those. going back to their days, they were older than me at sanford. one of the problems is their problem solvers and they solve big problems. one of the first problems was how difficult it was to find information in scholarly journals and books. one of the first ideas even before the idea for the search engine was scanning books and making those -- it seems like a crazy idea so they went to another crazy idea which was making a search engine. that went really well. in a lot of ways, that success has given them the opportunity to do this project which they are very passionate about. this is not part of people.org or a charity project, but it is hard to qualify it as necessarily just for historians as well. ..

>> here's a book that i was reading on the plane. i'm trying to learn how to chip lobe error on my golf game. if you were to tell me to scan this book, it would be, i could get a really high quality camera and i could spend all day taking pictures of it and working on

it. i could spend time like researching and getting all the data, metadata and doing a good job. our challenge is how can you make that to scale. how can you do that not for one book, but for really all the world's books, for millions of books. we don't have unlimited money. there are resource constraints. is money per book and it's also time. to do every book perfectly, you could do it in a way where you do a perfect from the beginning and it takes 100 you, but then we're all dead. but this really is sort of a long project. one analogy is to your member are you in the web days where you load an individual, image on the webpage. it would sort of fill in slowly here that's one good way to fill in an image. now you see it loads the whole image and it is sort of blurry and then it fills in and tell a gets perfect. sort of the analogy, that's all

we're doing at google books. we are trying to make it as successful and we can. the 80 percent for as many, sort of in your lifetime. then we can continue to go back and fill in the gaps. so what else gets me excited? i think obviously the democratization of this information and making -- it's exciting to me that a student anywhere in the world can access this information. so i think at this point i will be time for questions. great, thanks. [applause] >> okay. thank you all again, to all of our speakers. and we do have plenty of time for questions. so i have been encouraged since we have the television there, that anyone who has a question,

please go to the microphone and speak it in there. but otherwise, i believe it open to the audience. anybody. >> my name is jim google. i have 21 books published are my concern with google books is a lot of stuff i have dealt any similar classified environment. i've gotten involved in an unclassified format. i spent many, many years researching, interviewing people, getting little red dots on my chest out in the desert. what is my incentive if everything i do eventually goes online, continue to do what i do? because i've seen some of my stuff that only i have ever acquired, i have seen on the net in place in europe and asia, whatever. that's one of my main concerns. we have copyright trademark standards here in the u.s., and

a lot of countries signed up to it. but there's a lot of characters out there that really, could care less about intellectual property. >> that's a really good question. i think with the internet, it offers a lot of opportunities but a lot of difficulties and challenges as well. from our point of view on google, we are trying to be basically help you reach the audience of users who want to purchase your book. so what we want, sort of a topic you what your books on? [inaudible] >> so what i'm hoping for is when someone just go to google and i search for the plane, we want to be able to show your book. and ideally give them a little snippet that reinforces them that this chapter is your book, and just the questions. and then we want to have a bilingual they can purchase the book. right now on google books we

have a leg to amazon and barnes & noble and borders, and basically the book retailers can input their prices of inventory data into our system. and then we linked users out to that. we're also working on an initiative that we talk about called google editions where we'll sell visual access to the book are so users will be able to click, paid a $25 or whatever you want to pick the price for your book, and then they can have immediate access to the whole book right in google books. what's exciting about that is with the visual rating, i don't think we will ever lose the paper book, but visual reading, the idea is you can keep your books in the cloud is sort of a buzzword right now. we're making available lots of different devices and access point for users to read that. the idea is you can be at home, maybe it's a sony e-book reader or samsun reader, you can start to read your book airfare when i'm on the go and i have my

phone with me, i can continue where i left off. i think it's a compelling offering for consumers, and then ideally you would sell more books through this exposure. there is a lot of piracy on the web. when twilight or some big book comes out it seems like the next day it is online. those aren't scans from google. those are people, they have basically said everyone in our website, everyone types of one page and they put it altogether. they are quickly able to transcribe these popular books. i'm not sure if there is a solution to completely stop in that. one solution is having an alternative legal way of users can buy things quickly. for a long time to music publishers were resistant to selling digital music. so there wasn't a legal avenue for consumers to buy music. so there was a lot of piracy. it seems to me when steve jobs

and apple came out with itunes, it mitigated that to a large extent. oftentimes it's not worth your time. to go try and find that it's easier just to find out to buy something for a dollar. i think as we all work together, hopefully that should mitigate some of the piracy. >> thank you for your brilliant overview. i am very interested in the new google iphone. i had the opportunity to look at some new trends and to research that helped a lot of students. if you look at the area, let's say, wikipedia. it basically familiarizing people with a broad overview before they get into very detailed and specialized research. are there ways to visualize, conceptualize that process where there is mind mapping or timeline, to be a new way to

help people look at that familiarization of it. there are some good books on timelines, and the ability to look at the timeline stretch and break it and then go right in, maybe a helpful, simple way to bring history together for a lot of people to look at multi-trends, within a particular time period. and through that visual structure, similar to gis and really mapping, you are looking at layered information system, technological, economic, and using a layered system along a timeline that would really help to visualize. and familiarize that system in a way that makes sense. and i work with one of the leading geniuses of gis, and he started with a very set of principle, a layered cake. when you are a little child and have a birthday, the birth is celebrated with a birthday cake.

you have the wonderful thrill of cutting through layers and understanding that thrill of all the different elements. i think that he was looking to help to enable most of the world to understand huge complexities of world ecosystem behavior with a simple understanding layer cake structure, now gis system. he will be following a similar model of stretched timelines, scientific, technological layers and historic context that would begin to go in or out, but very simply organize very powerful. >> i think that is an important point. i think once you digitize a book and skimmed it, it allows you to study the information in interesting ways that you otherwise could not do it. been beyond that it allows you to sort interact with the content and learning new ways as well. on the side of the interesting trends and announces you can do with a digital book that you maybe could be with a paper copy, workcell, on google books

we have an interesting little project, now that we have scanned a book where able to look through, our computers look through and find place names. let's say it's a book like around the world in 80 days. and extract out the places. what we did is a matthew of the book. and i helped launch this on google earth. you go to google earth, and basically you can zoom in on a location like you zoom in on london and then you see the references in any book that we know about to that location. it's interesting to find information that way. you mention timelines as well. google web search has something where they extract data from webpages. then are able to do a timeline view. you can search for like george washington, or some figure from history, and then see the spikes on the timeline of the books that reference that person. that's on the data extraction side which is interesting. i think it's very exciting on how you can augment books that make it easier for students.

here is my golf book and it's got photos for how to did a pitch shot, but what i want to see is a video, and if i'm studying a history book i was just out on the aircraft carrier out here, if i'm reading a book about that, i want to see the videos from the world war ii footage. and i want to see maps, you know, and see where this aircraft carrier went and more photos. and wouldn't it be great if users could contribute, like you said, layers. one of the things in google maps, they can add their photos and videos to it. if you can do the same thing with books where you still have the book that you are not messing with that. but to decide, you can have these layers that people can turn on and turn off and share. i think back to my days going to school, i would read a book and maybe i would understand 20 percent of it. i would have to go and my professor would help me sort of get a deeper understanding of it. we would have that classroom discussion and we would give our

input. in a digital world where we are connected it's very exciting to think about the virtual book clubs or virtual university classes where you can get together and discuss things, maybe a professor write their sort of authoritative layer that slices and dices the book and explains it. and then i can find that as well. >> if i could just come in on that because i think it highlights, right now there are those layers. they exist in google books and they are all written by google engineers. they are mapping tools, things that you can see that google has access to. a clearly have a function they can write to see all the books that quote any other book, even if it is not cited in the footnotes that we don't have access to that as colors but we haven't been able to create anything on top of that. all the other google properties that i was talking about before act as platforms on which scholars, software developers, users can open. we haven't seen that yet out of google books. i know some of this is because of the legal problems.

but the intent when you look at this, here's where i very much agree with paul is, there's a tone deafness to the way history is rich and complex. and so the kinds of things that engineers do history as they extract place names and make a map. and hope that that is interesting. but there are others among us that want to do other things on top of google books. we don't have the kind of access to that programming environment that we would like. >> if i could add to that an ethical. because i think that point is absolutely right that it underlines what i think i was going to say about groove. i think the google out of rhythm is great, except it is wonderful to discover the part of king lear takes place in up state new york. there is a plaything for a. all for instance, when he wrote to the warden was writing about maternity and child bearing. because when google took out

those wonderful quotations that appear in other books, they stuff their advertisements in the front and back of the book that if you look at the most quoted passages, they are bookseller published by the same publisher that year that are advertised in the front. so the proof of concept is wonderful. but the detailed execution to get it right so that you are led data doesn't take into the wrong place and the wrong time needs exactly the sort of input that dan is calling for and google doesn't allow. i think that's why in the way some of these tools are enormously powerful is completely unfulfilled. >> i am writing my dissertation on history but my real money job because history is not enough money, is i am a librarian at new york city. this is the university mac which i had to tape because they couldn't find me a pc laptop. i'm still seen by the library administration as one of the

luddites, because i think that books are still important, and those algorithms are problem. we are using algorithms to read half of my books out of the library. any historian in any humanist and a lot of other fields, they don't go and check out every book that the use. they go to look up a reference, they go to look up a citation to that book doesn't get circulate that it gets taken off the shelf, looked at, some people put it back, some people don't. it doesn't get counted. might expect with google books is when it was first coming out. my dissertation is on gender and anarchism in spain. there so many problems with nothing, because when the spanish republican and all the royalist street names, rename. when the revolution took place, suddenly things were renamed. then when franco one, streets were rename. when the monarchy came back, franco died. streets were renamed.

i mean, oslo, the capital of norway was no differently for longtime. so those are problems that i think google has to solve a. there are problems with the way people use and they can turn me and we see it in my university when i talk to other colleagues and to people in europe on the international association of labour history institutions. so i'm interested in the union. people are not coming to the library because they think they're finding everything they need to find using google. and they're looking at things uncritically. and they are not -- so mesas come to me and say i want to write about the battle saratoga. and i need to find accounts or even better, recently a student wanted to write about sailors, sailors, meaning renk seeman, accounts of the nepal a -- napoleonic wars. most sailors were not there.

but they choose google and they found an article of a diary that was sold and they want to know why he could find no library. they were not able to make a distinction. i think dan is right. that google books is great, proquest, god rest whatever soul they may have left, are much more of a problem because we get gouged in an endless market routine were over 50 percent of our budget goes to electronic products. what many of you may not know that a product itself may not be that expensive, they hit us every year with maintenance fees, with electronic journals were not paying a lot for the journal. we're paying for the maintenance fee. that every year as collates. and i'm also on the new text mining project board. some of those products look really great. and i really look forward to seeing what can come out. i think being able to do some of the stuff that dan says you have algorithms for, and making available so we can start using them and getting people into

the. but my concern as elaborate as more of that people come to me and say, i can't find anything in google on the greek forcible removal of greeks from turkish territory after world war i. and they don't realize that if they don't know greek and don't know turkish, google is not going to find it for them. >> definitely google books is just a tool. i wish it could make us all great historians. but there's more to it than that. i'm sure you can attest to. i think students need to see it as a tool, maybe it starts to point you in the direction of the library that can help but they still need to actually get out of your pajamas and go to the library and interact with the original books as well. >> go ahead. >> it seems to me that there is two different strands of criticism of google books. on the one hand, questions about

access. and actually some ways in which google allows access. and then questions about sort of quality of the scans or individual things. so i'm curious to have our panel of critics, paul and dan and from a library perspective if sean wants to add things, how you evaluate what's more important because i think one of the points dan tries to make is the access questions are not being asked nearly as much as we hear about, you know, hands-on pages or things out of order. metadata issues that i'm just curious about how each of you would weigh those out. >> very quickly, i think dan offers a solution i was trying to talk about some of the problems of opening an apple would make a huge difference. people like dan get their hands on them and others who can start to say, this is how to fix.

