[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 138 (Monday, September 30, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11936-S11937]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ORDER OF PROCEDURE

  Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I am glad we have that vote behind us. I 
know Senators are very interested in how we will proceed and what will 
be the next subject we will take up.
  Before I get to a unanimous consent request, I would like to inform 
all Senators, I know a lot are interested in what is happening with 
regard to the parks bill. We are still working on that. As most of you 
know, the House did pass a different parks bill from the omnibus bill 
that had been pending here. The conference report on the omnibus parks 
bill had been pending here, I guess, for 3 or 4 days. They moved 
another bill with a fewer number of parks in it, I think somewhere 
around 104 park projects, and then they added some heritage trails, 9 
or 10 of those. So we have a bill pending here.
  Still, some very important parks were not included in that list that 
came back from the House. Some of those are in Colorado, which is 
really hard to understand why they were not left in, some in Alaska, 
but several that really have a lot of support.
  We have been working with the Senator from California and the Senator 
from Alaska to see if we can find a way to come to agreement of how we 
can get that legislation passed and address the concerns that are still 
out there.
  That effort is still underway. We are working with the 
administration. Senator Murkowski has been talking with White House 
officials in the last couple of hours. That effort is still underway. 
We don't know how we are going to be able to get it done or when. We 
are still working on it. As soon as we can get an agreement, we will 
make that announcement. I hope it can be done in

[[Page S11937]]

such a way that a recorded vote is not necessary, but we are not to 
that point yet.

  The business at hand is the FAA reauthorization bill. We cannot leave 
without getting that reauthorization done.
  On Saturday, I had a unanimous consent request that we were prepared 
to propound, which we thought was going to be accepted, that the Senate 
turn to the consideration of the conference report to accompany the FAA 
reauthorization bill and that we would have a cloture vote on Monday, 
today, at 5 o'clock.
  Because of the desire to notify the Members that we would not have 
further recorded votes on Saturday, I made that announcement so 
everybody would know, and that made it possible for this cloture effort 
to be blocked, in effect. The indications were that, ``Well, we're 
going to have a scorched Earth effort and we might require all kinds of 
procedural votes,'' and we couldn't get to forcing this to a head after 
that particular move over the weekend.
  So we are finding ourselves where we are now.

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