Trent Lott: “I also want to take this occasion to say that I do not think the Senate has looked very good this year. I do not think…”

“I also want to take this occasion to say that I do not think the Senate has looked very good this year. I do not think the length of the debate necessarily improves the quality of the legislation. I think you need to have reasonable debate, adequate debate, understand what is in legislation, but I think debate just for debate's sake is not good legislating. When I look at what we have done this year, we have been in session now for the most part for 2 months, and what do we have to show for it for the American people? We got off, I thought, to a pretty fast start, although it took longer than it should have. On the congressional coverage, we did say, oh, we are going to make the laws apply to us, and the vote was 98 to 1--98 to 1. We got that one passed, and it went to the President. That is the only bill--I believe this is correct--the only major bill, and maybe the only bill, that we have sent to the President for his signature this year, in 2 months. Now, we went then to unfunded mandates, a process to try to stop the cavalcade of unfunded Federal mandates we are putting on States-- overwhelming support for it, but here in the Senate we spent 58 hours and 34 minutes discussing this legislation.”