Thomas Daschle: “I, again, will publicly affirm what I have said to him privately-- that we are more than ready to grind out amendments…”

“I, again, will publicly affirm what I have said to him privately-- that we are more than ready to grind out amendments and work through the many contentious issues. I listed them last night. He knows very well what those issues are. We have a very controversial electricity title that was redrafted. Once the bill was reported out of committee, for whatever reason, the majority decided they didn't like the electricity title and redrafted an entirely different electricity title that we had not seen until Friday. So we were not able to examine it for purposes of consideration of amendments and other issues until this weekend. But we also have the question of nuclear licensing, the conservation questions which we have talked about, the renewable portfolio standards, and a number of issues that hopefully we can address in addition to the electricity matter. The tax title has yet to come up. You can't slow walk a bill that has not been pending. And it has not been pending. We have urged our colleagues to bring the bill to the floor so we could walk through these issues one by one and address them constructively.”