but i'm not very excited to. >> you can compare what google is doing with metadata compared to the internet archives of the library project is doing, which they've completely liquefied and crowd source and have gotten a strong support from the library congress which has donated metadata records and other places that i would love to hear what brandon macon help out, but there was at some a big meeting about the geographic control and some kind of unified system of metadata and proven in sharing. and again, so i feel that a lot of the quality issues can flow out of a more open environment where we have a better sense of what's going on. pairs can be corrected in broader ways from institutions and individuals. >> the question of which is more important, i think they are both important that we have to fix both of them. going back to the maps analogy, how do you fix the bad direction

and what not. part of it is fixing the algorithm. and building the tools of the expert in that domain, who knows better about where your house is located then you? so we gave in that world, man's world, we let you place on the map where your house is. of course, you have to build tools and therefore like to pricer high school kid who will start moving the hospital around and things like that. but you can solve that. you can see two people said a hospital here, you can start to trust that. you have credibility and what not. we have taken baby steps towards that on google books. we have the feedback button where when you find an error, you can flag it and that brings it up to our attention so we can have a human operator then look at and try to fix it. that's 5 percent of what we need to go, that's deadly the direction where we're going. i want to get to a world where when you see an ocr error what we have done something funny and we messed up in the

transcription, why should you be able to just type it in and fix it for us. then we can have a system that takes the input, two people say this word should be this, we can trust that. i think that's where we're going. >> just one caveat about the metadata issue. i have written about this elsewhere. i think metadata is pretty weird stuff. and i think, i look at a project like grey stone which tries to open source. the identification of tracks on popular albums in the greystone archive which is the outcry which identifies if you use itunes. it goes astray very, very quickly. it is a hard thing. i'm not sure the internet archive is having success that helped with its wiki on the. so little i like the idea that i think it is passionate i think metadata is difficult and weird. >> i agree that it doesn't completely solve it.

just turning all metadata to wiki doesn't completely solve it. >> and usually after i tried to step back from these things and not make a comment, but since it's been pointed out several times that i'm the only librarian on this platform, i feel somewhat obligated to say a little something here. and from a library perspective, all of these issues, are there lots of christens to be made about google? certainly. however, we can survey say that at least i used to work at the university of michigan, though i wasn't directly involved in this project. that we have digitization programs going on for a long time before this where we were dealing with all of these issues. the problems our intellectual property, the criticism that had been brought up here are so huge it was usually just easier not to deal with them. so we didn't. and for the first time when google comes along and says, we can do all of us, we can digitize all of these books that the university of michigan would have taken over 1000 years to do

with the staff that we currently have, and i think we owe them all a tremendous debt of gratitude in that sense. or if nothing else, realizing that these issues exist and that we had been dealing with them. so from my perspective, a lot of the time i think what we really out to be posed to sing on here and what is important, is that we have tremendous possibilities that google books and things like google books open up, is a perfect? no. i'm ever going to live in a perfect world? no. so what kinds of things can we do and some of the things that were brought up with gis and mapping and bringing these books together, how could we were to try to get something that's maybe not perfect, but at least it can pass. also, kind of the things you were bringing up as an author, myself, too, i want to get my work out there and distribute it. how can i do that in a way it electronically that is probably again, is there going to be piracy? yes, but i'm also going to get

my work out there to a much broader audience. than might have been possible before. i guess from a library point of view, this is really how we see it. that this was a tremendous opportunity to bring these issues to the floor, and now it's a matter of there are lots of imperfections but how do we work together to try and get them into something that is at least a passable and most of us can say is okay. thanks. >> first want to thank all of you. i was a prize to find how much sympathy i was having with all of your argument as we went along. i am all there for openness. i want access, i want that data. i'm trained as a medievalist in literature. so when you start talking about the books, and talking especially about the metadata, about those books, who own them,

where have they been, i am right there with you. i now work as a strange beast called an instructional technology specialist. i am working on trying to code up cash but it's not quite up to google standards, but it is pretty close. it's interesting what you were just starting to get into really, and focusing. the question i have for you, because when i heard from everyone i think, recurring theme here is, trust. how do we decide when we trust data that we have come and how do we decide whether we trust the answers that google is giving us? so i was wondering if i could just ask all of you to maybe look back on what we've got so far and think, okay, as a scholar trying to produce an argument, trying to get my information together, what are the standards of trust that i would like to see at work and in play in a project like this?

>> good question. >> i will start. i think trust is a good question, and i'm not sure as a historian, and academic, i mean, it's always good to not be fully trusting. right? we've all gone into archives, i certainly have, where people live and letters that we read and forge dates, and airbrushed people out of paintings and photographs. it's not too bad to have a little bit of paul with us all the time to be the skeptic, the knowledgeable skeptic. [laughter] >> who can see that there may be reasons to not trust things that i think that's not a bad feeling. and i just want to get a quick example, because inbred disposition, at the center for history and the media, when we cocreator with the project at the city university of york september 11 visual archive,

which was a very large archive that we gathered via the web, a partnership with the libra of congress and smithsonian, collecting all the digital stuff. and we ended up with 150,000 objects that we gathered over the web. and i remember going to the society of american archivists, sort of present this project, the result of it. and immediately people started standing up saying it's not an archive. how do you know that someone didn't like when they said they were colin powell on your website? what are you going to do about that? you know, i guess my sort of blasé response at the time was you know that we don't check our brains at the door when we look at these things. we have to go with some amount of skepticism and that we want is, and i think what paul very good point is that we actually need more metadata bit when we did the september 11 archive, we

try to provide the researchers look at our archive which is now at the library of congress, with as much metadata as possible. we got the solution you. this is the ip address. here is the location of that ip address that we try to e-mail the person, the e-mail didn't go through that here's all the things we did. but at the end of the day what we had was a kind of raw archive that we knew was problematic. and we tried our best to sort of iterate towards something that was decent and usable, but we left it to the historian, the smart historian in 50 or 100 years to analyze all that material and to measure it against other sources. as we do every day. so at some point we're going to hit that wall i think with google books. we're not there yet. i think brandon will admit there is a lot that can be added, but i think as in free speech, more free speech is better but more metadata is better. where did this metadata come from? are the conflicting sources? has someone waited and said this doesn't look right to be.

all these things can be helpful to the scholar to assess veracity and thus, build trust. >> the only thing i would add to that is one of the key things for trust is having breadth of sources. so we are probably stand in the version of a particular book of hamlet or something like that. if there were a case where a -- one book at some airbrushed out or something with scribbled out, ideally we are helping by giving access to all 10 versions of that book at 10 different libraries. so i think with more sources, and on the metadata as well, with more sources you can make a better decision about what you trust. right now i'm try to make the core website better. our site has been focused around search engine, the homepage is still pretty bad and were tied make it easier to browse and one of. i got it setup so you can click, browse in the subject. i was doing this in the day and why is hamlet beginning the computer subject. so we started looking into it and we get the metadata sources from this book from like 30

different sources, and 20 all say that this book should be in the computer section but do we have one random data source that says it's a romance novel. our algorithms were not set up to do with it. we were too trusting in the data source. the advantage is in that case we get multiple sources so you can do a simple algorithm where you can trust 10 people say this book belongs in the computer section, and the one who says it's a romance book. i think the key is breadth. >> i think the question is a very important one. it's a tricky one. i think in general is an awful way in which this is shoved off on somebody else come off and shoved off libraries. people talk about digital literacy. and assume that there is somehow way that magically we can treat this and that. i don't think it is. if they do a google search on anything, look at the results you get and then think about

which one you click on. and taken away, what kind of years and years of knowledge goes into the decision. how do you shortcut that? i don't know but i think it's tricky. i think that one of the things that google has got going for it, i come back to the early page of britain's suspicion about commercialization because i think google search is getting worse. but they had an enormously reliable ranking, and in general, you don't unless you have some very strange, people go much built in the first page, along the first three pages. and then brought as a. i think it is a terribly important point that there is no way of understanding how that maps across into google books. how the first 10 books read, what that means, it's certainly not the standard page rank algorithm or anything like it. so what that means and how you are meant to make sense is i don't know. that would be all right if

somehow that was like, but the fact it looks exactly like the standard google search and therefore somehow you are meant to trust in the way you spend the same google search, there are almost what you want to say he should disrupt that order because it doesn't work. another thing that i would just say, although i know of people work with google, a lot of people went to google. but it somehow was me that the very first figured you see in google tends to be a plot like. if you look at the page count that they get for the number of hits, it is almost always utterly false. why? well, some of the documents given, it would take us a couple of nanoseconds longer to get that figure right. well, take a couple of nanoseconds. but if you want people to trust you, don't begin by lying to them at the very first thing

they see. >> i think to that point, there's a lot of difficult engineering that goes into like figuring out how many hits, certain query gets. >> oxford university, i apologize in advance for if this question is confusing as i find the subject matter very confusing that i was wondering if the 21st speakers might comment on the underlying tension between i guess what i would call the fragmentation on one hand, and comprehensive is on the other hand when we think about information resources. it seems to me there are costs and benefits to having inquiry approaches that either kind of embrace fragmentation, or go for a comprehensive approach on

either side. often human life can feel quite fragmented, and so the modern world may be best understood from this angle or that angle. and at the same time, historical societies often like to aim for having a comprehensive view of culture and knowledge, etc., and perhaps it got harder after dante's time. i'm not sure, but what i guess i am looking for you is, how google books to contribute to the kind of latest round in this tension. and kind of the societal perceptions of whether the sources that are use our fragmented to start or copperheads it to start. and maybe the interesting analog example you brought up of the book, which looks very dialing simple and kind of command and

authority of some kind which in fact is much more complex underlying that. so maybe this is all a roundabout way of asking, is kind of a comprehensive city that google books is hoping to get and may not achieve, is that really the new fragmentation for our era? and what does that mean to really do use it at the end of the day? so maybe you can make something out of that model of a question. >> sure. look. what google excelled out at first and continues to excel at, with exception of google books, is it is the master of aggregating resources that are web scaled and providing search and access to those. that's what it was always set up to do. i said earlier that i found google books to be a very odd property within the google plextor here again, i feel that it's very strange that they're trying to come up with a copperheads of libra on the

campus. what they've done is they go forth and have a sound servers with 1000 books and will provide an overarching search and access to those materials. one could have imagined a very different google book search which was a google book search. that would have, as paul noted, a subject domain expert digitizing small quantities at high quality and providing as they do with websites, access to google where google provided what it is good at. what's strange about google books is they are trying to do the aggregation and so. and for me, that is not web scale. and so again, i find it to be a very odd project for them to take on. and i wonder if there is a different version of this that would take what has been scanned that is scattered around the globe and does something on top of that as they did with web search. >> i think that's a very nice point. very early on, google talk about this project before they started

denying it. and he said our goal is to create a comprehensive searchable virtual card catalog of all books in all languages. and they change from that. in some ways if they had done that and had let other people do the scanning and they have provided the way, as they say, to help discover books around the world, that would have been, i think, in many ways of playing to more of their strengths. that they could certainly, we hope, given some of the money they put into the project to help other people to the scanning. but it might have been better if they had left some of that to other people pick the basic question you ask i think, and you know this has all lots of alexandria this, the idea that we can collect everything in one place. and of course, again the irony, i don't want to keep going on about this, but there's a wonderful night of the teeth which got the whole project started and it's great for that reason, but when they begin and they said they are going to organize all the world's information. just conceptually that makes no

sense at all. there is no such thing as all the world information. maybe it was a good idea to start off trying to do that. because you get something done. that it creates an idea of the conceptual. so to come back to the question in a way that you asked me about the book, i draw attention to my colleague jeffrey number of who wrote a very good essay called the future of the book. he began by saying pointing out quite clearly that we talk about the book as if it were a unified object. and it's not. i was one of the first things that scanning and digitizing did was it pulled apart many of the different aspects that we were calling books. for instance, it was very easy to take the bold parts catalog or even the railway timetable, and those will never appear as books again. they were not naturally books that they just happen to be in the codex or because we didn't have anything to do with the. whereas we know the scholarly comfortable monograph is causing all sorts of problems.

so the way in which different genres and forms were invest in that particular material property, he is very, very different and we confuse ourselves when we suddenly lump them all together. and libraries have lived without confusion for a long time but found ways around it. it glosses over more problems than it reveals. >> on the fragmentation, from a professor that had assigned a topic to the student to research something, sometime. they came back with all the books he came back. they were all books that failed on google books. the risk is that google books is too useful and it is too easy to do research in your pajamas, and students and scholars, we use as the only tool so i think it's up to you guys, history, to see it as what it is that it's one to. you still need to go to the library, still need to extend your research beyond that.

