Advancing the Issues

Floor Speech

ADVANCING THE ISSUES -- (Senate - July 09, 2007)

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I listened with interest to my good friend, the majority leader. Let me make a few random observations before making some remarks about the Defense authorization bill.

He indicated there have been 42 cloture motions filed. That is quite a lot, no question about it. The reason that was necessary, of course, is because the majority was trying to truncate the legislative process, which, in the Senate, unlike the House, gives the minority considerable opportunity to offer amendments.

Typically, the way these things are done is to be worked out. Cloture motions do not always produce the desired result of the majority, and we look forward to having fewer cloture motions, not more, as a better way to actually pass more legislation.

With regard to the August recess, I certainly would be prepared to stay here and work. I recall the majority leader and I were here the last time that was tried in 1994, when we stayed here 2 weeks into the August recess, to try to pass the national health care plan supported by then-President Clinton and his First Lady, Hillary Clinton. After 2 weeks of frustration, Senator Mitchell gave up and the recess began. Sometimes that kind of device would be helpful; other times it may not be.

I worry a good bit about the fact we have not done any appropriations bills yet. The basic work of the Government is to fund the agencies of Government. We do it through 13 appropriations bills. We have not passed any yet. I do worry we will end up with a process that could lead us in the direction we went last year under my party and in 2002 when the Democrats were in the majority, which led to kind of a total meltdown of the appropriations process. I hope that can be avoided. There will be a lot of cooperation on this side of the aisle to prevent that from happening. But we do need to schedule the bills and actually pass them if we are going to have a chance to have anywhere near a normal appropriations process.

With regard to the 9/11 bill, as my good friend the majority leader knows, we were prepared to go to conference on that bill the Friday before the recess. No request to go to conference was actually propounded on that day. I think if we can have our staffs exchange some language, there is no good reason why we cannot go to conference on the 9/11 bill very shortly, maybe even including today.

With regard to the lobbying bill, it was my intention to go to conference on the lobbying bill. We had an objection on this side of the aisle. The objector came over here, made the objection, and that is the way the Senate works. There is still strong support for that bill on this side of the aisle. It was the first bill the majority leader brought up, with my concurrence and cooperation. We passed it with only two dissenting votes, and I am very optimistic we can get that to conference as well.

So there will be a lot of cooperation on this side of the aisle to try to advance the issues the majority leader believes we ought to address.

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