we are facing a deadline this week-- October 1. Every family in America knows about deadlines: April 15, you had better get your taxes in. A deadline is coming for shopping for Christmas, for Hanukkah. We are faced with many deadlines…

Four years ago, we had a Government shutdown. Congress failed so miserably in its responsibilities to fund the agencies of Government, we actually shut down agencies. We sent Federal employees home. They were paid later on even for the…

I managed to complete college because of the National Defense of Education Act, a bill passed by Congress, signed by President Eisenhower, that allowed me as a student from a working family to borrow money from the Federal Government to…

one of the items previously discussed deserves further exploration; that is, the whole question of what we are going to do in the closing weeks to meet the Senate's obligation to the people of this country, to deal with the most basic…

I say to the Senator, if he yields for a question, if we can extend the year to avoid the tough decisions on the budget and not only avoid Y2K, but we can repeat the month of December and have Christmas sales and inject in the economy a…

this is an amendment which addresses the question of grazing on public land. If you followed the debate on the Department of Interior appropriations bill over the last few days, and the weeks when we were in session before our August…

I have tried to make it clear with this amendment that I am not seeking to end this part of the western economy, the use of public lands for grazing purposes. I am not one of those. Someone in the course of the debate said there are some…

I ask the Senator, it is my understanding from her previous statement that many of the States have sued the oil companies saying: You didn't pay enough. You owed us more in royalties. You underpaid the amount you were required to pay for…

I wish to speak to the Bond amendment, not the Robb amendment. The Bond amendment is another one of these legislative riders on spending bills. It is an attempt to change environmental policy with an amendment to the appropriations bill…

And their payment to the taxpayers for the use of our land, the land owned by the taxpayers across America, is this royalty; is it not?

I know we are in an era of surpluses where we are trying to figure out ways to give away money, but I ask the Senator from California why would we decide to give money to oil companies at this point? Why adopt an amendment that would give…

Not only do I not think this is baseless, I want to touch all the bases so the Senator from Idaho can understand why we think this is worthy of debate on the floor of the Senate. I ask the Senator from California this: We had a big debate…

I ask the Senator from California, as a followup question, so I understand it completely, these private oil companies go on to public lands, drill for oil which they sell for a profit. They are charged a royalty based on the price of the…

I further ask the Senator from California, it has been my experience in Illinois that coal mining companies and oil exploration companies will go out and buy private land, at least an easement or right to drill on private land, and pay…

The Senator made reference to a Wall Street Journal article where a former official from ARCO said--was this under oath or was it just a public statement in terms of their efforts to try to reduce the royalty payments to the Federal…

Can the Senator from California explain the impact, then, of the Hutchison amendment, how this will affect the royalty that is paid by the oil companies that want to drill for oil and make a profit from that oil off land owned by taxpayers?

So this gentleman, no longer employed, conceded the point which you have been making during the course of this debate, that these oil companies are really cheating the Federal Government, the taxpayers of this country, because they are…

The point I am getting to is, if the Hutchison amendment is adopted, then basically we are giving a discount to these oil companies from the amount they owe taxpayers for drilling oil out of public lands and selling it at a profit; is that…

So in some of the States, for example, Texas and California, if the Hutchison amendment passes, there will be fewer dollars from these royalty payments coming back to the States of the two Senators engaged in this debate.

The sad thing is, if we give these tax cuts to the wealthiest among us, as proposed by the Republican bill, we are going to ultimately shortchange, in the outyears, some critically important programs for America, such as education. Think…

I am sad to report as of this moment we have little to show for our efforts this year. The Columbine shooting, which focused the attention of America on violence in our schools, rallied the Senate in a rare bipartisan fashion to deal with…

That is a fact. It has been a sad commentary that we know in the year 2015, if I am not mistaken, the Medicare system, as we know it--this current system--is going to go bankrupt, be insolvent. Many seniors want additional benefits to help…

My quarrel is what I consider to be the irresponsible action of the D.C. City Council with the so-called tax cut they have enacted. The sense of the Senate, which I make a part of this appropriations bill, says the D.C. City Council has a…

I will continue: [Washington, DC] has the distinction of having an AIDS death rate seven times the national average. As if this weren't tragic enough, the city also has to contend with needle-exchange opponents attacking a program that…

as part of last October's Omnibus Appropriations bill, a provision (Section 130) in the District of Columbia's FY 99 appropriations placed a $50 per hour/$1,300 per case cap on attorney's fees in cases brought under the Individuals with…