purposes Social Security moneys.
I was talking a minute ago to my distinguished colleague
from South Carolina. He is going to try, I guess, to raise
taxes. I would support it so long as we are not raising taxes
for anything and everything but Social Security. You are going
to have to increase the age. You are going to have to get some
revenues to make it fiscally sound. But if we started
immediately with the Social Security surplus going to just the
Social Security trust fund, we immediately have $160 billion,
and with that $160 billion in 7 years, we would have a
trillion dollars and you wouldn't have to worry until 2045 or
2050, and there would not be any crisis. We ought to study
that.
It is the same with trade. Everywhere in the land people
cry: Free trade, free trade, free trade. There is no such
thing; never has there been and never will there be free
trade. I know about freer governmental restrictions,
subsidies, and quotas, but that is not going to happen.
People ought to remember that we built this industrial
giant and power, the United States of America, with
protectionism. The Brits corresponded with the Founding
Fathers, and they said: Under David Ricardo's comparative
advantage, what needs to be done is we will trade with you
what we produce best and you trade back with us what you
produce best. Free trade, free trade, free trade.
Hamilton wrote the Report on Manufacturers. He said to
Britain: Bug off, we are not going to remain your colony. We
are going to maintain our own manufacturing capacity. The
second bill that ever passed this Congress in history, on July
4, 1789, was a 50-percent tariff on articles and we started
with protectionism, linking the steel mills with
protectionism. Roosevelt came in with protective subsidies on
agriculture. Our friend, President Eisenhower, had import
quotas on oil -- protectionism. President Kennedy came in with
a 7-point program to protect textiles. More recently, our good
friend President Ronald Reagan, put in voluntary restraint
agreements on automobiles, steel, hand tools, and
semiconductors.
Ask Andy Grove if he would have Intel today if President
Reagan had not put in that protectionist measure. There would
not be any Intel.
We did that with Sematech and everybody knows it. But we
were treating trade as aid in the war of capitalism versus
communism right after World War II. We had the only industry.
So we sent over, with the Marshall Plan, money, experts,
equipment, and we started giving away my textile industry --
giving it away.
Right now 70 percent of the clothing I am looking at is
imported; 86 percent of the shoes on the floor are imported.
It is all gone. All that time they said: Don't worry. We are
going to be a service economy. My light bill in South Carolina
is administered in Bangalore, India. So we have lost the
service economy. We have lost the manufacturing economy and
capacity.
What happens is your security is like a three-legged stool.
You have the one leg, your values as a nation. Around the
world we stand for individual freedom and democracy. We have
the second leg, unquestioned, as a military superpower. The
third leg -- the economy -- has been fractured intentionally
and we are happy about it because capitalism has defeated
communism in Europe, in the Soviet Union, and in the Pacific
rim. And it is defeating it right now in China. Let's not
disturb it and what have you, except to begin to compete. As
Akio Morita says: That world power that loses its
manufacturing capacity will cease to be a world power. What we
need to do is to rebuild.
We can begin to immediately rebuild by changing the
culture, the mindset, the legislation. Around here we passed,
4 weeks ago, a $50 billion tax cut bill that was supposed to
represent foreign credit sales. Instead, it subsidized the
export of jobs, the outsourcing of jobs overseas.
We are still treating trade as aid. If you are going to
open up Sununu Manufacturing, before you open the door you
have to have a minimum wage, clean air, clean water, Social
Security, Medicare, Medicaid, plant closing notice, parental
leave, OSHA, a safe working place, safe machinery, and I can
go all the way down. And in Manchester, NH, your competition
has moved to China because they can operate and produce there
for 58 cents an hour and none of those requirements. If you
don't move to China yourself, you are going broke. You will go
bankrupt.
The policy of the crowd that is hollering and wailing and
moaning about the outsourcing of jobs is exactly the policy of
the very crowd that is causing that outsourcing. If you head
up a multinational, you are supposed to compete and make a
profit.
We are supposed to create a strong economy and produce
jobs. The Congress of the United States, the Senate, we are
the guilty parties. We have to put in a change of the culture.
We need a Department of Trade and Commerce, and to put the
Special Trade Representative over there and to do away with
the International Trade Commission, because this is just a
sop. The International Trade Administration -- and not
Commission -- should find the penalty rather than having that
separate hearing and say there is no injury and everything
else of that kind.
