Chuck Grassley: “I am pleased that Majority Leader Frist has called up the Class Action Fairness Act. I have been working on this bill…”

“I am pleased that Majority Leader Frist has called up the Class Action Fairness Act. I have been working on this bill since the 105th Congress, so I think it is about time the Senate completes action on this bill. My colleagues will recall that in October of last year Senator Frist brought this bill to the floor, but we were not able to proceed to the bill because of filibuster, and we lost the vote on cloture on the motion to proceed by just a one-vote margin. A supermajority of 60 votes was needed. We had 59 votes which, obviously, means that last fall we had enough votes to pass the legislation but could not get around the filibuster. When you are up against a filibuster, you have to work out issues because nothing in the Senate gets done that is not done in a fairly broad bipartisan way. Since then, I have worked in good faith with Senator Hatch, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and our lead Democratic cosponsors, Senator Kohl and Senator Carper, to modify the bill to address a number of concerns raised by their colleagues on the Democratic side, Senators Dodd, Landrieu, and Schumer. These Senators are now satisfied with the changes we made to this bill. We reintroduced the legislation this year as S. 2062. So the bill before us goes even further in terms of compromising on the issues than were brought before the Senate last October--enough action, I hope, that we can get to finality within a few days.”