we don't want to get to a road where it is fragmented. they only do the research on google books. [inaudible] >> said you are trying to kind of create -- >> you might want to talk into the microphone. >> your optimal use of experts for your power user, how you going to try to direct us into what it is and what it isn't? and where will you actually say we're going to be copperheads of, here but we recognize that everything over here and were going to give you these platform tools that hook and to the rest of life as opposed to kind of maybe making people think that this is kind of all hall or something like that? >> does a good question. we are doing our best to scan many other books and make them available as again. we are adding tools that the user community can build on top

of the. we do have programming interfaces that are available where you can search for the books. you can embed our preview in your own site and build on top of that it's so that's definitely direction where we're going. and then going back to google, there's google books, also google, the search engine. our hope is that other people will continue to scan books and do similar projects. and then from google search we point the users to whoever has the best source of information. >> just to build a little bit on what brandon was saying. again, speaking from formerly at the university of michigan standpoint, the way that we really saw this, at least for the books that we own, that were our books, scanned by google, we build our own database for searching of those books. and in many ways we were trying to approve on some of these issues that we have already been talking about, and we did some things i think that indexing, for instance, a lot easier to do

within in the books is what it was called. which is kind of the implementation of all the google books that we had at the time. and are continuing to build on. also trying to correct some of the metadata issues. so really, i am from a library perspective, this was a great way to just get the books scanned, and then we could kind of handle all the problems, at least for our own stuff as they came along. and as these books get google indexed, presumably if people search on particular topics, our books will come up there as well as the google books that are skin. i don't see these things is kind of being mutually exclusive trying to work together. so building kind of more metadata, more functionality is really i think i'm incumbent just on a story, but libraries and all of us to think of the kind of things we need. >> my name is alex from evergreen state college, and my question is it seems to me that

the criticisms of the academics and the librarians about the way that google books is put together in the metadata is organized are probably very accurate, but it doesn't sound that there's any incentive for google to respond to any of their suggestions, however accurate they may be. i'm guessing that it may be because google owns and operates the means of physical storage for all of the electronic information. i don't know if that's entirely accurate but i suspect at some point it will be. why did you guys team up? why don't you -- why don't my present academic institutions help share the cost in physical storage of google books, and then that way you can have more of an advantageous position for getting the information stored correctly? >> we want to work together. we have some extra to you that we're bringing to the table, and sort of like the computer scientist and bringing our algorithms. those have been if it. especially when you're dealing with millions and millions of books. if there's a problem in the

metadata for this book, is easy to fix this one book, but in our general frame of mind is to not just fix the one problem, but trying to figure out how is the algorithm broken or how can we fix this when we fix the algorithm we're not fixing it for this one book but for all of them. obviously the historians and librarians and different people in this community, they have their own expertise. we do want to work together with the different groups. >> i feel like i'm talking too much here, but from a library perspective again, i don't think google is the only one store this. michigan was doing all the books they scanned in our own databases. so really, for us, which is as librarians, an issue that is incredibly important is preservation of this material which is not as important an issue for google. so it's really important that these things be stored in databases, other than google. and i think librarians certainly see that as an important issue and have been dealing with it and are doing with it. and are storing data and lots of

multiple places. >> i'm a graduate student from the university of oregon that i would like to follow up about google books being a really extraordinary democratizing influence for students like myself who are not at harvard, michigan, or standard but now have access to all those libraries. hold onto second. my phone is talking to me. one of the concerns i do have, you kind other too early when you were discussing why it is that google books is important to google, and one of the things you hide it was the fact that your founders, this is something very critical to part of their mission. my concern of course is that founders think of golf, they think of granted that if anyone has been following apple, they get sick. that is my concern is that at

some point what is potentially going to be the most extraordinary digital archives in existence is going to potentially be able to be turned off when the suits they control. and the suits always end up taking control. [laughter] >> i think you can look at -- that's true. as a shareholder of google, iso point probably want suits to take control. as a graduate student of university of oregon, it is critical at this stage of portal for people like me, to be able to continue to research and access this data. that's probably an unfair question because it's not something you can answer, what it does seem to highlight the point that there has to be a way for this information if something does happen with google, that it has to be stored in different places here because if google turns it off, then it's done. i currently have 1600 lines of medical journals from the 19th century in my library. and if google decides one day, well, due to the current laws right now, this is not worth the

hassle and they switch it off. i have lost all that data. >> that's a good question. obviously, you know, hopefully the founders don't let on to play together at any one moment, right? they're not allowed to. in case there is an accident. the solution, they have done a good job of pushing out the culture throughout the whole company. it's a part of basically everyone there. i think that even if the founders did go away and some evil businessman came and took control, i think we would kick them out pretty quickly. [laughter] >> there's enough control, it really is a bottom -- the power is distributed at google. there's really no like master-planned from top 10. it's spread out to the core engineers who aren't making a lot of these decisions. i think -- you've all heard don't be evil and sounds kind of silly, but people do take its earthly. is a country that is built on trying to be different than your typical stereotypical thought of

what you might have thought of microsoft or somebody's other companies as well. but, you know, could google stock tank and go away? what would happen to these books? i think it's about question and that's why it's important for these libert, they store these books as well. with which i got a book from the library, we get a scan back to the library. they archive that. that's why it's important other people do this as well. when we check out a book out a book from the michigan library, it's like you to check out a book that we check it out, scan it and get it back. it's important that other people, when we do that we don't damage that the biggest import other people do that as well. we don't want to be the only ones with the digital version. >> and also to say, libraries have already thought about this issue, not so much -- i mean, we all wish the best for google obviously, and it feels somewhat ironic since i'm wearing a suit. but paul mentioned the haughey

trust, but when it was founded to do is bring all of the whatever it is now, the google libraries that were having their books digitized together, and try to get a tray a way to preserve this content so that if heaven forbid, google went bankrupt and goes away, then at least there is someone that has all this content together and is working hard to preserve it in some kind of managed way. liber's have thought about this issue and are working on this issue. >> i just want to pay a compliment to google, and not google books which i know nothing about. google earth is an absolutely magnificent product. >> think you. >> and it gets its appeal not from the amount of data, but rather by how easy it is to move the amount. and you just feel like you have

the whole world in your hand. is there in google books -- without revealing your secret -- where are you going with novel ways of moving about all this huge amount of information, decide to just keyword search, which i imagine is where you're beginning? >> i'm in charge of the website. i'm almost embarrassed by our website sometimes. step one has been sort getting all the content and getting these millions of books. i think the next phase is, you have all these books, how do you make it easier to find information in these books? it's -- like the music world, if you have access to all the world music, the problem is what you want to listen to right now? sort of the paradigm of this paradox of choice. so i think we have that at google books right now. if you go to the homepage, you know that of books there but you almost don't know where to begin. i think that's something we need to start to address. some of the interesting trends,

i think social is going to be an interesting way to discover content. so for example, that's how we discovered what you read often and the physical world, right? like your friend starting a book and recommend it to you. or someone reads a book and you want to read it so you can discuss it together that i think it will be exciting as we start to connect users on google books. on gmail you have your contacts and your friends, if we can start having people with their reading lists and things like that, you know, the big thing with facebook and some of these other social apps, what they call activity stream. what that is is basically pushing updates to your. when you check your facebook activities can, here is a picture of your friend at the zoo and it is pushed to you. or jane updated her status update. i think an interesting way to buy books issues are getting updates like bob finished this book or jane started to review this book. you start to find books that what is one interesting trend. button also giving people the

tools to create their own collections. so you know, if you're interested in golf, someone creates their top 10 books for golf, and that unity basically to vote on and filter those collections as well. a lot of sites do this pretty well, and then when you search on a topic you can start to service those as well. i agree with you, it is a problem. the problem now is you have so many books, how can we do a better job of helping you search the right job for them. >> and we still have time for a few more questions if anyone has one. >> the other interesting turn, is mobile. i'm really excited about these smart phones and tablets and ink devices. i've got a kindle and sony e-book reader and i think they're great. there is sort of an attachment to physical books, you know, i can't read my kindle in the bathtub, right? or places like it that you could drop it in.

it's really convenient. it's like the ability to get a book within 60 seconds you can do it wirelessly. i think it's good for me to. i think it's good for authors that i think he will make it easier for readers to find books and get quickly. i think they will end up selling more books. i think these devices also can encourage more reading. if you think about it, as these devices get cheaper, they are about $200 now, but you can get them for free on a replay that i think in two years, a lot of people will have smartphones in the pocket that have a large enough screen you can start to read on and have a data plan. so there's just a lot of opportunity for people to do more reading. maybe it's in that 10 minutes they have on the train or in between moments in the day when they might not have otherwise been lugging around a physical book. with these interactive screens, we mentioned earlier, the exciting things you can do with starting to do sort of multimedia with the book and connecting books together. doing notes and that kind of

stuff is also very exciting. >> one of the things that's been interesting listing to your folks, i'm from central florida, one of the things that's interesting about listening to you is that it's almost as if there is a conversation not happening. i mean, given that we spend a lot of our time walking into a room full of vibrant young people to immediately begin falling asleep, i know that the way we talk doesn't always hit with the way the rest of the world thinks. at the same time, you walk into the room when you held a durable, i can hear people's eyes rolling. like you read that? like, footnotes. [laughter] >> and so what i'm wondering, do you folks at google hired people to be the people who interact between your power users and the folks like you who are actually designed the think? >> that's a good question that just for product design in general, the risk is you end up

creating a product for yourself and not for your actual end-users. our demographics at google are excused in a certain way. the risk is are we building a google books product for geeky engineers but we definitely don't want to do that. what's the solution to the? we have, you know, more to mitigation and talking with the actual historians and researchers. >> i'm a guy doing a grant program doing digital media. >> that's a good solution. we do have a usability team that we work with. so we will put an ad in craigslist and we will have a speed i would recommend h. annette. >> and i have a job. i'm not looking out for the grad

student. >> what i'm saying is it seems like you say, a usability team in which there are are a lot of people, like you are thinking about it and you're talking to us and saying, we can encourage more reading, the book is a single text we want people to read that these guys are thinking like each book is useful for its you folks and i want thousands of empty make broad arguments that make our students eyes roll. >> that's an interesting point to. i think it's easy to think about as a very singular thing. a book like twilight which is like fiction, it's very different and the ui is very different than a really dense academic book where you're doing different things like search into and try to connect quotes and thoughts together versus just passive reading. it affects the design. for example, a device like a kindle that it works really well for fiction, but it doesn't work very well for scholarly work i was a. just the nature of the device.

we are definitely thinking through those issues and we have to come up with better solutions. >> thanks. i just want to say that we have two more questions and we are running a little short on time. so please, both to our questioners and to our speakers. >> i am a library and actually, -- >> and we will leave the last few minutes of this to go live now to the u.s. senate, where members are about to officially begin the second session of the 111th congress. senators will start today with an hour of general speeches before turning to consider a judicial nomination for the 11th circuit court of appeals. the senate plans to recess in the noon hour from 12:30 to 2:15 for weekly party lunches. and then, senators return to consider a bill that raises the federal debt limit. and health care is still very much on the minds of members as democratic leaders continue to work out details of a final bill

with the house. live now to the floor of the u.s. senate here on c-span2. the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the chaplain dr. barry black will lead the senate in prayer.

the chaplain: let us pray. almighty god, our heavenly father, thank you for the gift of a new year. we have received great benefits from your hands and lift to you our grateful praise. lord, lead our lawmakers on the road you have chosen. guide them with your c and teach them with your precepts. give them the spirit they ought to have, that they may do what they ought to do. lord, this is the day you have made, we will rejoice and be

glad in you, for your joy is our strength. we pray in your great name. amen. the presiding officer: please join me in reciting the pledge of allegiance to the flag. i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. the presiding officer: the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington, d.c, january 20, 2010. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable tom udall, a senator from the state of new mexico, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: robert c. byrd, presidet pro tempore.

