Departments of Commerce and Justice, and Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008

Floor Speech

DEPARTMENTS OF COMMERCE AND JUSTICE, AND SCIENCE, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008--Continued -- (Senate - October 15, 2007)

Mr. REID. Mr. President, we have on this bill that is now before the Senate--the Commerce-Justice appropriations bill--about eight amendments that Democrats have pending or wish to offer, and we have 26 Republican amendments. Everyone should understand we are going to finish this bill tomorrow. It does not matter what events are going on around town, we are going to work and finish this bill. If it takes until 8 o'clock tomorrow night, fine; there will be no windows. We are going to work right through this. If people try to hold this up, we will have a bunch of votes. We will have the Sergeant at Arms instructed. We are going to move through this.

I am told we want to finish appropriations bills. This is our second week on this bill. We are going to finish this bill tomorrow or sometime early Wednesday morning. We are going to continue working on this until it is completed or until we find there is such intransigence by the Republicans that they do not want us to finish this bill. I hope that is not the case.

We have had on our appropriations bills some decent cooperation from the Republicans, for which I am appreciative, but we have other bills we have to do. If we finish this legislation, we will still have seven appropriations bills to do.

I am aware we have had to file cloture 49 different times this year to defeat Republican filibusters or to turn them around, and if it is necessary to file the 50th, we will do that. I think that would be a shame to have to do that.

We have a finite number of amendments now, and we need to try to work through them. What we could do, of course, here--there are more Democrats than Republicans--we could move to table all the Republican amendments. It would take a lot of time to do that. I hope we do not have to do that. I hope we can work through these amendments and some of them will be accepted and some will be voted upon.

I want to be as reasonable as possible, but I have the Nation's business to be concerned about. We have to work through this. We have been off work now doing other things in our districts. We all worked hard. Now we are back to legislating.

As part of that legislation is this bill that is before the Senate now. We are going to work on it and complete it. I was hopeful that with the 2:30 deadline we would come back with a reasonable number of amendments, but that is not, in fact, the case.

We have on the Republican side a number of Senators who are offering multiple amendments. I know they are important, and I understand that, but I hope that we can, as I have said, work our way through these. We will one way or the other work through these, because I do not want and do not intend to file cloture. I intend to work until we finish this bill.

I don't know how I can be more clear than that. We have to move after this to another appropriations bill, one that is extremely important, the Labor-HHS bill, an extremely important piece of legislation involving so many different and important issues, as the Presiding Officer, for example, is well aware.

It is my understanding the distinguished junior Senator from South Dakota wishes to call up an amendment before I do the closing matters, and I am happy to wait. I ask now to return to legislative business.

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