Tom Harkin: “We are stuck, dead in the water. Again, my friend, Senator Chambliss, said he wanted to send to the desk a list of…”

“We are stuck, dead in the water. Again, my friend, Senator Chambliss, said he wanted to send to the desk a list of amendments that have been looked at. Not all of them have been filed, as I understand, but they have been talked about. As I understand it, there are 255 amendments. That is ridiculous. Of course, we are not going to have 255 amendments. But at least we could work. We are here; we could be working now. We could debate the Dorgan amendment and vote on it today. There are five requests I just offered right now, five amendments we could dispose of this afternoon. The other side objected to each one of those. Again, I am extremely frustrated, as the chairman of the committee. We got a bill through. We worked very hard on it. Senator Chambliss worked very hard on it. Yet we are stuck. We got it through committee. There was not one dissenting vote in the committee, not one. It is a good bill. As Senator Lincoln said--I heard her speech this morning--it is bipartisan, it is multiregional. There are a lot of compromises in it, as is true in any bill.”