Thomas Daschle: “we have three options. First, whether it is the pension bill or any bill, we can go to conference and do what the…”

“we have three options. First, whether it is the pension bill or any bill, we can go to conference and do what the institution requires, and that is have Members of the Senate and House, Republicans and Democrats, present at conferences and resolve our differences in the traditional manner. Second, we can certainly pass the bill over to the House, send it over to the House at any time. We can do that on the pension bill this afternoon. The third thing we can do is what I have just suggested has been done successfully on 19 occasions so far in the 108th Congress and 51 occasions in the 107th Congress; that is, to preconference and ultimately then to confirm our agreements in a formal conference once the negotiations have been completed. We stand ready, once again, to do whatever it takes to pass the pension bill and ultimately put it on the President's desk. There is an urgency to this legislation. We will not, on any legislation this year, tolerate the unacceptable experience we had on several occasions in the first session of this Congress. Mr. President, I wish to take a moment to talk further about the transportation bill. As I said yesterday, getting this bill to the floor has been too long a process. I won't dwell on that other than to say the Congress and the administration have not been successful in bringing this bill to conclusion, and because of that we have already lost 90,000 jobs.”