Mike Levin: “we made some very good progress on the national Defense authorization bill last week, and I am optimistic, with the…”

“we made some very good progress on the national Defense authorization bill last week, and I am optimistic, with the continuing good help that is always available from our leadership and the cooperation of Senators, that we can complete action on this bill in a timely manner this week. We debated the bill for over 18 hours last week, and we disposed of 29 amendments. We still have some amendments that will require debate and rollcall votes, and we will be working with the sponsors of those amendments to try to get them before the Senate as promptly as possible. We were able to clear a number of amendments last week. We have a package of cleared amendments. I am looking at my good friend from Virginia. He is nodding his head, so we believe we can act on a number of cleared amendments later today. We expect to move shortly to an amendment from the Senator from New Hampshire and the Senator from Minnesota prohibiting the chain of command from requiring female servicemembers to wear an abaya in Saudi Arabia. We are going to vote on that amendment. It is currently planned at approximately 5:45 p.m. Following the disposition of that amendment, it is our hope that we can have another amendment offered for debate and schedule a vote for sometime tomorrow morning. Finally, I note that the Defense Department and the Nation lost a great public servant this weekend.…”