Mr. President, I rise because we have a crisis on our hands with the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration. I know exactly why we have this crisis. It is another made-up crisis by the Republicans. This is a Republican shutdown. We just got past the most, well, I feel made-up crisis we have ever seen. Eighty-nine times we have passed a debt limit extension, and it took us weeks and months of wrangling to get it done. We finally got it done. I am glad we got it done. Unnecessary, people in my State panicking that they wouldn't get a Social Security check, small businesses saying they couldn't get a decent loan--all that for nothing. We can do our work. We can take the ideas of the Presiding Officer's Gang of 6, Senator Coburn's ideas. We have the ideas on the table. We can do this. We did it when Bill Clinton was President. We worked together, and we solved the problem. We had a deficit and debt. We balanced the budget and created surpluses. We don't have to have this taking government hostage. So we just got done with holding the full faith and credit of the United States of America hostage, and now we are seeing an extension of the hostage-taking of the Federal Aviation Administration by the Republicans. We need to end it. How do we end it? We end it simply by saying we have our disagreements. On this bill, there are a couple of broad disagreements. They are important disagreements. I honor both sides of the argument.…
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Mr. President, Senator Harry Reid and I were both elected to the House in 1982, and over the last 34 years, Harry has become more than a colleague to me. He is like family. I call him the ``brother I never had,'' and he calls me the…
Mr. President, since we are kind of reversing things, I ask unanimous consent that my friend control the time right now. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Senator, I was just talking about it briefly, and I actually misstated it, so I am glad I was corrected. This rider, dropped at midnight, going on a bill that is a beautiful bill that I worked on for so long and that the Senator from…
So I will continue to speak, and when I am done, I am done. It may be soon because I am getting a little tired, but I will keep talking for a while. I say to everybody that I am sorry, but don't drop a midnight rider on a beautiful bill…





