Thomas Daschle: “let me emphasis that I want to give the distinguished majority leader plenty of benefit of the doubt, and I want to work…”

“let me emphasis that I want to give the distinguished majority leader plenty of benefit of the doubt, and I want to work with him in good faith. Obviously, he is attempting to work through a number of challenging scheduling questions. I applaud him for making that effort. To the best of my ability, I intend to work with him as closely as I can. He has indicated that he does not know whether we can get through them all. I hope that he would say, ``At least I am going to try.'' That is all I am asking at this point, that the leader attempt to work with me to try to deal with all 23. If we fail for a lot of reasons, we may fail. But I think my colleagues would like very much to know that at least at some point between now and the August recess, given the fact that we are hoping to cooperate on a whole range of issues--the distinguished leader gave me a two-page, single-spaced list of legislative items that he wishes to bring up between now and the August recess. That is going to take a lot of cooperation on both sides of the aisle for us to get it done. We have a defense bill that he wants to bring up this week. Hopefully we can work through that. But the degree to which there is bipartisan cooperation has everything to do with how much cooperation there is on both sides on issues that we both care about. My colleagues care very deeply about this list of judicial nominees.”