Bob Dole: “first I want to commend the managers of this bill, particularly my colleague Senator Kempthorne. This is his third year…”

“first I want to commend the managers of this bill, particularly my colleague Senator Kempthorne. This is his third year, and I think he has done an outstanding job working with the distinguished Senator from Ohio, Senator Glenn. He is someone who made this commitment and stuck with it. Just for historical purposes, we have been on this bill a long, long time. The vote was 86 to 10. I think we could have finished it probably a week ago. We had 44 rollcall votes taken, 8 were unanimous. Of those 44 votes, 9 were taken on committee amendments that had been adopted unanimously in committee. We started on this bill on Thursday, January 12, at 10:35 a.m. We had 10 full days debate on S. 1. We used about 58 hours 34 minutes: The Democrats, 36 hours 55 minutes; Republicans, 21 hours 39 minutes. There were 211 amendments submitted to the desk. Of those 211, 68 were actually proposed--50 proposed by my Democratic friends, 18 proposed by Republicans; 30 were agreed to; 20 were tabled; 16 were withdrawn; 2 second-degree amendments fell; 3 have yet to be disposed of. These are just sort of background facts on how long it has taken and how many amendments and how many hours. I assume the next bill may take as much time. I hope not. If this was a warmup, we have a lot of work ahead of us. I will also suggest that this is the first step in forging a new partnership.”