mr. reid: mr. president? the presiding officer: the majority leader is recognized. mr. reid: following leader remarks, the senate will proceed to a period of morning business for one hour with senators allowed to speak for up to ten minutes each. the time will be equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees. following that morning business, the senate will proceed to executive session to consider the nomination of beverly baldwin martin of georgia to be a united states circuit judge for the 11th circuit. debate on the nomination is limited to one hour, equally divided and controlled between senators leahy and sessions or their designees. upon the use or yielding back of the time, the senate will proceed to vote on confirmation of that nomination. the senate will recess from 12:30 until 2:15 p.m. to allow for weekly caucus meetings. we expect to h.r. s. j. res. 45, a joint resolution increasing the statutory limit on the public debt under previous agreement later today. mr. president, it's my

understanding there are two bills at the desk due for the presiding officer: the senator is correct. the clerk will read the title of the bills for the second time. the clerk: h.r. 3961, an act to amend title 18 of the social security act to reform the medicare s.g.r. payment system for physicians and for other purposes. h.r. 4154, an act to amend the internal revenue code of 1986 to repeal the new carrier overbasis rules in order to prevent tax increases, and so forth and for other purposes. mr. reid: mr. president, i would object to further proceedings in respect to these two bills. the presiding officer: objection having been heard, the bills will be placed on the calendar. mr. reid: mr. president, visiting with nevadans as i have done during these past several weeks, it's impossible not to be motivated to get back to the business of legislating. it's impossible to ignore their grief over growing foreclosures, the uncertainty of unemployment, and the frustration of fighting

insurance companies for your family's health, and it's just as evident that the people of nevada and the nation need us to work toward sensible solutions rather than drown once again in the partisan bickering that consumed much of last year. some elections go your way. some elections go the other way. it's the nature of democratic politics in a very diverse nation. but regardless of the outcomes of an election, as i've said many times, the american people demand that we work together as partners, not partisans, to improve their individual lives. that's true after republican victories as it is after democratic victories. the first half of the 111th congress, even with the minority's minimal help, we made significant progress. while last year's final few months were dominated by a debate over health insurance reforms that will save lives, save money, and save medicare, that historic step was only one of many accomplishments we were proud to have passed last year. we begin this congress determined to strengthen and

stabilize the economy. i should say we began this congress determined to strengthen and stabilize the economy for working families. that's why we immediately cut taxes for middle class and small businesses. that's why we immediately started the lily ledbetter legislation, the more equalized pay for women in america. that's why we started the process of creating good-paying jobs here at home and investing in our future. just last week, the white house's council of economic advisors found that as many as two million americans have the stimulus to thank for their jobs, as does our growing gross domestic product. but there is more to do, and that's for sure. we protected consumers by cracking down on abusive credit card companies, and we have been trying to do that, mr. president, for a long, long time, but last year we were able to get it done. finally to get under control the abuses that credit card companies have been doing to the american people for so long. we cracked down on mortgage

fraud schemes, the scams that take place when times are tough, that we changed the law. we rooted out corporate fraud. but there's more to do. we started to thaw our frozen credit markets so americans can get the loans they need to buy a car and send a child to college or start a new business. but there is more to do. we're helping responsible homeowners keep their homes, help more homeowners keep the equity in those homes, and help more families buy their first home with the tremendous direction that we got, there are a lot of people that can claim the idea for the first-time home buyer tax credit, but the idea came, as far as i know, from johnny isakson from georgia, and it was a tremendously important program that's still going on. we extended it. even though we have done that, mr. president, there's more to do. we helped millions of children stay healthy by expanding chip. we extended by some 14 million children, children that can go

to the doctor when they are sick or the hospital when they are hurt. we made it easier by far for these kids to get the help of their -- and their parents to be relieved of a little of the mental torment they have by not being able to take their kids to the doctor or hospital when they are hurt. and, mr. president, we also made it harder for tobacco companies to prey on these children. we learned and we have known for some time that the tobacco habit starts when -- most of the time when you're a teenager, and with this legislation we have been trying to pass for decades, we finally with able to get it done, to focus on the tobacco companies and why there has to be some criminal placed on them. even though we have done that, there is more to do. we have expanded unemployment insurance, we extended it also for millions of extended cobra subsidies so those still struggling to find work can feed our families, fuel our economy and afford decent medical care.

but there's more to do. we supported the travel and tourism industries which will create tens of thousands of jobs, cut our deficit by hundreds of millions of dollars, but even after having done that, there is more to do. we helped hundreds of thousands of drivers afford more fuel-efficient cars and trucks. mr. president, it was such a good idea, the cash for clunkers, that now i heard on the news this morning, japan is going to do it and it's going to be -- that's going to be a boon for american car manufacturers because japan has said that those japanese people who decide to use the cash for clunkers can buy american cars. but, mr. president, even though we have done that, there is more to do. with the national service bill, named for senator kennedy, we made it easier for more americans to serve their country like the heroes of generations past. with one of our most important conservation bills in many decades, we protected our public lands for generations to come. but there's more to do. we have given our troops, veterans and their families the support they deserve, including

better battlefield equipment, better care for our wounded warriors, and a well-earned pay raise. we have also cut waste and fraud in the pentagon's purchase of military weapons. but there's more to do, mr. president. this congress also made history by pursuing justice and ensuring quality for every single american. with a hate crimes bill that bears emmett till's name, we stood for those who are victims of violence because of their race, ethnicity or sexual orientation. with a bill as i have indicated in lily ledbetter's name. we stood up for those who are targeted for discrimination in the workplace because of their gender. mr. president, we passed overdue appropriation bills, new appropriation bills and an honest, sound budget to make sound investment in every part of our country. and the court confirmed president obama's outstanding nominee for the supreme court,

sotomayor. we have a lot more to do. in the coming year, we can ensure all americans can afford health care, limit insurance companies' ability to deny health care to the sick, slash our deficit in the process. we'll help more americans keep their homes and their jobs and continue to help our economy not only recover but prosper once again. we'll continue to create new jobs, including good-paying, clean energy jobs that can never be outsourced. mr. president, you can see throughout the country that happening. a week ago yesterday -- monday, two days ago, i was in a place about 35 miles outside las vegas, the harry allen plant. it's going to be the most clean natural gas facility producing electricity anyplace in america. 700 men and women were working on that construction project. but that was only part of it. we were there because it was a background of a construction project, people walking and running, doing the jobs that they needed to do, trucks moving

back and forth. the reason we were there is because the western area power administration, wapa, under the stimulus bill we passed, had the ability to do low -- to do loans that were very, very low interest loans, and we had -- we were there to announce a public-private partnership between ellis power, n.v. energy, wapa. it will bring electricity from the northern part of the state to the southern part of the state for the first time in the history of the state of nevada. we became a state in 1864. why is that important? it will allow nevada to be energy independent in two and a half or three years, but just as important, mr. president, we also will be able to produce far more electricity than nevada needs because now with this power line that will create hundreds and hundreds of jobs, we'll also have a lot of --

renewable energy projects for that full 250-mile route. they will be able to do solar, wind, and geothermal and bring that on the power line. that's only the first phase. after that it's already been agreed by wapa they can do stage two which will bring electricity from the northwest into nevada and, of course, california and the whole southwest. so that's a -- that's a good project and an example of the good-paying clean energy jobs that can never be outsourced. we will tackle our daunting energy and climate challenges by doing so we'll strengthen our national security. we need to look no further than boone pickens who talks about this every day of his life, that the way we're going to have a more secure nation is lessen our dependence on foreign oil. use the resources we have among which are wind, sun, geothermal and now we're the largest holder of natural gas of any country in

the world, and that's what pickens is talking about. using our own energy, not continually importing oil. and as we do all these things, we'll continue to leave a seat at the table for our republican colleagues. their caucus come -- whether their caucus comprises 40 or 41 members, each composes this body of 100. our individual caucuses, one that will soon have 59, one that will soon have 41. that makes 100. we should all be united within the walls of this chamber, not defined by the aisle that divides its desks. today is the first anniversary of the first time barack obama addressed our nation as our president. one year ago today, standing on steps just a short distance from here, mr. president, he reflect thad our nation had chosen unity of purpose over conflict and discord. he asked us to put aside the differences and dogmas that paralyze our politics. we can answer that call this year, not just because president

obama requested it but because the american people justly demand it. by and large, those in the minority have so far shown far too little interest in working with us. more importantly, they have shown far too little interest in working in the interest of their constituents. mr. president, i called my office early this morning and asked my faithful assistant janice shelton to arrange a call for me to talk to the new soon to be senator from massachusetts, scott brown. i look forward to visiting with him. i look forward to welcoming him to the senate. and ask that he work with us. it's certainly a conversation i look forward to. so, mr. president, i hope that in this new year, we'll resolve to leave partisan political motivations behind and i hope that we'll share a renewed motivation to get to work, to legislate for the good of this country.

mr. mcconnell: mr. pdent? the presiding officer: the republican leader is recognized. mr. mcconnell: first, i want to welcome everyone back after what i hope was a restful time away from washington. it's good to be here. i can assure everyone that republicans are energized and eager to pick up where we left off. there's a lot to do and we're ready. the news of the day, of course, is that we'll soon be welcoming a new senator into our ranks. it's been a long time -- a very long time -- since the people of massachusetts sent a republican to the senate. so i'd like to congratulate senator-elect brown on his decisive victory last night. i had a chance to speak with him last night. i think it was a truly remarkable turnout and decision on the part of the people of that state.

now, there's a reason the anything was focused on this race. the american people have made it abundantly clear that they're more interested in shrinking unemployment than expanding government. they're tired of bailouts, they're tired of government spending more than ever at a time when most people are spending less. and they don't want the government taking over health care. they made that abundantly clear last night in the commonwealth of massachusetts. this is why americans are electing good republican candidates who they hope will reverse a yearlong democratic trend of spending too much, borrowing too much, and taxing too much. the voters have spoken. they want a course correction. we should listen to them. today we'll have a chance to show we've gotten the message when we take up legislation that will raise the national debt limit. the reason we're being asked to raise the limit on the national credit card is clear.

it's because the majority has spent the past year spending money we don't have on stimulus bills that don't stimulate the economy, on budgets that double the debt in five years and triple it in ten. we need to move in a new direction, a dramatically new direction. that's the message of virginia. that's the message of new jersey. and that's the message of massachusetts. mr. president, i yield the the presiding officer: under the previous order, the leadership time is reserved. under the previous order, there will be a period of morning business for one hour with the time equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees and with senators permitted to speak for up to ten minutes each. the senator from tennessee is recognized. mr. alexander: thank you, mr. president. mr. president, massachusetts voters yesterday sent a clear

message that the democratic majority in congress is not in touch with the american people and that we ought to restart the health care debate. senator-elect scott brown's independent voice will provide a much-needed check and balance to a congress that has become more dominated by more taxes, more spending, and more washington takeovers. nothing demonstrates that need more than the so-called health care reform bill, a 2,700-page attempt to remodel 17% of the american economy that was concocted in secret, presented to the senate over the weekend before christmas during the worst snowstorm in years, voted on in the middle of the night, and passed five days later on christmas eve without one single republican vote. now that the people have spoken in massachusetts, we should abandon these arrogant notions of trying to turn our entire health care system upside-down all at once and instead set a

clear goal of reducing health care costs and then work together step by step to reearn the trust of the american peop people, an approach that republican senators urged exactly 173 different times on the floor of the senate during last year. if you'll examine the "congressional record," mr. president, you'll find that republican senators have been proposing a step-by-step approach to confronting our nation's challenges 173 different times during 2009 on health care. we first suggested setting a clear goal -- reducing costs. then we proposed the first six steps toward achieving that go goal: one, allowing small businesses to pool their resources to purchase health plans. two, reducing junk lawsuits against doctors. three, allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines. four, expanding health savings accounts.

five, promoting wellness and prevention. and six, taking steps to reduce waste, fraud and abuse. we offered these six proposals in complete legislative text totaling 182 pages. the democratic majority rejected all six and ridiculed the approach in part because our approach wasn't comprehensive. a good place to restart the health care debate would be to abandon plans to send a huge bill to states -- that is, every state except nebraska -- to pay for medicaid expansion. mr. president, the 60 senators who voted for this so-called health care reform legislation ought to be sentenced to go home and serve as governor for two terms to try to pay for it, because what these senators would find is that states are broke and there will either be higher state taxes or higher college tuition or both to pay for what the democratic governor of tennessee has called the mother of all unfunded mandates.

