Don Nickles: “I regret that my colleague from Massachusetts has objected to our unanimous consent request to bring this bill up.…”

“I regret that my colleague from Massachusetts has objected to our unanimous consent request to bring this bill up. Obviously, he has some concerns, but he does not have the votes. We have offered to vote on his proposal. He can draft his proposal any way he wants. We have drafted our proposal. We want to vote on our proposal. We want to pass our proposal. We will give him an up-or-down vote on his proposal. We will offer and have offered that he can have two or three amendments, and we can have two or three amendments. We can finish this bill. He can draft those amendments in any way, shape or form he wants to and address any and all issues he has addressed today that might be in this letter or another letter. I hope he will do better work in the letter than the President did in his radio address. He was factually incorrect in that. I happen to be offended by that. I just make that comment. To reiterate, we offered to bring this up in July. My colleague from Tennessee and I and others wanted to finish it in July because we know we have a difficult conference with the House. This is not the easiest legislation to consider. So it is important to move sooner rather than later, as I think I heard my colleague from South Dakota mention. So I hope we will bring it up. But we are going to have to have cooperation from our colleagues. If they continue to insist on unlimited amendments, to where they can debate this issue all month, that is not going to happen.”