Bob Dole: “I think one example is today we spent nearly 4 hours during a recess to try to work out the Boxer amendment which had to…”

“I think one example is today we spent nearly 4 hours during a recess to try to work out the Boxer amendment which had to do with violence in women's clinics. It is a very important issue. It has nothing to do with this bill. And we spent the last 2 or 3 days not discussing the amendments but discussing parliamentary procedure and whether or not we can adopt the committee amendments, which generally is a matter of course. This is a bill that has not changed a lot since last year. It has not changed much since last year. Unless something happened across the countryside that this Senator is not aware of, it is supported by the Governors, the mayors, the city officials, township and county officials, and all the others, as has been indicated by the Senator from Idaho in the debate. The House will start action on this bill on tomorrow. They will probably demonstrate, as they did in the congressional coverage, that they can pass the same bill in an hour and 20 minutes that took us 5 days because of so many amendments that were not germane. I would not suggest that we want to be like the House. I am very happy to be the U.S. Senate, and am very happy to have been in the House years ago, too. But it seems to me that we can bring this matter to a close. If cloture is invoked, all the germane amendments are going to be there. They can be a debated, adopted and disposed of in one way or the other. So I hope that tomorrow we can move on this bill. We may not.…”