David Thomas: “I will share some general thoughts I have. It seems to me as we look forward to the remainder of this session, the time…”

“I will share some general thoughts I have. It seems to me as we look forward to the remainder of this session, the time is getting pretty short. In a couple of weeks we will begin our Memorial Day recess, and then we will be moving on towards our Fourth of July recess, of course. So between now and the time we adjourn for this year, we do not have an awful lot of time remaining. We collectively ought to see if we can figure out how we are going to accomplish many of the things that have to be done. Obviously, that is the responsibility of leadership, but we have not moved very quickly. We spent a very long time on energy--6 weeks. We have spent more time now on this trade bill, and it looks as if the prospect is we will be spending even more time than we had anticipated. We have a lot of things facing us. I hope we can wrap up the trade bill. I think it is very important. I think it is part of our future economy. As we do these things, I hope we can have a little vision of where we want to be when we are through. What do we want to happen with trade, for example, in the next 10 years? Do we want to be part of the trade process, with hopefully having fair trade around the world which will increase our opportunities to export? Thirty to thirty-five percent of our agricultural production has to go into export. As we do this, we think about what it takes to accomplish that goal, if that indeed is our vision.”