Zach Nunn: “As we begin the fourth day of consideration of this bill, I thought it would be appropriate to give the Senate my own…”

“As we begin the fourth day of consideration of this bill, I thought it would be appropriate to give the Senate my own view of where we have been and where I think we are going if we are going to finish this bill, which is a very important measure. Thus far, we have debated this bill for about 24 hours. We have disposed of 34 amendments. I have not kept an exact count of the amount of time consumed by consideration of three nonrelevant, nongermane amendments thus far to our bill, but I will make a conservative estimate, and a charitable observation, that well over half of the time of our debate has been devoted to these three nonrelevant amendments. While I believe the issues of reopening Pennsylvania Avenue, pharmaceutical patents under the GATT agreement, and the stalking of women are certainly worthy of Senate debate, none of them are in the jurisdiction of this committee, and none of them are in the jurisdiction of the conference when we go to conference. All of them, even if they are passed on this bill, will require outside conferees and are unlikely to be accepted by the House. The simple fact is that we cannot afford the time it takes to consider and to continue considering these nonrelevant amendments. I may vote for all of them. But, at some point, the Senate has to decide whether it wants to pass a defense bill. If so, then both sides of the aisle have to cooperate and not continue putting these kinds of amendments on the bill.”