Don Nickles: “first, I compliment my friend and colleague from Pennsylvania for his leadership, and I just want to make a couple of…”

“first, I compliment my friend and colleague from Pennsylvania for his leadership, and I just want to make a couple of general comments. I, for one, would like to see us pass the Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bill. We should have passed it by the end of September. We did not get it done. We should have passed it by the end of the year. We did not get it done. You might ask, Why didn't you pass an appropriations bill? Because we had something very unusual. As a matter of fact, I have been in the Senate now--this is my 16th year. I cannot remember a party holding up moving to considering an appropriations bill for months. That is unique. That is historic, and the reason is because the Democrats in Congress, in the Senate, did not want us to take up the Labor and Health and Human Services bill. We tried. We even had votes. On September 29, we had a vote on whether or not we would move to this bill, and they said, ``No, we don't want to move to the bill.'' They did not want to move to the bill because there is a provision in there dealing with striker replacement. Somebody said, ``Well, that wasn't a germane amendment to this bill.'' It certainly was. It said no money should be used to enforce the President's Executive order dealing with striker replacement. There is also money in the bill that says no money will be used to enforce the President's order dealing with the prevailing wage on helpers. That has been in there for a few years.…”