On the recordJuly 17, 2014
As was mentioned, I believe by some of my colleagues, the give-and-take on this bill was ideally how things should work. First, a bipartisan group of Senators got together and crafted the legislation. As Senator Crapo noted, there was some push and pull, what should be the balance between government and the private sector, and we did move a little bit more in giving greater responsibility to the private sector. People should note that at the end of the day the private sector will pay back all the money the government would lay out if, God forbid, there is a terrorist incident, but it would be over a period of time of course. But we had Democrats and Republicans come together and we came up with a bill. The chairman and ranking member agreed that the bill was a good idea, held hearings, and then we moved forward with the legislation. Then always comes the even greater morass. We do get some bills passed out of this place with bipartisan support and many of them are significant bills, but then we go to the floor and we wonder what is going to happen now. We have the age-old dispute about how many amendments, what type of amendments, should they be relevant. In this case we asked colleagues on both sides of the aisle who would want amendments. The amendments that came back were reasonable. Most--not all--were related to terrorism insurance.…
