mr. chairman , i yield myself such time as i may consume . 
in my concluding comments i want to reiterate some of the points that have been made with respect to the civil rights provisions and quote from the testimony of professor theodore eisenberg , who testified before the house committee on the judiciary in the 108th congress and said : `` a congress considering reinstating the fee-shifting aspect of rule 11 in the name of tort reform should understand what it will be doing . 
it will be discouraging the civil rights cases disproportionately affected by the old rule 11 in the name of addressing purported abuse in an area of law , personal injury tort , found to have less abuse than other areas. '' i would also like to cite the testimony of the honorable robert l. carter , u.s. district judge for the southern district of new york when he stated : `` i have no doubt that the supreme court 's opportunity to pronounce separate schools inherently unequal in brown v. board of education would have been delayed for a decade had my colleagues and i been required , upon pain of potential sanctions , to plead our legal theory explicitly from the start. '' we do not want to put off a brown v. board of education civil rights case like that for a decade because of a rule 11 that has been rejected by the federal courts already . 
the language in the substitute makes it clear that neither the sanctions approach we have taken in the substitute nor the sanctions approach taken in the base bill would apply in civil rights cases ; and while there is some language of suggestion in the base bill , it is not definitive . 
in fact , the naacp wrote in respect to the language in the base bill : `` while language nominally intended to mitigate the damage that this bill will cause to civil rights cases has been added , it is vague and simply insufficient in addressing our concerns. '' so on the basis of a need not to chill civil rights legislation , which i think we have only seen the greater importance with , as katrina ripped off the veneer of poverty and inequality in the country once again for all to see , as we consider that the base bill would implement a change that the courts themselves have rejected and found spawned a cottage industry in meritless rule 11 litigation , and as the base bill has a stronger and i think more sensible three-strikes-and-you-are-out provision , i would urge my colleagues to support the democratic substitute in preference to the flawed base bill . 
mr. chairman , i yield back the balance of my time . 
