Thomas Daschle: “this bill is going to change business as usual. There will be less ability to sneak things in, less opportunity for…”

“this bill is going to change business as usual. There will be less ability to sneak things in, less opportunity for people late at night to put little provisions in the bill that we only understand later to have consequential effects both budgetarily and otherwise. It gives the President the chance to highlight questionable spending and force the authors to defend it publicly, discourages questionable projects if authors know they may be forced to defend them in public. So there is no doubt the legislation that many of us support, the original Domenici-Exon bill is strong, it will work. Unfortunately, it ought to be the bill that we are debating today, but we are not. We are not because, for some reason, the Republicans have chosen to come up with a new concoction, some other provision that does not have the provisions that I just described, despite the broad bipartisan support for a bill that throughout the process has shown to have the kind of bipartisan support necessary to move this legislation along. Mr. President, I wonder what the real motivation may be. Is the motivation the desire to pass meaningful line-item veto legislation or the motivation to try to embarrass the President or the Democratic Members of the Senate? I do not know.…”