that mandate arrogantly expands medicaid and to help pay for it, would send a three-year, $25 billion bill to governors, who, in turn, will send the bill to state taxpayers, and then to college students. that's like your big-spending uncle sam hiring someone to paint your house and then sending the bill to you, even though you've told uncle sam you've already spent all your available money sending your kid to college. of course, uncle sam doesn't have to balance his budget and you do. i speak today not just as a united states senator but as a former governor worried about states and as the former president of a great public university worried about our college students, many of whom are seeking an education to get a job. washington policies are turning our federal constitutional system upside-down. they're transforming autonomous state governments into bankrupt wards of the central government. in doing so, they're making it harder for states to support

public higher education. therefore, damaging its quality and damaging the opportunity for americans to afford it. governor schwartzenegger of california says -- quote -- "with a $19 billion deficit, the last thing we need is another $3 billion bill for medicaid." at the university of california, students are paying a 32% tuition increase. why? because, according to "the new york times" -- quote -- "the university of california now receives only half as much support from the state per student as it did in 1990." and why is that? because when governors make up their budgets, it usually comes down to a choice between exploding medicaid costs and higher education. and medicaid, hopelessly entangled with expensive washington policies and mandates, usually wins. this isn't a new problem. it was a problem when i was governor 30 years ago. it became a bigger problem between 2000 and 2006, when medicaid spending for state

governments rose 63% while spending for higher education went up only 17%. the association of american universities, president obama's budget director, both have warned us that the drop in state support is hurting the quality of american public higher education and the problem gets worse. the state share of medicaid spending will go from $138 billion in 2007 to $18 $181 billion in 2011. yet instead of fixing the problem of exploding medicaid costs and its impact on higher education, the health care bill would make it worse. over the christmas holidays in my state, the most talked-about part of the health care bill was the so-called cornhuskers kickback, which makes taxpayers and students all over america pay for nebraska's medicaid so nebraskans won't have to raise their taxes and tuition. i can guarantee you that any senator who's sentenced to go

home and serve as governor, except perhaps in nebraska, would not vote for this health care bill. the second recent big blow to states and to public higher education has been the stimulus package which was hailed as bailing states out but instead will soon be pushing them over the financial cliff. this is how the democratic lieutenant governor of new york explained it in a "wall street journal" article on january 8. he said, "states, instead of cutting spending in transportation, education, health care have been forced to keep most of their expenditures at previous levels and use federal funds only to supplement. the net result is this," says lieutenant governor avick. "the federal stimulus has led states to increase overall spending in these core areas which, in effect, has only raised the height of the cliff from which state spending will fall if stimulus funds evapora evaporate. on top of all that this is the dramatic deterioration of the autonomous role of the states in our federal system, thanks in

part to the stimulus, federally collected tax dollars have risen to 40% of state budgets. so instead of serving as autonomous laboratories of democracy in a federal system, states are becoming little more than heavily regulated and increasingly insolvent administrative divisions of the central government in washingt washington. now, some are suggesting a new stimulus to bail out the states. why should we even consider that when the last one is helping to push states off the financial cliff? and why should we pass a new health care bill that makes it worse for states, that is, every state except nebraska? wouldn't it be better to restart the health care debate and take a series of steps to reduce health care costs without the medicaid mandate? instead of expanding medicaid and sending the states the bill, why not reform medicaid, which has become an embarrassing administrative nightmare, where $30 billion a year goes to

waste, fraud and abuse, according to the government accountability office? instead of dumping 15 million to 18 million more americans into medicaid, in which 50% of doctors -- 50% of doctors -- won't take new patients, shouldn't we try a better idea? lieutenant governor ravich suggests that one place to start would be relieve states of the responsibility of those patients who draw services from both medicare and medicaid. that would save states about $70 billion a year and would place all the responsibility on washington for reforming the program so taxpayers could afford it. 30 years ago, when i was governor, i met with president reagan and proposed a grand swap that the federal government would take over all of medicaid in exchange for giving the states all of the responsibility for elementary and secondary education. president reagan liked the idea and i still think fixing the responsibility for both education and medicaid in a single government would make it work better and force its

reforms. mr. president, the number-one topic on the minds of most americans today is jobs. running up the cost of health care, raising state taxes, damaging the quarter of universities and community colleges, and restricting access to them is a good way to kill jobs, not create jobs. there still is time to restart the health care debate. to work together on a step-by-step plan to reduce health care costs while avoiding expensive mandates on states that increase state taxes and increase college tuitions. the surest way to cause this to happen is to tell these 60 senators who voted for this health care bill that if it becomes law, they'll be sentenced to go home and serve as governor for two terms to try to pay for it. mr. president, i ask unanimous consent to include in my remar remarks -- to include in the record following my remarks three newspaper articles. the presiding officer: without

objection, so ordered. the senator's time has expired. mr. mccain: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from arizona is recognized. mr. mccain: mr. president, i want to thank my friend and colleague from north dakota for allowing me to speak out of order, and i might add -- and i'll say this several times -- what a privilege it has been for me to serve with the senator from north dakota, a man who embodies the best in a prairie populist and one that i've had a great honor and privilege of working with for a long time. and as the hour grows near, i'll have more to say about my appreciation for the honor i've had of working with the senator from north dakota. but i come to the floor, mr. president, to congratulate my friend, scott brown, for a historic victory last night. scott brown is a man who has served his country in the national guard -- army national guard and reserve. he's a person who served his state in the state legislature.

he's a wonderful father and a wonderful public servant, and i congratulate him on his landmark victory. i believe it was lexington and concord which shot was fired around the world. last night a shot was fired around this nation. a shot was fired saying no more business as usual in washington, d.c. stop thi -- this unsavory sausage-making process called health care reform where special favors are dispensed to special people for special reasons in order to purchase votes. mr. president, the american people don't want this health care reform because they don't believe it attacks the fundamental problem with health care in america, and that is there's nothing wrong with the quality. it's the cost that needs to be brought under control. but there also is anger, i know from the town hall meetings in

my own state, that they are even as angered by the process, by the louisiana purchase, purchase, $300 million for louisiana, the florida medicare advantage grandfather clause by the senator from florida, florida, $5 billion, the cornhusker kickback, vermont, massachusetts, hawaii, michigan, connecticut. twice in connecticut. montana, south dakota, north dakota, wyoming. the list goes on of special deals that were carved for special reasons, and the latest, of course, is the incredible, incredible action concerning unions being exempt from taxes that nonunion members will now have to pay in greater numbers. how do you justify favoring one group of americans -- this is union members -- for any reason other than you owe them political favors? and they have political influence? and so the -- so the negotiating

went from the back rooms here to the back rooms in the white house. the same -- the same president that said that c-span in a completely transparent process would prevail here so the american people would know who is on the side of the pharmaceutical companies, who probably got the best sweetheart deal of anybody in this whole process. so, mr. president, i believe that the majority of the american people that said according to polling data, 48% of massachusetts voters said that health care was the single issue driving their vote, and 39% said they voted for brown specifically because of his vocal opposition to the measure. i congratulate scott brown. i congratulate our new colleague, not only for standing up for what's right but also articulating the frustration that the american people have about this process we have been

through. so, mr. president, here we are. now the rumors are that they will jam this proposal through the house of representatives and then bypass what has always been the normal legislative process. they should not do that. the american people have spoken. the people of massachusetts have spoken for the rest of america. stop this process. sit down. open and transparent negotiations. let's begin from the beginning. we can agree on certain -- on certain principles and certain measures that need to be taken like malpractice reform, like going across state lines so that people can have insurance of their choice and many other ways, including perhaps -- perhaps refundable tax credit for those who need health insurance, risk pools for those who have pre-existing conditions.

there are many of those things we could agree on. if for the first time in this administration and in this senate we sit down across the table from one another with honest and open negotiations and discussions. we know health care in america's costs are out of control, we know they need to be fixed, we want to be part of that process. so i urge, i urge the president of the united states, i urge my colleagues, now 59 of them, to say stop, start from the beginning, sit down and work for america. do what's been done in the past time after time after time, where we sit down and negotiate in good-faith efforts. so far, that has not happened, despite the promises that the president made during his campaign. so i urge my colleagues together to say we have got to stop this process, we have got to stop this unsavory sausage-making

chicago style that's been going on and we have to sit down in open and honest negotiations with the american people and fix the health care problem which we can do together, and that's what the american people want taos do. again, i thank -- want us to do. again, i thank my colleague from north dakota. i yield the floor. the presiding officer: the senator from north dakota is recognized. mr. dorgan: mr. president, there has been a lot happening in this country with respect to the economy and politics in recent months, and i know that there is great angst, great concern about this country. i know there are questions about when will america get the bounce back in its step. these are troublesome times, for sure, for a lot of reasons, but i am convinced that we will find ways to put america back on track. i'm convinced of that. you know, you go back a couple of hundred years of american history. this country has been through some very tough times, but always, always rebounds. always has a sense of optimism that the future will be better than the past, that kids will

have it better than the parents. and i am convinced of that. the american people i think have plenty to be steamed about, and they need to find ways too let off -- to let off that steam but they have a right to be steamed, and let me describe a bit of it. one year ago, this president took office, and he inherited an economic wreck. i mean, that's just a fact. the question at that moment was will this economy completely collapse? that wreck was caused by a lot of things, but deciding to go to war and not pay for a penny of it for year after year after year. everybody knows better than that, you can't do that. hiring regulators that were boasting that they weren't willing to regulate, to say to the big shots on wall street, the speculators, the big investment bankers and others do whatever you want, we won't watch. the sky's the limit. we don't care. and now we see the carnage that results from that.

derivatives, instruments that derive values from something else. c.d.o.'s, mortgage-backed securities, synthetic derivatives. do you know what a synthetic derivative is? that's something that doesn't have any value of any kind. it's just a wager. you might as well put a craps table in the middle of an investment bank lobby and say to them you don't have to go to las vegas. just gamble here. by the way, while you're at it, you can gamble with other people's money, not your own. but even investment banks and fdic-insured banks have been gambling on their own proprietary accounts and derivatives. we ought to know better than that. so what happens is the regulators give a green light to that kind of rancid behavior, and it steers this country into an unbelievable bubble of speculation, and the center pole from the tent collapses and the

economy nearly collapses, and a whole lot of the american people are paying for it. the fact is these folks fleeced america. it is the great bank robbery in american history. now, it's interesting to me that when i talk about big investment banks and some others, the community banks out there weren't involved in this. you go to most of your hometown banks and take a look at how they're doing, they're doing just fine because they weren't involved in this short of shenanigan. it was the biggest financial firms in this country that steered this country into the ditch. and it started, yes, with mortgage brokers and mortgage banks and investment banks and hedge funds and derivatives traders. all of them steered this country into the ditch. and by the way, now they're driving the getaway car, going to the bank to deposit their big bonuses. you know, they got big bonuses even while their firm lost a lot of money. now all of a sudden those firms that would have collapsed were it not for the help of the

american people are now earning record profits and set to pay the biggest bonuses in history in the next few weeks. that is unbelievable to me, and in my judgment shouldn't be allowed. well, in my judgment, we have got to do something about this, and one of the pieces of the agenda that's in front of us is to reform this system of finance and try to wring out the unbelievable orgy of speculation in this system that puts the american economy and the american people at risk. so one of the pieces of this agenda at this point is called financial reform legislation. now, i'm -- as i said, i am convinced that while this ship of state has a lot of leaks, i'm convinced that -- that we can fix it and set it right are and set it back on course, but it's not going to be done by

revisionist history in the past by some, by those who put their hands over their eyes and plug their ears and decide, you know, we're not interested in learning the lessons of the past. this president inherited a wreck. he may not have done everything right, he may not have done every single thing right in the last year, but i will tell you this, he took action to try to put a foundation under this economy to prevent its collapse, and i think he deserves some credit for that. had he done nothing walking into the white house door, the federal budget deficit for this year was going to be be $1.3 trillion. that's what this president was left with from the previous administrations. so, as i said, we have got a lot of work to do and it's going to require the cooperation of people in this chamber. there has not been much cooperation recently. this chamber has been pretty divided. you know, i -- i have i guess dozens of times quoted mark twain when he was asked once by someone if he would be engaged

in a debate, and he immediately said yes, and they said we have not even told you the -- he said yes if i can take the negative side, and they said well, we have not even told you the subject. he said that doesn't matter, the subject doesn't matter, the negative side will take no preparation for me. and so it is here in this chamber. the negative side saying no to every single initiative, even those initiatives that i believe saved this economy from collapse. but we need better than that. we need to work together and find ways in a bipartisan way to cooperate for this country's benefit. so what are the issues? well, i just mentioned financial reform. we have got to fix this system of ours. the fact is the same firms that steered this country into the ditch, the same people, the same interests are doing exactly what they did before, trading on their own proprietary accounts, taking on massive amounts of risk, and we've got to decide, you know what? we should separate investment banking from fdic-insured

banking. we have got to decide if you're too big to fail, you're just flat out too big. we've got to decide those things on a financial reform bill that comes to the floor of the senate. well, the american people are concerned about a lot of things. first and foremost, jobs. there is no social program in this country that is as important as a job that pays well, in my judgment. a good job that pays well makes everything else possible for families. so we need to focus like a laser on trying to create jobs once again in this country, put people back on payrolls. do you want to do something for the economic health of both families and america? good jobs, good jobs that pay well with some security and some benefits. there is no better tonic than that. and it's also the case that we need to focus like a laser on this issue of debt and deficits because the fact is we were left with an economy that is not sustainable with respect to the current deficits. it just isn't. you can't fight wars without paying for it. you just can't do that. you can't enact programs without

paying for them. and when you fall into a very deep recession and your revenues dry up and you have $400 billion a year less in revenue and because of unemployment and many other stabilizing programs you have $400 billion more in outlays to try to help people who have been laid off and who are in trouble, you run into giant federal budget deficits, but we have to fix them and we have to do that together because this course is not sustainable. there is one other issue that i want to talk about just for a moment because i hope early on in this year we do something else that is important to the american economic strength, and that is pass an energy bill that moves in the direction of giving us the freedom, the freedom in this economy from foreign oil. now, let me just describe why this is important in the context of trying to also fix what's wrong in this economy. we are a nation that uses an -- a substantial amount of oil. we stick little straws in this

