Tom Harkin: “a lot of work has gone into this bill. The person who led that whole work for a 2-year period of time was Senator…”

“a lot of work has gone into this bill. The person who led that whole work for a 2-year period of time was Senator Mikulski. I happen to be chair of the committee. But it was Senator Mikulski and Senator Burr, working together, who really have brought this to fruition. It is a good bill. Senator Alexander always says that our committee probably has the biggest divergence ideologically of any committee in the Senate. Yet we have reported out, I think, 19 bills out of our committee, 10 of which have been signed into law during this Congress. We are able to do that because people work together. We work things out. That is what has happened with this bill. There are a lot of crosscurrents on this bill. There are a lot of items that Senator Mikulski would like to have had in the bill, that I would have liked to have had in the bill, and I am sure I can say the same thing for the Republican side. But over a 2-year period of time--I know it has been at least that-- Senator Mikulski has worked on this. We made our agreements, and we worked it out to the point where the bill passed our committee unanimously. We have, as I said, a wide divergence of ideological views on our committee. So, here is a bill that passed unanimously. We will have an open process here of debate, deliberation, and amending. I think at this time we have a pretty defined universe of the amendments, unless something else pops up that I did not know about. We are working on those.…”