I have worked with the lawyers. We need a Deputy Attorney
General for Trade in the Justice Department. We have one for
antitrust. We have one for civil rights. We have one for
taxation. We don't have one for trade. We need somebody
enforcing those laws. We need, by gosh, to turn around and
start competing the way they have done.
Let me just say what we need to do is get ahold of
ourselves and realize we have a problem. I was at a meeting
earlier today where one of the Senators was counseling the new
Senators: Don't take too many committees. The new ones are
going to take all the committees. Our time has come. We want
it all. So we want all the committees.
The rules ought to say a Senator should not be on any more
than two committees. You can't keep up with it. I am on the
Appropriations Committee. They used to have 17 members; now
they have 29 members. You know, the Appropriations
Subcommittee on Defense has 19 members. You can't hardly get a
quorum for the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.
Everybody wants to be on all the committees, so you have your
staffs doing all the work, because you can't keep up.
But the main culprit, the cancer on the body politic, is
money: Money, money, money. When I ran 6 years ago, in 1998, I
raised $8.5 million. That $8.5 million is $30,000 a week,
every week, for 6 years. If you miss Christmas week, you miss
New Years week, you are $100,000 in the hole and don't you
think we don't know it and we start to work harder at raising
money.
As a result, the Senate doesn't work on Mondays and
Fridays. We have longer holidays. The policy committee is
adjourned and we go over to the campaign building because you
can't call for money in the office. So we go over to the
building and call for money and obviously we only can give
attention to that. We don't have time for each other. We don't
have time for constituents, except for the givers. Somebody
ought to tell the truth about that. Unless and until we excise
this cancer, the Congress and Government is going to languish
alone because it has to be done.
When I helped write the Federal Election Campaign Practices
Act in 1973, we said each Senator would be limited to so much
per registered voter. That meant that Strom Thurmond and I
were limited to $637,000. Fast forward 25 years, add in
inflation, and give me $2.5 million. Quadruple it, $2.5
million but not $8.5 or $10 million that you have to spend
because all your time is on the campaign and not the country.
I can tell you right now we are in real, real trouble.
I worked with John McCain and Russell Feingold on the
McCain-Feingold. I worked with Senator Biden on public
finance. What really needs to be done, and I tried 20 years
ago, is to put in a constitutional amendment that Congress is
hereby empowered to regulate or control spending in Federal
elections.
Then we can go back to the 1973 act: So much per registered
voter. When you are limited to $2.5 million, you have limited
the campaign. You have limited the time of the campaign; you
have limited the expenditures of the campaign. Then you have
time for constituents. Then you have time for problems.
When I came here, Mike Mansfield would have a vote at 9
o'clock just about every Monday morning and we would work to
Friday at 5 o'clock. We all stayed here on the weekends and we
didn't have all of these long holidays we have now..
But if you want to limit campaigning and if you want to
change -- as Abe Lincoln said -- disenthrall ourselves of the
dogmas of the quiet past that are inadequate for the stormy
present of money grubbing, then we have to think anew and act
anew. We need to disenthrall ourselves from this money
grubbing and go to work finally for the country instead of the
campaign.
That is our situation. I have watched it. I have studied
it. I have seen it. They don't have me going to meetings. They
have me going to the telephone and calling and calling,
traveling all over the country for money. Money is a cancer on
the body politic.
Other than that, I have spoken seriously about trying to
face up to some of these problems that we have confronting us.
There are a lot of opportunities.
They are talking now about immigration. Mexico is not a
foreign country. They are our neighbor. All you have to do is
put down the billions that we spend: Give them a Marshall
Plan, increase their standard of living just like Canada. Then
you don't have immigration. I can tell you right now, the
money spent on immigration, drugs, and border patrol, and
financing that government out of the banks in New York and
then refinancing it on us taxpayers, we could have a Marshall
Plan and solve the problem.
There are a lot of problems that we can solve. But if there
is a last word, it is one of gratitude. This has been the
finest experience I have ever had. When you come right down to
it, I was always worried that I couldn't make enough money to
stay in Washington. Now I have looked at my trial lawyer
colleagues who made a lot of money. Most of them are dead.
Those who are alive are looking for a new golf course and a
new drink and they don't know anything about what is going on
and they are not interested in anything going on. If you
really want to be enriched in your life be a United States
senator. The best postgraduate course is to run and be in this
Senate.
It is with heartfelt gratitude I thank the colleagues for
their indulgence this afternoon, particularly my colleague,
Senator Graham. We just have a fine time working together, and
I know he will be representing us in the Senate for years to
come.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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