planet every day and suck out oil. we suck about 85 million barrels of oil a day from this planet called earth. of the 85 million or 84 million barrels of oil a day, 1/4 of it is used in this little place on the planet called the united states of america. we need 1/4 of all the oil that's produced every day just to keep america going. and a substantial amount of it is produced in areas of the world that don't like us very much, areas of the world that are very troubled. so we have great vulnerability with respect to our energy. the fact is energy powers this country's economy. we don't think about it. we get up every single day and we flick a switch, we plug in -- something into a wall socket, we turn a key in an ignition. in dozens of ways beginning when we first step out of bed and turn on the light, we use energy and we use a lot of it. so the question is what can give this country some energy security? being 70% dependent on foreign

oil? certainly not. and by the way, in addition to getting nearly 70% of our oil from other countries, nearly 70% of the oil is used in our transportation fleet. so what do we do about all that? well, the fact is we passed an energy bill out of the energy committee, now about nine, ten months ago here in the united states senate, and that energy bill, in my judgment, has a lot to commend it, and i believe that early on in this congress, the president and the senate ought to decide we're going to take up this bill. it is bipartisan, pass this legislation and give america another step in the direction of being less dependent on foreign oil. it is also about jobs. you create a lot of jobs by new production and conservation systems and so on. but let me describe what is in this legislation. the legislation deals with increasing production, the

increased production of energy here at home, increased conservation, increased efficiency, and maximizing the production of renewable energy where the wind blows and the sun shines. the first ever establishment of renewable electricity standard, driving a certain percentage of our electricity to come from renewable energy. all of that is in this legislation, and it's already been passed by the senate energy committee and it was passed on a bipartisan vote. now, let me start just for a moment with some good news. mr. president, could i be notified at the end of 15 minutes please in my presentation. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. dorgan: let me start with some good news because we almost never hear good news these days. all the news in america is about what went wrong, you know? the old saw about bad news travels halfway around the world before good news gets its shoes on. almost nobody has any interest in saying let's broadcast good news all day. the good news is with respect to oil, last year for the first year in a long, long, long time,

america actually increased its production of oil. we've been on this declining path. no more. last year we increased the production of oil. part of that comes from a formation in my part of the country called the bakken shale. it is unbelievably complicated what we have done but our country has learned -- and we are leaders in this technology -- to go sploi and get oil from formations that five, eight, ten years ago you couldn't get oil from. there's up to 4.3 billion barrels of oil in something called the bakken formation. 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil using today's technology. they go down two miles with the drilling rig, drill down two miles, do a big curve and then drill out two miles. with one rig, they're going down two miles, a big curve and out two miles then they hydrofracket and the oil drops, they're getting up to 2,000-barrel-a-day wells. and that's just one part of the substantial additional production that is available in this country and it is producing now in a very significant way in

montana and north dakota in something called the bakken shale. i also have in the past in this energy bill introduced the amendment that was passed on a bipartisan vote that opens the eastern gulf of mexico, where there's, we believe, 3.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil using today's technology. and 21 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the eastern gulf of mexico, including the dustin dome. so there's a lot to be achieved by additional production, and we should do that. there's no question we should do that. and the legislation that has been passed on a bipartisan vote with my apt to open up the additional production -- my amendment to open up the additional production would allow that to happen. well, that's one piece of the legislation but there is much, much more. we understand that our most abundant resource is coal but we need to have a lower carbon future as we use fossil energy, so the research and the science that is really exciting to be able to continue to use coal and

capture and sequester or capture and provide beneficial use of co2 is something that we're working on very hard and we advance it in this legislation. if you're going to maximize the production of energy where the wind blows and the sun shines, then through solar energy and wind energy, you need to develop an interstate highway of transmission capability. we don't have that. we have an interstate highway system to drive on but we don't have an interstate highway system to movie electrons on and to produce energy where you can produce it where the wind blows and the sun shines and move it to the load centers. that doesn't exist at the moment. last -- in the last nine years, we built about 11,000 miles of natural gas pipeline to move natural gas around the country. during this same period, we only built 660 miles of high-voltage transmission lines between states. we need to fix that. if you're going to maximize the production of energy, where the

wind is blowing and the sun is shining -- and we should -- then you need to have an interstate highway of transmission capability to move that where the sun shines to the load centers on where the wind blows to the load centers. and that also is in this legislation. we have a renewable energy standard for the first time in history in this legislation that will actually drive the production of renewable energy because it has to have a significant portion of renewable energy in the energy that is sold. 15% in the bill. i think the votes exist on the floor of the senate to get to a 20% r.e.s. all of that i think is very important and -- and the other thing that we do is we move towards an electric drive vehicle system with battery technology investment and all of the related issues that attach to that. i mean, that's going to be part of our future. and beyond the electric drive future i think is hydrogen and fuel cells. so there's -- there's so much to be excited about. we do need to get that legislation to the floor of the senate. now, let me describe it just briefly by saying this.

there are some who say, look, the issue is climate change and we've got to bring a cap-and-trade climate change bill to the floor of the senate. here's my view. to address climate change and have a lower carbon future means that you have to put in place policies that actually reduce carbon. how do you do that? with the very things i've described in this piece of legislation that is now out of the senate energy committee and ready to come to the floor of the senate. it is to the specific policies that will reduce carbon that will actually allow us to make progress in addressing climate change issues. so i know there's a lot of discussion and a lot of controversy around cap-and-tra cap-and-trade. my own view on cap-and-trade is i don't have the foggiest interest in providing a trillion-dollar carbon trading market to wall street to decid decide -- for speculators and traders to decide on monday and tuesday what our energy is going to cost on thursday and friday. i'm just not interested in that given the history of what's happened on wall street and the economic wreck they caused in -- without any regulation, by the

way, in recent years. but having said that, still we need a lower carbon future i agree with that -- and the way to do that is to pass smart energy policy. we have a bipartisan bill that addresses all of these issues: additional production, additional conservation, more efficiency, maximizing renewables, the first-ever renewable energy standard. all of these issues -- the presiding officer: the senator has used 15 minutes. mr. dorgan: all of these issues will strengthen our country and i hope very much that one of the priorities in the coming months will be to pass that energy gislation and advance our country's interests. mr. president, i yield the floor. mr. durbin: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from illinois is recognized. mr. durbin: mr. president, before i address some of the issues before us, let me say a word about my friend and colleague from north dakota, who during this recess announced that he's going to retire at the end of this year. senator dorgan and i have served together both in the house and in the senate. he has been such a powerful force and a powerful voice in the senate democratic caucus on so many important issues that we share values on, and i'm not

going to bid farewell because i know that this next -- year will be a busy year for you representing your state and being engaged. and your talk just this moment on the floor about issues of concern are clear evidence that you're going to be fighting for your causes and your people in this upcoming year. but i do have to express my regret that you're leaving us and thank you for your many years of fine service to the people of your state and to the house and to the senate, and i look forward to making this a great year, a great send-off year for your contribution. mr. dorgan: mr. president, if the senator from illinois would yield, let me -- i have refrained always from using the word "retire" because i can't sit around very -- very much and so i don't -- i don't ever intend to quit working but i am not seeking reelection, the senator is correct about that. and it is -- this is a great institution, a great privilege to serve here, and i look forward to a lot of work this year with my colleague from illinois, and i hope together we can frame the policies that will

help put america back on track to a better future. thank you very much. mr. durbin: thank you, senator dorgan. what did we learn yesterday in massachusetts? i guess many things about the feeling of the american people. and when you -- when you go and take a look at the polls, it's interesting, because it isn't as if it's a very partisan feeling among most americans. they're not happy with either political party, when it comes right down to it, and have given a third-party choice, a lot o of -- and if given a third-party choice, a lot of folks tend to move in that direction. it reflects i think a number of feelings. first, that we have a weak economy and a lot of people unemployed and a lot of uncertainty. i think that's created anxiety if not anger. i think it's also an issue about whether or not this congress and this administration can respond to the issues that really count, that matter in people's lives and do it in a timely fashion. there's a frustration that many of the things we take up seem to take forever, and most of them take forever right here in this

room because the senate was designed to slow things down and sometimes bring them to a halt. that has even added to the frustration and maybe the anger across america. people are -- when you ask them in polls about the situation here in washington, they say two things that are not necessarily consistent. they say, one, i'm concerned about the debt of this nation, how much more debt can we pile up on future generations and how much more can we mortgage our future to foreign lenders like china that will buy up our debt and buy a bigger piece of control of our economy. legitimate point. but the second thing they'll say is, listen, i hope that congress and the president will do something to help create jobs to get this country moving forward, which, of course, would involve the expenditure of federal fun funds. so they don't always give consistent answers but it's easy to look behind the results in massachusetts and in other states and see that the american people are upset and concerned

about the current situation. and what will we take from this? well, there will be a realignment in the senate in terms of going forward. there will be 59 democratic senators and 41 republican senators after the new senator from massachusetts, mr. brown, is sworn in to this body. but still, we will face the issues that people want us to deal with. when i went home to illinois, i didn't shy away from health ca care. i took it on the road and went to the south suburban chamber of commerce in cook county. that's right near the city of chicago. yesterday i went to the chicago chamber of commerce and invited in small businesses to talk about health care. what i heard from them i've heard in letters and e-mails and messages from all over the state and that is that people are genuinely concerned. they may feel at least some satisfaction with their current health insurance but they're worried about the future. when small businesses stand up, as they did yesterday, and say

our premiums went up 17%, 20% each year and it's unsustainab unsustainable, that is a reali reality. and if we play to a draw here and do nothing, it's understandable that people will be even more frustrated and angry. i understand the shortcomings of our effort to reform health ca care. i'm humble enough to realize that even our best work may not be perfect and needs to be -- may need to be changed in the future. but it isn't enough to just stop the debate and ignore the problem, and i would engage and invite my colleagues from the other side of the aisle, if they truly want to govern, if they truly want to work with us, please step forward, show us that you're willing to sit down and work together. we are and we've tried and we'll continue to. we should. and it isn't just a matter of health care. it also goes to the question of creating jobs. we have an opportunity now to

breathe life back into this economy, to get more people back to work. like one of my friends, a congressman from illinois, phil harris, said recently, he said, i get personally ill when i hear the term "jobless recovery." i share his angst and nausea, if that's what it is, over that term. there will be no jobless recovery until peopl. until people get back to work, we are still in recovery and haven't reached our goal yet, which is to end this recession well, with a strong economy and people back to work. well, how we reach that goal, we need to do something this year and we need to do it quickly so that we don't miss the construction season, so that we can create new opportunities for jobs and -- in building bridges and highways and airports and water projects all across america. investment in our infrastructure that pays off over the long run and creates jobs immediately. that's something we need to do. it will take money to do it, and

fortunately there is a source. president bush had his troubled asset relief program, the tarp program, and took hundreds of billions of dollars and loaned them to financial institutions and companies to get through the worst of the recession. many of those companies are paying us back, some with interest, and we want to take the money that's being paid back there and invest it back into this economy to get it moving forward. this sounds to me like something that democrats and republicans should agree on. i think we both share the goal of getting out of this recession and moving forward, but we need a cooperative effort, a bipartisan effort for that to be achieved. and so i hope that we can find it. i hope we can reach common ground there. i believe that most of the senators from most of the states represented here have heard from their governors. my state is struggling. others are as well. there will be layoffs of key personnel, firefighters and police is men and teachers --

policemen and teachers, for example. we should find a way to help those states to get through this tough patch that they've run into because of a recession and a downturn in revenues. we don't want to see our children suffer because teachers are laid off and there are more kids in the classroom. we certainly don't want to endanger our communities by laying off firefighters or policemen if that means that our safety is compromised and our homes and neighborhoods. so there ought to be some common ground we can find here with both sides of the aisle. at the same time, there is a meaningful discussion under way with senators conrad and gregg, democrat and republican, about long-term deficit reduction. in the midst of a recession, it's hard to, i think personally it's hard to argue that we won't be adding to the national debt as we try to bring ourselves out of that recession, but we clearly need to have a plan, a direction, and a long-term goal of reducing our deficit. we can reach that goal and i

think we should, and we need to do this on a bipartisan basis, and i hope that in the days ahead when the president gives the state of the union address, he will speak to this and he will try to help us in reaching that common goal. so whatever the result in massachusetts, it will, of course, make the news today. it will diminish in importance as other stories replace it, but at the end of the day, we still have responsibility. we still need to deal with the rising cost of health care. we need to deal with the fact that 50 million americans don't have health insurance. we need to confront the health insurance companies who are turning down people when they need help the most through their health insurance plans. we certainly need to address the job situation, making sure that our government is funding and inspiring new job growth across our country, and we need to deal with our long-term deficit with a plan that starts to bring us out of our national debt or at least reduce our national debt.

