Steny Hoyer: “reclaiming my time, I am sure if it is up to the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations I will be; but in a…”

“reclaiming my time, I am sure if it is up to the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations I will be; but in a nonhumorous, but still friendly way, we are very concerned on this side, Mr. Leader, when we hear you announce that there are conferences going on, that conference reports may come out and, to our knowledge, we have not been invited to any conferences. We have not sat down to try to resolve differences in the bills. As the gentleman knows, the labor-health bill in particular was very controversial on this side of the aisle. We want obviously to participate and try to resolve those differences and try to address those deficiencies that we see. Therefore, in light of the fact that we are going to be leaving tonight, tonight is Friday, not coming back until Monday night, and if we have a conference report, presumably that has to come out and the staff work is going to be done, because we cannot have a conference Tuesday morning or Monday night; no conference has been called as far as I know on the labor-health bill, and we cannot have the committee staff do its work between Tuesday morning if we had a conference and Tuesday afternoon, that just will not work, for us to consider the conference report. So we have a concern on our side of the aisle, Mr. Leader, in terms of how conferences are being carried out and, frankly, the definition of what a conference is now-a-days.”