The Senate Schedule

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD
SENATE
THE SENATE SCHEDULE

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I would say, in response to my colleague from Nevada, I have had a number of jobs in my lifetime, and we are fortunate we are on salary on this job because if our pay depended on what we did and what we produced, we would not be drawing a paycheck around here for weeks at a time. We waste so much time on the floor of the Senate, it is hard to imagine.

We spent a whole week on a class action bill that went nowhere. Then we spent a better part of a week on a constitutional amendment on same-sex marriage that went nowhere. Now we are about to waste a third week in a row.

At the same time, I think there are 12 appropriations bills that have not been considered. During this period of time, we had notification from Secretary Ridge at the Department of Homeland Security and our FBI Director that America was going to face an attack. Most Americans stood up and took notice, as they should, and called our offices and said: What should we do? And we said: Lead your lives. Keep your eyes open.

But it is clear what we should do. Take a look at this Calendar. Right on the back of our Senate Calendar, the lead items are the Homeland Security appropriations bills. These are multibillion-dollar bills that will appropriate money to give to State and local governments as well as Federal agencies to make America safer-sitting on the Calendar for a month, without even being considered.

We will take a break, at the end of this week, for 6 weeks. We will be gone. We will come back, and they will still be sitting on the Calendar. God forbid anything happens in America. We are not going to do anything to deal with them.

Then you page through this Calendar and find bills waiting for action dealing with security at nuclear powerplants, security at ports across America, security at chemical plants, security on rail lines. If we paid any attention to Secretary Ridge, as we should, and Director Mueller, we would be meeting today with Senators on the Senate floor passing this legislation. Instead, we are killing time. We are doing nothing.

Now, it is hard to explain why this do-nothing Congress is wasting time when it should be, in fact, doing things to make America safer. I do not understand why the leaders in this Congress cannot pick up the very Calendar they print every day, turn to the back page and read the top line: homeland security. Pretty clear: homeland security. Yet we have not passed this legislation.