On the recordDecember 8, 2010
If we could have a conference between the House conferees and the Senate conferees on the food safety bill, we could come to some reasonable compromises where we could recommend a vote for the food safety bill as a stand-alone bill. That is still possible to do or would be possible if the Speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate and the chairmen of the appropriate committees in the House and Senate were willing to go down that road. In this Congress, those types of conferences have been few and far between. So we are stuck here in a situation where you have a reasonably good piece of legislation that passed the House, a not as reasonably good piece of legislation that came out of the Senate at the last moment and is being attached to a continuing resolution that shows that the majority in both this body and the other body have refused to take their funding responsibilities very seriously for the last year. So as much as good as is in the food safety part of the bill, and as hard as Chairman Waxman and Chairman Dingell and Subcommittee Chairman Pallone have worked on that part of it, I still believe that the correct vote on this bill today is a ``no'' vote.
