William H. Frist: “in a few minutes we will begin voting. As most people know, we are on a very important piece of legislation, the…”

“in a few minutes we will begin voting. As most people know, we are on a very important piece of legislation, the Commerce-Science-Justice appropriations bill. We have been on it for several days. As I look through the amendments coming forward, indeed, the amendments we are considering over the course of the afternoon and evening, it is clear we have a challenge. The challenge is to be able to comprehensively address the bill with debate and amendments but at the same time not open up the bill to lots of legislation which in many ways are rifleshots that are related to Katrina or that people are attempting to relate to Katrina. I say that in part because it is important we address the underlying legislation which does have some Katrina-related aspects to it. Looking at our response to Katrina, I believe there is a right and wrong way to address that natural disaster. We have tried to act and I believe we have acted in this Senate in a very responsive way in terms of having an emergency session with the initial $10 billion, having another supplemental for $51.8 billion from two nights ago, authorizing the affected courts to meet appropriately outside their jurisdiction, announcing a joint committee we are still working on in terms of the composition to look at what went right and what went wrong, passing legislation last night on the national flood insurance program. We are working very aggressively to respond in an appropriate way.…”