Pete Domenici: “Sometime yesterday I raised this issue when most of the Republican Senators were in a meeting. It seemed, from the…”

“Sometime yesterday I raised this issue when most of the Republican Senators were in a meeting. It seemed, from the feedback, that most of them agreed with the comments that were made then. Essentially, we don't often have this situation, but what really happened--I used the word ``yesterday''--the supplemental has been around here for so long that it has run into a new problem. It ran into the problem of forest fires--huge ones--and into flooding that has been described by those who come from States where flooding has occurred. But there is no question that the forest fires and the floods, because they came a long time after these urgent supplementals, should have cleared it. In normal times you would be beyond the supplemental and you would be waiting for something else; but the supplemental bumped right into the fires and the floods, it took so long to get its rightful place here on the Senate floor. It didn't seem to be very urgent when it took 2 months to get done. But now we want to try to live by the facts the White House put into the budget before this new set of facts occurred.”