Mr. President, I reluctantly suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.

Madam President, yesterday Senator Hutchison raised a very good point about slots. Slots are kind of the hidden problem in the FAA bill. What I think I would like to put forward--and I wish she were here to hear me--is that I recognize the…

Madam President, I ask if the Senator from the State of Washington would grant me 30 seconds to say one thing.

Madam President, this is, in fact, the aviation bill. As everybody knows, that is what we are doing; we are doing the aviation bill. We are talking about health care, but secretly we are doing the aviation bill. So I thought it would be…

We cannot afford to let the gains we have sacrificed so much for slip away.

Does it not make a little bit of----

Basically, those of us who lived through the 1974 oil embargo and saw what it had done and how it crippled the Nation.

Make no mistake, after sacrificing hundreds of billions of American taxpayers' dollars and nearly 4,500 American lives, the United States has an enormous stake in Iraq's success.

We were worried, and were saying so at the time, that this endeavor would harm the country's economy, that it would blow the top off of the price of oil.

There are people on this committee, and in the Senate, who have argued that the United States should remain in Iraq in the same sense that it's remained in Korea, as a projection force.

If we are no longer there they will turn their focus on the Government of Iraq.

We seek a country that is sovereign, stable and self-reliant, with a government that is just, representative and accountable.

General Austin, you have said that internal security in Iraq is the best it's been in years...

I have real concerns about whether the proposed civilian-led mission will take the lead once our troops are gone and is sufficient to support the Iraqi needs and U.S. interests.

Basically we get, as a country and our general fund, no return on the investment we're making.

Clearly this did not occur, with the United States spending billions in Iraq for reconstruction.

Their ability to do what we saw them do in the past is somewhat diminished.

We cannot afford to let the gains our troops have sacrificed so much for in Iraq slip away before they are cemented.