Byron Dorgan: “I was happy to yield because the Senator from Georgia is a thoughtful Member of this body and offers an interesting…”

“I was happy to yield because the Senator from Georgia is a thoughtful Member of this body and offers an interesting proposal. It is one that I do not support, but certainly I respect his views on this issue. I had hoped we would be discussing the central portion of the Coverdell bill and amendments to it. But I say to the Senator from Georgia that the majority leader has run for the Senate in only one State, and other Members of the Senate who are elected to this body from their States have a right to offer amendments on legislation brought to the floor of the Senate. My understanding is that the reason we are now on NATO expansion is because, when the Coverdell bill was brought to the floor of the Senate, the majority leader wanted people on this side of the aisle to agree not to offer a certain number of amendments, to package them only the way the majority leader wants them packaged, and to offer them for a vote, up or down. If that is the way he wants to run the Senate, I say fine, but we have the right to offer amendments and intend to offer amendments, not just on the issue of school modernization, or the size of classrooms or the addition of 100,000 new teachers to limit class size, but also on a range of other issues that we think are important in the area of education. It is a fact that today we were told that, unless we agree to dramatically reduce our proposals on education, we were not going to be debating education on the floor of the Senate.”