Don Nickles: “I regret maybe some of the tone of some of the debate that has been made. I am very interested in trying to come up with…”

“I regret maybe some of the tone of some of the debate that has been made. I am very interested in trying to come up with a reasonable time agreement to take up this legislation. We have offered to do that. We have offered to give a vote on both the Democrat and the Republican proposals. I understand my colleague wants more time. He probably would like to spend a month on it. I heard him say it is the most important legislation we have before the Senate. I think I heard him say the same thing about the tobacco legislation. We spent 4 weeks on tobacco legislation, and we are not going to spend 4 weeks on this. The Senate is scheduled to be in session about 5 additional weeks, so we don't have the luxury of time that maybe we have had in the past. We have agreed to bring it up this year. We have agreed to give it adequate time for debate. We have not agreed to spend an unlimited amount of time on this.”