Don Nickles: “I tell my friend and colleague from Nevada, I am happy to work with him to try to expedite consideration of the bill. I…”

“I tell my friend and colleague from Nevada, I am happy to work with him to try to expedite consideration of the bill. I might note, the President sent the urgent supplemental request on March 21. It was just recently marked up--I believe, last week. So we have had it on the floor for a couple days. We have had a chance to review it. We did cooperate with the assistant majority leader to invoke cloture, which is unusual. I can't remember invoking cloture on an appropriations bill. Maybe the chairman of the committee remembers. It has probably happened, but it is not often. We did it in an effort to try to streamline it. There are a lot of people trying to pass a budget on this bill. I happen to be on the Budget Committee. I would like for us to consider a budget, but we haven't had a budget on the floor of the Senate yet. Some people were trying to rewrite the budget through the Appropriations Committee, and I questioned the wisdom of that. I was a little concerned about that. Invoking cloture eliminates the budget debate. We are not going to have four or five more proposals dealing with budgets and caps and budget rules, and so on. We will deal with appropriations bills. Now we have a list of amendments, a list of amendments germane postcloture. I will work with the Senator from Nevada to review that list. I don't know if we can possibly pass this bill tonight. I will try. I will work with him to try to do it. We will try to pass a good bill.”