that to me represents at least three immediate and attainable goals that should be done on a bipartisan basis, whether we have 60 votes or 59 votes, those issues still challenge us. so the lesson for massachusetts is the american people are expecting responsible results in washington. we have to deliver them. we can deliver it. but to do it, we need a bipartisan approach. we need both republicans and democrats to work together toward these goals. mr. president, i yield the floor and i suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from georgia. a senator: what is the current status of t senate? the presiding officer: the senate is in a quorum call.

mr. chambliss: i ask it be dispensed with. is the senate still in morning business? the presiding officer: it is. mr. chambliss: i ask that all time be yielded back and we move to the nomination of beverly martin. the presiding officer: without objection, it is so ordered. morning business is closed. under the previous order, the senate will proceed to executive session to consider the following nomination which the clerk will report. the clerk: nomination, the judiciary, beverly baldwin martin of georgia to be united states circuit judge for the 11th circuit. the presiding officer: under a previous order, there will be 60 minutes of debate equally divided and controlled between the senators from vermont, mr. leahy, and the senator from alabama, mr. sessions. mr. chambliss: mr. president, i would ask consent to speak under the time allotted to senator sessions and that i be followed by my colleague senator isakson. the presiding officer: without objection, it is so ordered. mr. chambliss: thank you, mr. president. i rise today to speak on behalf of a good friend, a very fine jurist, beverly martin, who has been nominated by president

obama to the 11th united states circuit court of appeals. i have had the good fortune of knowing judge martin who was a native of may con, georgia, for many years and can think of no one with more integrity, professional competence, and appropriate judicial bearing to sit on the nation's second highest bench. judge martin is a fourth generation lawyer. her great grandfather, her father, and her grandfather were all lawyers in macon, georgia. they started the law firm in macon which is where judge martin also began the practice of law after graduating from the university of georgia school of law in 1981. and i talked to my good friend cubbie snow jr. who was one of the senior partners in the firm at that point in time, and i said tell me about beverly. what did you do with her when she came fresh out of law school to be the fourth generation in that law firm? he said saxby, she started just like everybody else. we put her collecting accounts,

which is one thing lawyers have to do when they start out is that sort of menial type work. and he said i remember one day walking by her office and she is obviously on the phone with somebody trying to collect an open account and she finally screamed at whoever it was on the other end, said if you don't pay this bill, i'm going to lose my job. so beverly martin started at the bottom of the ladder from the practice of law. she has worked herself up to the point now of being one of the finest district court judges that we have in our state. my good friend jerry harold who is also a member of that firm says the thing that he remembered best about now judge martin when she was practicing law is that she -- she is very bright, but she approached everything from a true commonsense standpoint, and that she was a very level-headed individual. judge martin was drawn from private practice to atlanta to

go to work in the attorney general's office by then-attorney general mike bauers. she was there for a ten-year period. in 1997, she was appointed u.s. attorney for the middle district of georgia after serving for a couple of years as an assistant u.s. attorney. during her tenure as a u.s. attorney for the middle district of georgia in macon, judge martin was known as a tough prosecutor. she handled cases herself in a way that was not just very professional but in a very meaningful way, and at the same time she was very compassionate outside the courtroom. in fact, she started a program in both -- well, in macon, valdosta, columbus, and athens that's called the weed and seed program. it's now a nationwide program that's run through u.s. attorneys' offices, and judge martin was a strong proponent

and received national recognition for the work that she did with the weed and seed program in our state. she also held day camps for inner city kids during the summertime. she served on various boards including the board of macon state college and the georgia women of achievement, which board she serves on with my wife julie ann. her lengthy tenure as a prosecutor has given her unique and informed perspective when handling criminal cases. as many of my colleagues know, a prosecutor must be tough but fair in carrying out her responsibilities. this experience has served her well and she has served on the district court and it makes her exceptionally well qualified to serve on the 11th circuit court of appeals. while on the district courts, judge martin was faced with several difficult criminal matters. in 2002, she refused to intervene and halt the scheduled execution of a man convicted of killing a columbus, georgia, police officer.

more recently, in 2008, she rejected arguments that georgia's method of capital imprisonment was unconstitutional, determining that it more than conformed with recent supreme court guidance on the issue. in his charge to judge martin, the president has not only picked a fine georgian to sit on the nation's highest bench, but he has also picked a top-notch legal mind. but more revealing about judge martin as a jurist than my remarks are the unanimous -- are the anonymous lawyer comments that have been written about her during her nine years on the bench. words such as smart, bright, respectful, and fair appear frequently. one lawyer wrote "her legal misdemeanor is matched by her courtroom misdemeanor which is the best around." another says "she always calls it as she sees it and she has no leaning." mike bauers, attorney general and her mentor of 15 years, says

she is the most even-handed judge he has ever appeared before. in fact, mike who is now in private practice told me that he tried the very first jury trial case before judge martin, and in federal trials, the lawyers were all required to stand at a lectern where they asked their question to the witnesses, and it's not appropriate to get too close to the jury, but all of us used to try to do that because you can sometimes be more effective. and he said, taxby, one day i was trying this case before judge -- and he said, saxby, one day i was trying this case before the jury, and i obviously i got too close to the jury. and being the evenhanded judge that she is, she looked at her 15-year mentor and she said very professionally, mr. bowers, please back away a respectful distance from the jury. so he said, i remember it very well and that's the evenhandedness with which judge i have no doubt that judge

martin will serve the people of martin has always conducted herself on the bench. georgia, alabama, and florida very well on the 11th circuit. she is, to put it plainly, a fair and wise judge. the president couldn't have chosen a more qualified individual for the 11th circuit court of appeals. i'm proud to lend my support to her and look forward to her swift confirmation. and, mr. president, i yield the floo mr. isakson: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from georgia is recognized. mr. isakson: mr. president, i'm pleased to rise today on the floor of the senate and join my colleague from georgia, to endorse the confirmation, hopefully unanimous confirmation, of judge beverly martin to the 11th circuit court of appeals. i want to thank president obama for sending this nomination forward and the consultation that he had and his people had with senator chambliss and myself. and i want to thank senator leahy, the chairman and ranking member sessions from alabama,

the ranking member of the judiciary committee, for the diligence in which they approached this confirmation and the speed with which we have now gotten it to the floor. and i've proud on this january day that the vote on judge martin today afternoon will be the first vote of the 2010 session of the united states congress in the united states senate. mr. president, as senator chambliss said, judge martin comes from a long distinguished family of lawyers from middle georgia, and she comes to the bench with a balanced temperament and the evenhanded process that comes from growing up in middle georgia and having a respect for their fellow man around them. mr. president, i don't know judge martin and did not know judge martin until she was nominated, and i'm not an attorney so i didn't have a lot to fall back on when i made my first judgment. so i decided what i would do, what i always did in my 33 years of business, i figured you could always find out what was at the heart of someone by calling those that competed with them, other members of the same

profession. so i called lawyers, judges, prosecutors around georgia, friends that i had, to say, listen, tell me what you know about judge beverly martin. and without exception, every response was positive. it was interesting, the one district attorney i talked to said, i like her because she's got the tenacity of a prosecutor, and she was a prosecutor in the northern district of georgia. i talked to a dear friend of mine who's a judge on the georgia supreme court and he said, she's got the temperament for a judge. and i talked to another practicing attorney who had tried cases before her and had competed with her when she was a practicing attorney herself. and he said, johnny, she is tough and she is fair, but she has a passion for the law and a passion for doing what's right. i don't think you can come up with a finer endorsement than those three quotes. i also want to join senator chambliss in acknowledging, in stusd one's record -- studying one's record, some of her decisions which i think have been outstanding.

as a former prosecutor, she understands the danger our law enforcement officers go through, she understands the value that they serve, and i think her ruling not to stay the execution of the murderer of a columbus, georgia, policeman was absolutely the right decision. her defense of the georgia death penalty law as being constitutional was not only appropriate but i think right. and throughout all of her decisions, one thing is for sure: whether you agreed or not, she gave it the thought and the time necessary to make what she felt was the right decision. in the year 2000, the united states senate confirmed judge martin to the northern district court in georgia and it did so unanimously. it is my hope that today, on this day in the united states senate, once again the senate will unanimously approve the confirmation of judge beverly martin to the u.s. 11th circuit court of appeals. and i thank the chair for the time. and i yield back my time and would note --

and note the absence of a quorum. and charge -- i'm sorry, i'm getting my instructions to make sure i do it right -- and charg parties. the presiding officer: is there objection? without objection, so ordered. the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

the presiding officer: the senator from alabama is recognized. mr. sessions: i would ask the quorum call be dispensed with.

tho oesered. mr. sessions: i would like to speak on the nomination of judge beverly baldwin martin who president obama nominated to the circuit on june 19. i remain at a loss as to why it has taken this long for a nomination to come before the full senate for a vote. judge martin's nomination is one of those that had strong bipartisan support, both of the home state senators, chambliss and isakson have expressed their support for the president's nominee from the beginning. i have also expressed my support for judge martin, and i believe she would be easily confirmed when the vote occurs. as i've said many times, republicans have been and are ready and willing to proceed to a roll call vote on her nomination for months, but for whatever reason, our democratic colleagues in the leadership would not take yes for an

answer. instead, they chose to force votes on controversial nominees such as david hamilton and andre davis. given those nominees' records, it was no secret they would engender opposition and that it would take some time for their records to be examined and a debate prepared. i do not know the reasons for not calling up judge martin's nomination sooner. i hope it wasn't to purposely delay this noncontroversial nomination in order to create an illusion that a lot of judges are being obstructed. certainly, we have been accused of obstructing nominations in the last few months. and we have heard these allegations repeated on the senate floor and in the press and often supported by inaccurate and misleading information. some of my democratic colleagues have said they would confirm judicial nominees at the same

pace that the democrat-controlled senate confirmed president bush's nominees. i think my colleagues should be careful what they wish for because president obama's nominees have fared far better than president bush's. for those who were not here then or for those who don't or won't remember, i would like to take a moment to describe exactly what happened during that time. president bush began his presidency by extending an olive branch and renominating two prior clinton nominees to seats on the circuit court of appeals. one step below the supreme court. he renominated democratic nominees. well, how was he repaid for that? the democrats took the olive branch and broke it and gave it back to him. it began soon after president bush was elected when a group of well-known professors, activist professors, marcia greenberger and cass sunstein.

they met with the democratic leadership and proposed changing the ground rules of the confirmation process in a meeting apparently -- certainly not open to the public. they proposed that senators should consider a nominee's ideology -- this had not been historically done. and for the first time in the history of the country, they proposed that the burden be shifted to the nominee to somehow prove they were worthy of the appointment instead of having the senate with the presumptive power of the president to make nominations and then object if that nomination was a concern to them. so it was clear to me then that as a result of that meeting, a majority of the members of this body agreed to what they proposed. after the democrats took control in the 107th congress and then-majority leader daschle promised to, quote -- "use

whatever means necessary" to defeat president bush's judicial nominees. before the 2001 august recess back in 2001, the democrats granted hearings on only two circuit court nominees, and one was roger gregory, the former clinton nominee that was renominated. they even refused to hold a hearing for now chief justice john roberts. his nomination at the time was to the district of columbia circuit which had been scheduled for hearing before the change in the senate majority. then in an unprecedented and i think partisan move, our democrat colleagues indiscriminately returned every single one of president bush's 40 pending judicial nominations. there was no consideration of an individual's or nominee's record. there was no consideration of

bipartisan support for the nominee. it was a simple obstruction, it appeared to me. 30 of these nominees were later confirmed by voice vote or by an overwhelming majority. this was followed by another unprecedented attempt or event. the unprecedented systematic filibuster of highly qualified nominees, many of whom were later confirmed by voice vote or substantial majority. the democrats filibustered 30 attempts to hold up or down votes on at least 17 judicial nominees, some highly equal equalified, unanimously rated highly qualified by the american bar association. senator reid summed up what they were doing during the filibuster of the nominee, justice on the

texas supreme court. brilliant lady. he opposed her nomination, and he said this -- "there is not a number of hours in the universe that would be sufficient" -- close quote -- to debate her nomination. so today we hear outrage that pom's nom -- that president obama's nominees have been waiting for weeks or months for a nomination vote. president bush's nominees waited an average of 350 days, almost a year on average. i was here! from nomination to confirmation. and that was just the average. the majority of president bush's first nominees to the court waited years for confirmation votes, and some never even received a hearing in committee, despite being highly qualified, outstanding nominees. priscilla owen, justice owen of the texas supreme court, waited

four years for a confirmation vote. john roberts, jeffrey sutton, and deborah cook all waited two years. dennis shedd and michael mcconnell waited for more than a year and a half. terrance boyle who was nominated by president bush for the fourth circuit, languished close to eight years and never received a vote. even though he passed out of judiciary committee with a majority, and the democrats had the majority. miguel he is trat a -- estrada rated well qualified by the american bar association was filibustered through seven cloture votes and never confirmed. charles pickerring, carolyn coup, william meyers, all i think outstanding nominees, all were filibustered and never confirmed. so i ask my democratic colleagues did we have any outrage from that side then? let's look at the current pace of nominations.

