Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Madam President, with the debate coming to a conclusion the way that it has today, I am really starting to wonder if Congress really wants to reauthorize the SCHIP program.

I worked with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle Senators Baucus and Rockefeller and my good friend Senator Hatch to come up with a bipartisan compromise.

We passed a bill in the Senate with a remarkable 68 votes. Who would have predicted that when this session began?

We sat down with our House colleagues and hammered out a compromise that very closely followed the Senate bill. That compromise bill again passed the Senate by a wide bipartisan margin and received 265 votes in the House.

As we all know that bill was vetoed, and 2 weeks ago, the veto was sustained in the House.

In the 2 weeks since that vote, I have seen some of the strangest twists and turns I have seen in all my years in politics.

First, I sat down with Democratic leadership in both Houses. We agreed on the compromises we thought we could make to get the final votes we needed to pass the House.

At the same time, the minority leader of the House released a letter with the conditions his Members needed to vote for a bill.

Seeing as the compromises we were willing to make seemed to resemble the conditions in the leader's letter, we began meeting with House Republicans to see if we could bridge the final gap.

We started a process and made some real progress. Then all of the sudden House Democratic leadership decided it was time for a vote. No matter that we hadn't successfully concluded negotiations with House Republicans, it was time to vote.

That bill passed and it is the bill we are voting on here in a few minutes.

Moving ahead like that in the House created tremendous mistrust. But undaunted, we picked up the pieces and tried again to get a deal with House Republicans.

The minority leader in the House released another letter with the conditions his Members needed to support a bill. Of course, the goalposts moved from the original letter. But we still felt a deal was possible and forged ahead.

The majority leader of the Senate started the clock ticking on the bill here in the Senate. Again we were making progress with House Republicans.

So when the majority leader saw we were making progress, he asked for more time here in the Senate.

Incredibly, Senate Republicans objected. In the House, Republicans objected because we moved too fast. In the Senate, Republicans objected because we wanted to move more slowly.

Yes, you should note the incredible irony.

So today faced with continued objections, a decision was made to move forward with a vote this afternoon.

I ask all my colleagues. Why?

To my colleagues on the Democrat side; the President will veto this bill and the House has the votes to stop an override. Why go through with this?

To my colleagues on the Republican side; we have the votes to pass the bill and were quite close to having a deal to satisfy House Republicans. Did you force the vote today to keep us from reaching a deal?

What the heck is going on around here?

My patience is a little thin right now. But come tomorrow, I will go back to working with the folks who want a bill that we can get enacted into law.

This bill actually improves upon the bill that was vetoed by the President. All my colleagues who supported the bill before should certainly support the bill today.

But as we all know, this bill is getting vetoed and there aren't the votes to override in the House.

That is really too bad, because this is a very good bill.

It is really too bad for the more than 3 million children who don't have health care coverage today that would get coverage under this bill.

It is for those kids that I will pick up the pieces tomorrow and try to move forward. It is my hope that leadership on both sides of Congress and both sides of the aisle will set the gamesmanship aside so we can finally finish this bill.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source