Thomas Daschle: “I thought we had completed the discussion on immigration. But since it appears that is not the case, let me respond…”

“I thought we had completed the discussion on immigration. But since it appears that is not the case, let me respond again. We did not pull the bill. We could be on that bill right now. We could be taking up amendments right now. We have already agreed to short timeframes within which to debate the minimum wage amendment and the Social Security amendment. We can resolve them by 5 o'clock this afternoon and come to completion on the bill itself sometime tonight. We are prepared to do that. So do not let anybody be misled. We are not holding this bill hostage. We did not pull it down. We did not ask that there be no opportunity to vote. Welcome to the U.S. Senate. Welcome to the U.S. Senate. If our Republican colleagues are prepared right now, this afternoon, to say that throughout the rest of the 104th Congress they will never offer an irrelevant amendment to any bill because doing so would somehow indicate that they do not want a bill to pass or they are going to hold the bill hostage, we might be prepared to talk about that. But everyone knows that is not what this is all about. There are some here who do not want to deal with the issues that we are attempting to address in these amendments. So I do not think there ought to be any misunderstanding or obfuscation of the question. The question is, Do we support passage of an illegal immigration bill? The answer is not only yes, but emphatically yes.”