Kent Conrad: “first of all, I am enormously relieved to hear what has been discussed, and I hope in the next few moments that we could…”

“first of all, I am enormously relieved to hear what has been discussed, and I hope in the next few moments that we could agree, first of all, on amendments that have to be voted on for both sides, No. 1; No. 2, that we would agree on time limits, and it is very clear that unless the time for the debate on amendments that must be voted on is limited to 1 hour apiece, on average--some could be a little more, some could be a little less, but if we don't on average have time agreements of 1 hour or less, we cannot finish the work this week; and finally, that we agree to an order. I have seen colleagues who are very interested in some certainty. For example, if we could do Grassley-Dorgan in an hour and a half and then go to Lugar-Lautenberg for an hour and a half to at least begin the process, that would be enormously helpful, and then establish a list in order with time agreements. I wanted to take a moment to respond, as leadership is working on that kind of proposal, to an article that appeared in the Washington Post this morning that I thought was not telling the whole story about this farm bill. They have asserted that there is all this new spending in the farm bill. They focus just on the spending side of the ledger; they didn't focus at all on how we pay for it. I want to indicate that it is true that there are increases in this bill.…”