Judd Gregg: “Mr. President I don't want to beat a dead subsidy, so I will constrain myself to this last question. The point is pretty…”

“Mr. President I don't want to beat a dead subsidy, so I will constrain myself to this last question. The point is pretty obvious. Sure, any Senator on any bill can object to setting aside an amendment. That is not the way the institution has ever worked, in my experience. The way the institution works is the amendment process is a free-flowing, Wild West exercise around here, especially on bills such as this, which are huge authorizing bills with a lot of mandatory funding in them. Amendments are simply taken up in seriatim as they are offered. What will happen now, and the majority leader has been specific about this and very open about this, he is going to limit the ability to bring forward amendments, and the unanimous consent is not going to be granted unless he deems those amendments are relevant to the underlying bill, which means in his context of what is relevant. Well, a lot of us will have different views on what that means, as I pointed out on the death tax alone as an issue. So this is a process of shutting down the amendment process on the farm bill. The last time we debated the farm bill, we had 245 amendments and 19 rollcall votes, and we were on it for 4 weeks.”