Chris Dodd: “My point is, I would have thought this letter might have been dated on July 7, not the day before the decision to invoke…”

“My point is, I would have thought this letter might have been dated on July 7, not the day before the decision to invoke cloture. It raises some suspicion that maybe the intention was all along to file cloture and not to give us a chance to go through the normal processes of debate and amendments. Apparently the fix was in even before we started, which indicates to this Senator that the intention was never to get to this bill. There were numerous meetings over the last several. One of the things we talked about was the importance of setting aside an adequate amount of time for the full consideration of this bill. The Democratic leader offered a proposal of limiting several nongermane amendments and a limited number of relevant amendments. The majority leader countered and offered to have even fewer nongermane amendments and an unlimited amount of germane or relevant amendments. I was mystified by that offer because had it been accepted, we could have spent weeks on this bill without ever invoking cloture if we had had hundreds of amendments filed that were germane to the underlying bill. I am convinced there is still a formulation of germane/nongermane amendments that would allow us to consider those in a relatively expedited fashion and then get to final passage of the class action reform bill.”