David Thomas: “We are down to the end of this year's activities. We are down to the end of this session. Yet we do not seem to have…”

“We are down to the end of this year's activities. We are down to the end of this session. Yet we do not seem to have established for ourselves the priorities collectively that we should handle before we leave. I understand everyone has a little different point of view. Everyone has interests of their own. Everyone has things they have pursued and find most interesting. But the fact is, we have some things that have to be done. We have some things that I think most people would agree are priorities. But we have seemingly not been able to establish how we are going to spend our time. For example, now on the floor is this railroad retirement bill. It is a bill most people would be happy to talk about. It should be talked about. But it doesn't need to be talked about now. There are many items. Senators were already talking about, of course, the security of ships and docks, and so on. It is very important stuff. Is that where we are at the moment? There is no doubt these issues are important, but there are lots of things we need to talk about. We have not finished our appropriations, which should have been done in August. They are still not done. We are having great debates over Defense appropriations, which of course is highly important. We ought to be doing that. We have some conference committee reports now that are available. We are not talking about those.”