Jeff Bingaman: “let me speak very briefly in regard to the Energy bill that we passed here last night. As I just did personally, let me…”

“let me speak very briefly in regard to the Energy bill that we passed here last night. As I just did personally, let me congratulate the majority leader on the decision he and the minority leader, Senator Daschle, made to move ahead and take the bill that was developed and had strong bipartisan support in the previous Congress and send that to the conference with the House as the democratically passed bill. I think that was the right decision. That bill, as many have said, had a strong majority in the previous Congress. I think there were 88 Senators voting for it. There were nearly that many voting for it last night when it, once again, passed the Senate. I think that does allow us to move to the next stage of the process of actually writing a comprehensive Energy bill. I, like many of my colleagues on the Democratic side, strongly support enacting a comprehensive bill. We have worked very hard to do that in the previous Congress. We worked hard to do that in this Congress, and to assist the majority in the development of the bill. I believe strongly that the amendments that were offered to the bill that my colleague, Senator Domenici, brought to the floor were constructive amendments, were intended to improve the bill, were intended to get us in a better position to serve the needs of the country as far as energy is concerned over the next years and decades. I think this result is a good one.”