448 DOCU NTARY HISTORY O THE FLORIDA CANAL Listen: Not a single power which the President of the United States does not now poeses is given to him in the amendment. I mean that statement literally. The President has the right to call in any expert he wishes to advise him respecting these undertaking. He has the right to make any allocations he pleases from relief funds prior to June 30, 1987. That is the way he started these things-by appointing special boards which produced the precise reports they were supposed to produce, and which, as a result, theoretically justified the allocation of relief funds to the projects The amendment does nothing more than to authorize the boards to repeat the same thing over again and the President does not need a bit of this authority to do it. That statement cannot be controverted. All right. Where does that l#ave us? It leaves us in just one place, Mr. President. It leaves us squarely confronting the fact that all in the world this amendment seeks to do is to have the Senate and the House share the respon- sibility for these two undertakings without getting back any authority what- ever over them. It is purely and simply a purpose to bring us into the responsibility, although we are permitted no authority after we have discovered what our responsibility is. Mr. President, when the relief measure was on the floor of the Senate a year ago, and some of us were trying to be allowed to earmark a few allocations and special funds, we were told by the Chief Executive and his high spokes- men yonder across the aisle that that was heresy; we should not be permitted to have anything to say specifically about where the money was going. Oh, no; we could not do that! That would run counter to all the schemes and pur- poses of the relief program, so we did not do it. The President did it. We did not. He started these projects. We did not; but just as soon as he runs into hot water with a couple of them, he is very glad, indeed, to come back here and ask us to share the bath. That is all there is in this amendment. It is not necessary at all in respect to the projects themselves up to June 30, 1987, and that is all the amendment covers. It is not necessary in any degree. It is solely for the purpose of put- ting the President in a position to say, "Well, while the blood was on my hands alone at first, now it is on the hands of the House and Senate, too." There is not going to be any blood on my hands if I can help it. Mr. President, I think I have sustained my contention that the reality of the problem now resting at the bar of the Senate is the personal decision on the part of every Member of the Senate as to whether or not he is personally prepared to endorse Quoddy and the ship canal Since that is the status which I believe exists, I should like to have Senators who take this responsibility seriously in any degree, and who decline to subordinate a quarter of a billion dollars to expedient polities, know a little something which perhaps they have not known about Quoddy and the ship canal Mr. President, that leaves us with one other problem, and I can dismiss it very briefly relatively, because I have already previously discussed It at length in the Senate, and I hale been complimented by the fact that the Senate has twice confirmed my conclusions. We are now back to the Florida Canal, 200 miles long, extending frbm Jacksonville southwest to the Gulf. Mr. BoanA. Mr. President--; The Pas=rnro Ormc (Mr. Burke in the chair). Does the Senator from Michigan yield to the Senator from Idaho? Mr. VAiDwnmB I yield. Mr. BonAH. Are the Passamaquoddy enterprise and the Florida Canal now tied together? Mr. VAwmnmmqa. When the joint resolution was referred to the Commerce Committee the two projects were tied together. In the Commerce Committee I tried to divide them because I thought It was not quite fair to revert to pork-barrel, log-rolling methods to get votes. The Commerce Committee de- elined to divide them. The amendment came to the floor of the Senate. The senior Senator from Maine [Mr. Hale] yesterday asked that the question be divided when the vote is taken, and my understanding is that the Chair has ruled that he is entitled to have the question divided; so there will be two votes in the Senate, one on Quoddy and one on the Florida Canal. Mr. BoBaH. That will be convenient Mr. VAxDurmN That will be convenient and a little more conclusive. Regarding the canal, I was simply indicating in a word what it is. It is a 200-mile tortuous waterway with twice as much restricted water as there is any other waterway on earth trailing across the northern part of Florida from