Senate Agenda

Floor Speech

SENATE AGENDA -- (Senate - July 26, 2007)

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I understand there are only a few minutes remaining in morning business, which is our opportunity to talk about a wide range of topics. We have a lot of important business going on in the Senate. We have the Homeland Security appropriations bill, which we want to pass quickly to keep our Nation safe. Then we are going to turn to the 9/11 Commission recommendations. Most Americans recall after 9/11, we appointed a very good bipartisan group to come up with suggestions to make America safer. Unfortunately, those suggestions have not been acted on, and each year the commission gives the Government a failing grade when it comes to their compliance, so we want to change that situation. This year, with the new Congress, we passed the implementation of these recommendations and hope to bring those to the floor this week and have them enacted.

We also have pending major ethics reform. Most people are, unfortunately, inured to the prospect of stories of corruption in Washington. Some of the events that have happened over the last several years have been horrendous, leading to the prosecution of Members of Congress and many lobbyists in town. It is time to change that situation. We have a bill that will move us dramatically in the right direction, the most significant ethics reform in the history of Congress. It has been caught up in a lot of political debate and wrangling. Now is the time to move it forward, enact it into the rules, the law of the land, and apply it to the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Then next week comes a critically important bill. There are 47 million uninsured Americans, many of them children. Right now we have a program where we provide Federal funds to States so they can help us in insuring those children. We have about 6 million children who are now covered by this plan, kids who otherwise would not have health insurance.

Incidentally, most of them are children of parents who are working, who go to work every day. They are not poor enough to have the Government insure them, and they are not wealthy enough to insure themselves. They get caught in the middle. Six million children have protection today.

The program expires September 30. We want to make sure those kids are not left without coverage, and we have another 9 million children who are eligible who have not been brought in. The Senate Finance Committee is going to expand the number covered from 6 million to 9 million nationwide.

I wish we could do more. We should cover them all. Why wouldn't we as Americans want our kids to have basic health insurance protection? Unfortunately, even though our bill is bipartisan, it is reasonable, it is within our budget, the White House said the President will veto it. The President's reason for vetoing the children's health insurance bill? It is hard to believe, but he says it is unfair to private health insurance companies. Unfair to private health insurance companies? Most Americans understand that for most of those companies, each year means higher premiums and lower coverage, and many of those companies have failed to come forward to find ways to bring Americans into health insurance coverage. There are not going to be many tears shed for that industry. We should have our concern and focus on the children who are going to be left behind when it comes to health insurance if the President vetoes this bill.

Next week we will focus on that legislation. We will try to get down and pass this, get together with the House of Representatives, and send it to the President as quickly as possible.

In August, we have a 3- or 4-week recess, which I assume we will be taking most of, and then come back in September in the first week. There are a lot of appropriations bills to consider at that time. We will go back to the Defense authorization bill and a very important national debate on the war in Iraq. The administration promises us September 15 to give us a status report, as required by law.

Most of the indicators are that the violence continues in Iraq. The Government continues to disappoint us and, unfortunately, American deaths continue to mount. That debate in September is going to be a critical watershed debate. We need to have more Republican Senators cross the aisle and join us to call for a new policy in Iraq. So far 4 of the 49 Republicans have come to our side. We need 11. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to work for a cooperative bipartisan approach to a new direction in Iraq.

I yield the floor.

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