[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 211 (Friday, December 29, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S19302]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  UNANIMOUS-CONSENT REQUEST--H.R. 1643

  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, based on what I said earlier, I now ask 
unanimous consent that the Finance Committee be discharged from further 
consideration of H.R. 1643 regarding MFN status for Bulgaria, and that 
the Senate now proceed to its immediate consideration; that all after 
the enacting clause be stricken and the text of H.R. 2099, HUD-VA, H.R. 
1977, Interior, and H.R. 2076, State, Justice, Commerce, as vetoed by 
the President, be inserted, the bill be advanced to third reading and 
passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, all 
without any further action or debate.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there objection?
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I ask that 
the unanimous-consent request be modified to provide for a substitute 
amendment which would reopen the Government and keep it open until 
January 30. Absent such a modification, I object.
  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I reserve the right to object. I will just 
state to my friend from Vermont that we both share the same feeling 
about returning employees to work. But if we can, as I indicated 
earlier, get these bills down to the President, agree with the 
President any problems he has with these bills will be resolved in the 
budget agreement, then these employees will be back to work until the 
end of the fiscal year. So it would be permanent, it would not be a 30-
day continuing resolution. That would leave, as I said, the District of 
Columbia, which is now under a continuing resolution, and Labor-HHS, if 
I can convince my colleagues to let us bring that up, and then foreign 
ops where there is only one difference holding up that very important 
piece of legislation. I would be constrained to object on that basis.

  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there objection to the majority 
leader's original unanimous-consent request?
  Mr. LEAHY. Reserving the right to object further. I will note that I 
share the distinguished majority leader's--one of the finest majority 
leaders this Senate has had--desire to go back, but I cannot agree to a 
unanimous-consent to, in effect, override vetoes of the President by 
unanimous consent. So I do object.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Objection is heard.
  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I had not thought of that, but I think that 
probably would be something to think about. These are separate bills, 
not the ones vetoed by the President. It would be new bills. They would 
be identical to the ones he vetoed. But the one additional ingredient 
here is that we are on these budget negotiations, and we are serious 
about it--the President is, I am, the Speaker is, Senator Daschle and 
Congressman Gephardt are.
  I know on the Interior bill, for example, there are only about three 
reasons the President said he vetoed that bill. Those are all the parts 
and all the things we are hearing about on the nightly news. We ought 
to be able to resolve that. Maybe we can come back later and try, 
instead of these three at once, maybe sending down one we might be able 
to work out. We would do this only with the agreement of the President. 
So we are not trying to do anything here that the President would not 
sign off on, and I intend to raise that at our 3:15 meeting and tell 
him in good faith that if he would let us send down these one or two 
bills, we are prepared to resolve differences as part of the budget 
agreement.
  I thank my colleague from Vermont. Maybe we can revisit this in a 
different form later today.
  Mr. LEAHY. If the distinguished majority leader would yield, Mr. 
President, I share his concern and desire to put the Government back to 
work. This is not a thing that is helping anybody. They should be back. 
I wish him well in his meetings with the President. I have felt, if I 
might state frankly, that if the issue to be resolved in this budget 
impasse was left to this Chamber, Republicans and Democrats could come 
together with the President. It would mean that we would not have a 
Clinton budget, a Dole budget, a Leahy budget, but we might have the 
best of all of them and we would have a balanced budget.
  I have been in negotiations and conference committees with the 
distinguished majority leader on everything from agriculture to foreign 
policy to finance and tax matters. I know that while he is a strong and 
tough bargainer, I know he also wants the Government to operate. I 
believe there is the possibility to do this and I hope we might.

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