Jeff Bingaman: “Let me try to respond using another example which I raised, I believe, a week ago to the Senator from Ohio and the…”

“Let me try to respond using another example which I raised, I believe, a week ago to the Senator from Ohio and the Senator from Idaho both. That is a circumstance we have in my home State, where you have an Indian tribe negotiating now with various utilities to put in a nuclear waste repository, a monitored retrievable storage site. Under the legislation as drafted and as presented here to the Senate, any effort by the Congress to impose requirements on an Indian tribe with regard to the running of a site, the way that a facility such as that would be conducted, if those requirements added up to more than $50 million, it would be out of order for us to consider the legislation unless we paid for it. In my view, it should not be out of order for us to consider that legislation. In my view, that is exactly the kind of legislation we ought to be considering.”