Don Nickles: “I am very concerned, as an individual Senator who has been in the Senate for 22 years, about how the Senate is…”

“I am very concerned, as an individual Senator who has been in the Senate for 22 years, about how the Senate is working--or, in some cases, not working. I am concerned about the pending bill and the fact that I have served on this committee for 22 years and I didn't have a chance to offer an amendment. I am also concerned about how the bill has grown. It started out at 400-some pages. The second bill, dated February 26, had 539 pages. The bill we have pending, dated March 5, has 590 pages. This bill never went through committee and didn't have a committee markup. I didn't have a chance to amend it, to read it, or to improve it. The full Senate failed to have this opportunity as well. Twenty members of the Energy Committee didn't have that chance, either. So we now face the situation where we are amending on the floor; we are significantly rewriting it on the floor. There were provisions that didn't belong in the bill in the Energy Committee on CAFE. That belonged in the Commerce Committee, but they didn't mark it up there, either. We had to amend that on the floor and fight that battle. Those provisions on CAFE standards would have impacted every automobile user, consumer, every person in the country.”