Chris Dodd: “I hope that will be the result. My point is, here we are on the first of May and our legislative year is winding down.…”

“I hope that will be the result. My point is, here we are on the first of May and our legislative year is winding down. Not that we have done much these last two years; with the exception of one or two things, the highlight of this Congress so far might have to be the renaming of the airport. And now after frittering away weeks on nominations and cloture votes on bills going nowhere, we are bringing up ESEA. Perhaps this will change with this bill--if there is any bill that deserves our full and careful consideration, it is this one. Clearly, we should be able to afford more than a few days for the most important bill, the most important issue to the American public. We spent weeks on renaming the airport; our children deserve at least this much. Madam President, how does this make sense? It is certainly not the way we have done education in the past. We have always had debates, but we have always been bipartisan. The 1994 ESEA passed with over two-thirds of our votes. Historically, education bills have come out of the committee as overwhelming bipartisan. At least in my 20 years on the committee--this may sound strange in this day and age, but we actually had elementary and secondary education legislation come out of the committee with unanimous support.”