unlike president bush, president obama did not extend an olive branch by renominating any of the outstanding pending nominees that president bush had submitted that were being held up. in fact, he ignored a request by all of the republican members of this body to do that. instead, he chose judge david hamilton as his first nominee. he could hardly be characterized as a consensus nominee. 39 senators, all republicans, eventually voted against him after a full debate. a treatment of president obama's and president bush's nominees for the fourth circuit will illustrate what i'm saying. during the 110th congress, despite 33% vacancy rate in the courts, four of president bush's well-qualified consensus nominees to that court, the fourth circuit, were needlessly delayed and ultimately blocked.

president bush nominated steve matthews in september of 2007, and despite his stellar qualifications, he was forced to wait 485 days to even get a hearing, and the hearing never came. his nomination was returned on january, 2009. chief judge robert conrad of the district court had the support of his home state senators and received an a.b.a. rating of unanimous well qualified despite overwhelming support and exceptional qualifications, including having played point guard for, i think, the university of south carolina or clemson in the a.c.c., and he waited 585 days for a hearing that never came. his nomination was returned. judge conrad had been chosen by janet reno, president bush's

attorney general, to investigate one of the allegations against president clinton. and he conducted -- it shows the amount -- out of all the prosecutors in america, he chose judge conrad. he was a super nominee and should have been confirmed. the bar respected him and so did the democrat administration. glenn conrad and others i won't go into. i will just save that for another day, mr. president, and would submit the balance of my remarks for the record. i see our outstanding chairman, senator leahy, is here. i know he wants to get back to the committee, and i appreciate his leadership. he is a person i enjoy working with. we spat a little bit over these nominations, but he allows us to have a full and fair hearing when we have them, and i think i

can't ask for more than that. i thank the chair and would yield the floor. mr. leahy: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from vermont is recognized. mr. leahy: i thank the senator from alabama for his kind words. he and i have been friends for years. we share the distinction of both having married above ourselves, and that helps. as we -- and i'm going to be sure to leave five minutes for the distinguished senator from delaware who wishes to speak on another matter, but i do want to note as we return for the second session of the 111th congress, the senate last considers the long-stalled nomination of judge beverly martin of georgia to the court of appeals for the 11th circuit. judge martin is a well-respected district court judge. she does have the strong support of her two home state senators,

both republicans, senator chambliss and senator isakson, but her nomination has been stuck on the senate executive calendar for over four months even though we voted her out of committee with all democrats and all republicans supporting her. i must say that her -- the only reason for the delay has been a republican strategy to stall, delay, and obstruct that began last year. and i would hope in this new year that the republican leadership may reconsider their strategy and join with us and president obama to fill the more than 100 vacancies that are currently on federal courts around the country. we have seen these tactics from last year have led to the lowest

number of judicial confirmations in more than 50 years. i think of the 17 months when i was chairman of the committee and president bush's first term, we confirmed 100 of president bush's nominees. about the same number that in twice that amount of time republicans chairing the committee confirmed. only 12 of president obama's judicial nominations in the federal circuit judicial court were con firmed all of last year. during president bush's tumultuous first year, we -- we confirmed 28 judges. i might point out the democrats were in control only six months of that year. we still put through 28 of george bush's nominees. as i said, during the 17 months

i chaired that committee, we put through 100 of his nominees. the republicans have refused to agree to the consideration of qualified, noncontroversial nominees for weeks and months. last december, only three of the available 13 judicial nominations on the senate executive calendar were considered. by contrast, in december, 2001, the first year of president bush's administration, senate democrats proceeded to confirm ten of his judicial nominations. none of the judicial nominations currently pending on the executive calendar are controversial. six were reported by the senate judiciary committee with the support of all republicans, all democrats. and even though we worked so hard -- i know i did when i had the privilege being chairman of the committee for 17 months during president bush's first term -- i knew that 60 of

president clinton's nominees had been pocket filibustered by the republicans and left all kinds of vacancies. i tried to turn a new leaf and say we would not do the same of president bush, that we would try to move nominees and clear the vacancies. it's hard work but we did, we cut back the number of vacanci vacancies. now judicial vacancies have skyrocketed to over 100. that's undone years of hard work. president obama has reached across the aisle to consult with republican senators far more than his predecessor did. the nomination today is another example of that and he's made quality nominations. and i can't understand why these tactics of delay. there are unprecedented -- i've been here 35 years.

i'm now in my 36th year in the senate. only two of the current members of this senate have served longer than i have. i can tell you right now, mr. president, with both democratic administrations and republican administrations, both democratic control of the senate, republican control of the senate, i have never seen anything like this. it's wrong. the american people deserve better. and the cost is going to be fell by americans seeking justice in our overburdened federal courts. i cannot understand why, having been here from the time of president ford straight through, i've never seen somebody do this kind of thing to a president. why are they taking these tactics against president obama when they've never been taken by republicans or democrats against any president, republican or democratic. look at the unprecedented obstruction. over 100 filibusters last year.

that affected 70% of all senate action. instead of time agreements and the will of the majority, the senate's faced with the requirement to find 60 senators to overcome a filibuster on issue after issue. and even once we finally get that, the issue passes almost unanimously.it's delay for the sake of delay. and my friends on the other side filibustered money for veterans, filibustered money for our soldiers when they're in the field. you know, those who just a short time ago said a majority vote is all that should be needed to confirm a nomination and that filibuster of nominations are unconstitutional now reverse themselves and employ any delaying tactic they can. and again, something i've not seen in the 35 years i've served here. when you vote to leave our troops without funding at a time

we're fighting two wars, not to vote up or down but simply to refuse to allow a vote to come to fund them, that's wrong. and had the senate republican filibuster of the department of defense appropriation bill been successful, it would have cut off funding for our troops in the field, just as a filibuster, had it been successful on the veterans bill, would have cut off money for our veterans. many of these are veterans suffering grievous wounds from the war in iraq and the war in afghanistan. judge martin's nomination, the longest pending of the judicial nominations currently on the executive calendar, all these delays, i am willing to predict that she's going to get an overwhelming vote of both republicans and democrats and somebody is going to say, well, why was she delayed. her nomination received a unanimous rating of well qualified from the american bar association's standing committee

on the federal judiciary. i have told senator chambliss and senator isakson that i strongly support this nominee. i've told my own caucus i strongly support this nominee. she spent 25 years in public service as a federal judge, as u.s. attorney for the middle district of georgia, as an assistant u.s. attorney in that office, as an assistant attorney general in the office of the attorney general in georgia. this is an experienced nominee. it should be an easy one to confirm. president obama consulted with the republican senators from that state. they should have said, okay, you did exactly what we've asked you to do. you have the strong support of two republican senators. let's go forward. so i urge them -- urge my friends on the other side of the aisle, my republican friends, don't keep holding up these judges, reconsider their strategy, allow prompt

consideration of the other judicial nominees that are being held the same way. judge joseph greenway of new jersey, nominated to the third circuit. judge barbara keenan of virginia nominated to the 4th circuit. jane tranche of tennessee nominated to the 6th circuit. judge thomas venasky of pennsylvania, nominated to the third circuit. judge denny chin of new york nominated to the second circuit. rosanna peterson, nominated to the eastern district of washington, and william cartly, nominated to the western district of wisconsin, they have all been voted out by the senate judiciary committee. they all should be allowed to fill the vacancies where they're needed. mr. president, i will reserve the balance of my time and yield five minutes, six minutes, what -- i yield six minutes to the distinguished senator from delaware, an extraordinarily valuable member ofhe senate judiciary committee, to speak on

another matter. the presiding officer: without objection, so ordered. mr. kaufman: thank you, chairman leahy. the presiding officer: the senator from delaware is recognized. mr. kaufman: it's a pleasure to serve with you on the judiciary committee and see the work that you're doing. mr. president, i ask consent to speak as if in morning business for six minutes. the presiding officer: without objection, so ordered. mr. kaufman: i rise once again to recognize one of america's great federal employees. one year ago today, barack obama took the oath of office as president of the united states. as with every change in administration, the white house welcomed new staff members appointed by the president to help him carry out his policy goals. i've spoken many times about the career federal employees who serve regardless of which political party controls the executive branch. today i want to depart and spend a few minutes to talk about the highlight -- to highlight the important work performed by

those federal employees who serve in appointee positions. although they jobs depend on the outcome of elections and political circumstances, they are no less accountable to the people and no less dedicated in their service. this holds true for appointees from both parties, republican and democrat, who, given the opportunity, eagerly leave jobs in the private and nonprofit sectors to serve for some period of time in the government. many of our nation's elected leaders, many of the men and women on this floor once served in this capacity. on this first anniversary of president obama's inauguration, many are reflecting on the past 12 months and trying to gauge the administration's success. it's great sport on cable television. one thing is certain, though, that he could not have carried out his ambitious agenda without the help of talented white house staff. the great federal employee

honoring today has the challenging job of making sure that the white house staff are working together and that all the information the president needs reaches his desk. lisa brown serves as white house staff secretary. it's a position many americans are unfamiliar with but it is one of the most important positions in the west wing of the white house. the staff secretary's responsible for keeping the lines of communication between the senate and his senior staff open and organized, a very difficult task. nearly every memo -- every memo destined for the president's desk must pass first through the secretary -- staff secretary, who filters the most pressing problems and ensures the president's decisions are conveyed to the proper staff member. just think about that and how complex that is. lisa is a native of connecticut. she graduated magna cum laude from princeton with a degree in

political economy. she also holds a law degree with honors from the university of chicago. after clerking for the late judge john goble in the u.s. court of appeals on the 11th circuit in alabama, lisa was partner i in the washington firm of shea and gardner. while working in the private sector, she also engaged in pro bono work in the area of civil rights and disabilities law. during the time, lisa gained valuable expertise in these fields which we would later put to use in government service. in 1996, lisa began working as an attorney advisor to the legal justice department of the office of legal counsel. after a year in that role, she was appointed deputy counsel to vice president gore, and in 1999, she was appointed to be his counsel. at the same time, lisa served in the executive -- on the executive board of the president's committee for employment of people with disabilities. she also worked on legislative issues with the vice president's

domestic policy office. after the clinton administration ended, like many political appointees, she moved into the nonprofit sector, where she became executive director of the american constitutional society for law and policy. when president obama was elected, he asked her to return to government service as a key part -- a very key part -- of his white house team. despite her busy schedule, like many people working for the federal government, she has one of america's most stressful work environments, lisa still finds time to raise a six-year-old son with her husband kevin. juggling family responsibilities and a demanding workload is a challenge she shares with many other west wing staffers and with many other people in the federal government. lisa and other political appointees are a living reminder of the elective nature of our government. when the people decide to give control to the -- of executive branch to the party in

opposition, that party is always ready to call on a cadre of talented and dedicated citizens ready to shape policy. many of them bring to their job the unique perspective of having worked for a previous administration and they frequently -- very frequently -- leave higher paying jobs to sacrifice returning to government service. when they do so, they are not only serving the president, they also commit to long and stressful hours working on behalf of the american people to whom the president and his west wing staff are answerable. mr. president, i hope my colleagues will join me in honoring the service of lisa brown and all of those working and who have worked in the west wing under presidents obama, bush, clinton, and their predecessors. i yield the floor. mr. leahy: mr. president? e m vermont is recognized. mr. leahy: mr. president, i have six unanimous consent requests

for committees to meet during today's session of the senate. they have the approval of the majority and minority leaders. and i ask unanimous consent the requests be agreed to and the requests be printed in the record. the presiding officer: without objection, so ordered. mr. leahy: mr. president, what is the -- mr. president, i suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call: