Senate First Quarter Accomplishments

SENATE FIRST QUARTER ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, as we return from the celebrations marking our Nation's Independence Day, we should take a moment to mark the accomplishments of this Senate as we conclude the first quarter of the 109th Session of the U.S. Congress.

The list of accomplishments is impressive.

Judges to our circuit courts of appeals, stalled for years, now sit on the bench. Key legislative initiatives, once left to languish, are now the law of the land or on the brink of completion.

Class action reform protects plaintiffs from abusive coupon settlements while it prevents lawyers from gaming the system.

It had been delayed for at least a decade despite strong public support and legislative majorities. Now it has been signed into law by President Bush.

So too was a bankruptcy reform bill that ushers in a new emphasis on personal responsibility. It is another reform of our civil justice system that was long delayed, despite broad support.

We met our responsibilities to defend freedom, and the challenges of continuing to wage war on terrorism, with an emergency funding bill for Iraq.

We responded to the heart-breaking human cry for help by funding international relief efforts for victims of the Southeast Asia tsunami.

The budget resolution, which sets the vision of this nation, was completed and now permits smooth consideration of appropriations bills, tax relief measures, the highway bill, the energy bill and numerous other initiatives.

After failures to enact a budget in two of the last three sessions, getting this one in place means we are on course to meeting the President's goal of cutting the deficit in half while funding our important priorities of health, education, veterans, and homeland security.

When we've found that our budget needed to be adjusted to meet the medical needs of veterans, we voted to make the adjustments to ensure veterans have the health care they need this year as well as next.

We now are poised to soon enact a highway bill that will help Americans get where they need to go more quickly and safely, and will help create jobs within our States as well.

We are going to conference now on an Energy bill that will help reduce our national dependence on foreign sources of oil and prevent blackouts like the one that hit the Northeast United States in 2003.

We made the homeland safer by passing the Real ID provision. These provisions tighten our borders, reform our asylum system, and safeguard our identity documents so that terrorists cannot use them to avoid detection.

We've broken the unprecedented three-year filibuster of President Bush's judicial nominees who finally received up-or-down votes. Now, Judges Owen, Pryor, Brown, Griffith, McKeague, and Griffin have each taken their oaths and assumed the Federal appellate bench.

Most recently, the Senate has expanded the benefits of free trade, economic opportunity, and political stability to new regions of our own hemisphere with Senate passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

We've made a good down payment on the appropriations process by passing the Interior, Legislative Branch, and Energy and Water.

And finally, this week we have paid our respects and expressed our condolences to the victims of the London terrorist bombings, and are proceeding to work on funding our own homeland security needs.

Freedom never had a greater ally than the valiant United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom will never have a greater friend than America. Our prayers are with that great nation today.

That is an incredible body of achievement in just six months. Where once there was inaction, we can now boast of accomplishment. We have done what the American people sent us here to do.

I hope everyone enjoyed the Fourth of July weekend and paused for a moment to celebrate the fact behind those fireworks--that government of, for, and by the people can work, and that the accomplishments of this Senate show that it does work.

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