On the recordOctober 18, 2011
As soon as I answer my friend's question. I am reminded of what took place at the beginning of this year. We had a number of new Senators--relatively new Senators--who joined with some of the more experienced Senators who wanted to change the way the saw our having done business in the last Congress. I joined with my friend the Republican leader and said: Let's back off a little bit. The Republican leader said: We are going to be very discrete in what we do with the motions to proceed, to allow us to get on legislation. I said: Fine. If that is the case, we will make sure we have the opportunity to offer amendments. That has broken down big time, I say to my friend, because it is a rare day here that we have been able to move to a piece of legislation without having to go through the process of filing cloture on just the ability to get on a bill. And we have had open amendments, as we did on the small business innovation bill. Guess what happened. It was amended to death. So after 2 months--after 2 months--we gave up. We could not do that bill as had been done routinely in the past. So I say to my friend, we are going to try it again. We have these appropriations bills. We are going to try to get it done. We are waiting for people to offer amendments, and we are going to try to move through this and get it done. We are going to do the appropriations bills this week. We have other things we need to do.…
