Don Nickles: “I will not yield. My point being, the tradition of the Senate has always been to adopt a resolution announcing the…”

“I will not yield. My point being, the tradition of the Senate has always been to adopt a resolution announcing the individuals serving on committees and that this person or that person will be chairman of a committee. That has always been the tradition of the Senate. We broke tradition last year, and it was a terrible precedent to set because now if we are going to do a reorganization now, we have to negotiate wages, staff allotment, space allotment, and now people are trying to bring in blue slips. They are trying to drag in all kinds of issues so basically they can obstruct the Senate. That is absurd. Let's pass the resolution as we have done for the last 200-some years in the Senate, and say: Here is the organizing resolution; here are the committees on which you will serve. I have been in the Senate for 22 years, and that is what we have done in at least 21 out of the 22 years, and I would venture to say we did it 22 out of 22 years. The aberration being in the middle of last year after the Jeffords switch in 2001. I believe that was a mistake. Obviously, it was a mistake because we can have the Senate tied up in knots for weeks discussing all kinds of trivial issues that, frankly, should be decided by the Rules Committee, not by the Senate, not by reorganization.”