Heidi Alexander: “I will make brief concluding remarks and then we can vote. We are not debating the Iran agreement here today. This is…”

“I will make brief concluding remarks and then we can vote. We are not debating the Iran agreement here today. This is the Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill of the Appropriations Committee. We are not even debating the Cotton amendment. It is not even part of the bill. Senator Cotton has filed an amendment that could be part of the bill if the Senate decides to adopt it in our debate after we adopt cloture. He has done that. Just to repeat, over the weekend, the U.S. Department of Energy, without any consultation with anybody in the Senate that I know about-- without the Intelligence, Armed Services, or Foreign Relations Committees--decided it was going to buy heavy water from Iran. The Senator from Arkansas introduced an amendment on the subject. My understanding of the way the Senate is supposed to work is that we save the controversial amendments for the floor. If you can get 60 votes, you pass them. Then, as Senators, if the issue is an important issue about which we disagree, we vote on it and we accept the vote. Sometimes we win, and sometimes we lose. We also listen to each other. So if the other side says this is an especially difficult issue for us, we try to accommodate that. So the Senator from Arkansas has said that he will take 60 votes, although he is entitled to 51. He can force a 51-vote vote on this issue if he chose to do that, under parliamentary rules. He said: I will take a voice vote. He does not have to do that.…”