Harry Reid: “If I may be heard briefly, the Presiding Officer is chairman of the Appropriations Committee. I know the chairman of the…”

“If I may be heard briefly, the Presiding Officer is chairman of the Appropriations Committee. I know the chairman of the Appropriations Committee and Senator Byrd have worked very hard to get appropriations bills through this soon. I want to respond to my friend from Mississippi to indicate we may not like what is proceeding--that is, the Healthy Forests initiative and the way it has been brought to the floor, and class-action legislation. They are important pieces of legislation; we understand that. But the most important business to be conducted in this body is to finish our appropriations bills. We simply are not doing that. I am extremely concerned the House is out of session this week. They will be in one week. They have conferences that cannot be completed because they are not here. They are AWOL. In addition to the conference reports--and there are a significant number of those: military construction, Energy and water, Interior, and Labor-HHS--there are six other bills people on the majority side are talking about lumping into one big omnibus bill. That really doesn't work well. Those bills are so large and unwieldy, it is difficult to get the detail to find out what is in them. They become a mishmash of legislation. I hope Members understand the best thing we can do is work to get these appropriations bills passed. There is no reason we cannot pass them. The bills that have come before the Senate have passed in a reasonably short period of time.…”