Ron Wyden: “having said that, I want to state once again that I am anxious to work with all of the Senators who are on the floor…”

“having said that, I want to state once again that I am anxious to work with all of the Senators who are on the floor, and I am sure there are others hovering about the Chamber, to get on with the business of the Senate. All I want to be able to do is what I think is pretty customary in the Senate, and that is to get a vote at some point--at the time when we have the next set of amendments. But clearly, there are those here who don't want to allow that. So I think I will just have to persist. One additional area I want to focus on, I say to my colleagues, is that I and others, particularly a bipartisan group on the Energy Committee, have been trying to get an explanation from the Interior Department for months and months about what is going on with this program. What we would like to do is see if we could get some accountability. A number of Senators wrote back in January to express our concerns. We never got an answer. And what I would like to do is highlight a few points of the Senators' concerns because I think, once again, they go to this point about whether there is going to be some accountability in a multibillion-dollar program that has been costly to our taxpayers. The Senators said, in a January 24, 2006, letter: There is a series of steps the Interior Department can take to remedy the flaws with this program.…”