Bill Lee: “There we have it. Keep in mind, what you have just witnessed is my making a motion not to pass this into law, not even a…”

“There we have it. Keep in mind, what you have just witnessed is my making a motion not to pass this into law, not even a motion to accept this as an amendment to the text. I just asked for consent to call up the amendment and make it pending so that it could be one of the items that we consider, one of the matters to be voted on, one of the matters that we would at least have the opportunity to consider and debate on; to, hopefully, ultimately, vote on; and to ultimately resolve. But I guess that was too much. My friend and colleague from Illinois, in acting, undoubtedly, at the direction of the Senate Democratic leadership, made an objection even to calling that up and to making the amendment pending. This is what the rules of the Senate--more than two centuries old--have evolved to over time. This is what they are there to do. All of these odd terms like ``cloture'' and all of these procedural votes that we have are really designed to maximize the opportunity for each individual Senator to make sure that we have robust debate and to consider possible improvements to be made to a bill. In the past, this wasn't such a difficult thing to do. I have been in the U.S. Senate for 13 years now. I arrived in 2011. Things weren't perfect by any means, but, at the time, it was fairly common, when we were considering a major piece of legislation--or even some relatively minor pieces of legislation and while that legislation was pending--to direct time set aside to debate the measure.…”