On the recordAugust 4, 2021
I thank the majority leader for allowing me to say a few words tonight, and I want to commend him and the Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell, for allowing us to have this series of amendments. The Senate has worked its will and will continue to work its will tomorrow. As was said, there have been 22 amendments on the floor. About half of them are Democratic amendments, and about half of them are Republican amendments. I will say, also, there has just been a lot of discussion that has ensued because of this amendment process. So a lot of people have had the opportunity to discuss their issues to try to improve the bill in certain ways, and, frankly, a lot of these amendments were accepted; they were voted on positively--well, one just recently with regard to a safety issue that was just discussed--and improve the bill. So that is the way this place ought to work, and I think it is consistent with what we tried to do in this process from the beginning, where we saw an opportunity to pull out core infrastructure from a much larger package and deal with it without raising taxes but by focusing on bipartisan solutions, and that is exactly what the underlying bill does. The next step in that, then, was to say: Let's try to have an open amendment process too. And sure enough, we have.…
