Arlen Specter: “we have been sitting in the Chamber without accomplishing much for more than 45 minutes now. We had, in my view, more…”

“we have been sitting in the Chamber without accomplishing much for more than 45 minutes now. We had, in my view, more quorum calls and more time which was not spent on the bill than we should have. We have a great many amendments pending, and we are going to be pushing ahead. We are filing cloture today, and we are going to be pushing ahead to try to get this bill finished at the earliest time. Whether it is Thursday, Friday, or when this week, I do not know. We have been awaiting for more than 30 minutes the arrival of a Senator to offer another amendment. And very candidly, I am tired of waiting. So that concludes the action on this bill today. We will begin tomorrow morning with a series of amendments. We had wanted to vote on a number of amendments which were pending, but we cannot because too many Senators have other commitments. That is something that is hard to understand sometimes: why we are notified midafternoon that Senators are too busy to attend to the business of the Senate and to vote. I say in gest that I am going to run for majority leader on a platform to have a 4-day workweek, from Monday noon until Friday noon. That would double the workweek of the Senate. The second plank of my platform--I notice the two Senators from Georgia are amused; anybody would be amused--to hold down these votes to 15 minutes and 5 more minutes, we did pretty well on that. We had an 18\1/2\-minute vote. So that is a little progress.…”