Bob Corker: “I wish to speak for 10 minutes or so. When I have 2 minutes remaining, if the Chair could tell me, I would appreciate…”

“I wish to speak for 10 minutes or so. When I have 2 minutes remaining, if the Chair could tell me, I would appreciate it. Madam President, I am here today with a sense of optimism. I know all of us are very concerned about what is happening in our country with the debt ceiling. I know we are getting lots of calls from constituents. I think we have made remarkable progress over the last couple of weeks. If we think back to just a couple of weeks ago, people were crafting legislation for sort of a political vote, if you will, and I understand that. But here we are today, and we actually have the leader of the U.S. Senate--a Democrat--who has proposed a bill that has to do with spending. The Republican leader of the House has introduced a bill that has to do with spending. Candidly, I am kind of uplifted. We are finally on the right topic now. Candidly, to use a colloquial term from Tennessee, we are beginning to cook with gas. What I mean by that is people are actually now focused on the right issue. We have all talked about this August 2 date. We have talked about the fact that our debt ceiling has to be raised by then. Certainly, there are a lot of ambiguities in the financial markets right now. A lot of them have been watching the Treasury Department and think the Treasury Department has actually made some ways of causing that to last a little bit longer. But I think one thing we can all agree to in this body at present is that we have until August 2.…”