It is a pleasure to rise today to join with my colleagues and urge them to support the President's nomination of Hector V. Barreto, Jr., as Administrator of the Small Business Administration. The nomination of Mr. Barreto comes at a…

I am very happy to report I had the pleasure last Friday of joining my colleague from Kansas, Senator Brownback, and several Members of the House, in a trip to Kansas City, MO, with the Vice President and the Secretary of the Treasury…

this is part of a continuing effort to prevent the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from advancing what we believe is a very ill-conceived directive to increase springtime releases of water from Missouri River upstream dams in an experiment…

I thank my cosponsors and others for supporting this amendment, which will get us to a final resolution of this very important question. In response to some of the comments that have been made, the record shows in 1952, in the…

in recent years we have witnessed some very serious and troubling discussions in the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. We have noticed how American fighting men and women are being committed to engagements of all kinds all around the…

I enthusiastically support Senator Biden's colloquy. As a cochair of the Senate Guard Caucus, I find it alarming that of the 1,885 Army National Guard helicopters nationwide, over a 1,000 were recently reported as grounded because of a…

my second item deals with the defense budget. While the administration's request for a supplemental appropriations bill for the Department of Defense includes what the administration believes is the minimum needed to get by for the…

several days ago in debate in this Chamber, I talked about how the employees of small businesses might lose their health care coverage if the provisions of McCain-Kennedy went into effect unamended. The junior Senator from North Carolina…

it is clear that all of us agree that protection for patients of health care delivery systems is very important. Patients need to get quick, independent second opinions when their insurance company or their HMO denies care. Women need…

I want to take just a couple of minutes before we get into the closing to respond to a couple of points that have been made on the other side. Some who are proponents of this bill and who are opponents of this amendment have offered two…

I commend my colleague and neighbor from Arkansas for offering this amendment which will fulfill the promise we have been making to the self-employed in America for a long time. Small business owners, farmers, and others have suffered…

I think you will find before this bill is over with that there will be many issues in the jurisdiction of the Finance Committee, and what we should be talking about on this bill is making sure that we protect patients, we protect Americans…

we are now debating the crucial issue of patients' rights. For better or worse, we have a health care system that increasingly uses managed care to organize and deliver services. Over the next week or two or more, we are here to debate…

I want to talk about an amendment that I introduced some time ago and which we will vote on later this afternoon. The amendment itself is not very difficult and not very complex. It doesn't have a major change. But it represents a…

the National Association of Children's Hospitals and Related Institutions recently released a new report titled ``All Children Need Children's Hospitals'' that explores how essential children's hospitals are to the health of all children…

the nomination just confirmed, No. 145, Stephen Brauer to be Ambassador to Belgium, is a great personal pleasure for me. Stephen Brauer has been a terrific leader in the St. Louis community. He is a man who distinguished himself in Vietnam…

In 1997 Congress made an important change in the tax code for small businesses by restoring the home-office deduction. That change opened the door for millions of Americans to operate successful small businesses from their homes. Now the…

studies and reports have shown that PAT children at age 3 are found to be significantly more advanced than comparison children in language, problem solving, and social development. Often, through participation in PAT, learning problems or…

I believe the amendment can be accepted on both sides to make sure that we deal properly with early childhood education. I have come to this Chamber many times to state that research has now verified what parents have known instinctively…

I thank the manager. Mr. President, there have been numerous times that I have come to the Senate floor to say--and I come, once again, to repeat--that education is a national priority, but it is an obligation and responsibility of those…

Today I offer a bill to take a successful pilot program at the Department of Defense, make it permanent, and extend it governmentwide. For the past decade, DOD has had a program in place to try to develop and maintain small business…

as has been the tradition for the past 38 years, the President of the United States has issued a proclamation calling for the celebration of Small Business Week. Today, we are in the middle of Small Business Week 2001, which is being…

Yet I think it is necessary that we take a moment and recognize something that colleagues on both sides of the aisle will find very important, and I know support; and that is, the fact that this is Small Business Week. All of us know…

for the past several months we have focused extensively on the need for tax relief and the means for achieving it. As the chairman of the Committee on Small Business, I have argued time and again that the individual rate cuts included in…

I rise today to support President Bush's education initiative and S. 1, the Better Education for Students and Teachers Act. As a new member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee I have been involved in the tremendous…