[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 56 (Thursday, May 7, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Page S4451]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                SCHEDULE

  Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, the Senate will resume consideration of the 
Thompson-Sessions amendment to H.R. 2676, the IRS reform and 
restructuring bill. Under the previous order, the time between 
approximately 9:30 and 10 a.m. will be equally divided for debate on 
the amendment. At the conclusion or yielding back of the time, the 
Senate will proceed to vote on or in relation to the Thompson-Sessions 
amendment. I repeat, that will be around 10 o'clock, maybe slightly 
after. Or, of course, some time could be yielded back.
  As a reminder, we have reached an agreement limiting amendments to 
the bill. However, there are almost 50 amendments on the list. I had 
hoped maybe there would be a dozen. I assume, even though some of 
these, or most of them, would qualify as relevant amendments, Senators 
will decide that they can offer them on some other legislation or some 
of them, hopefully, will be accepted after working with the managers of 
the legislation. I hope those who do want to offer amendments will come 
forward and do that this morning.
  We need to begin to get a lineup of which amendments will be debated 
and voted on and a time that will be used. I see no need to debate 
these amendments for 2 or 3 hours. Most of them we ought to talk about 
30 or 40 minutes and have a vote, because a lot of work has already 
been done on this legislation. We have two or three contentious issues 
we need to flesh out and have a debate and vote on, but even those 
amendments I don't think are going to be critical at this point if 
either side wins. We still can work further on this once we get to 
conference, even though I hope the conference will be short. I think it 
is incumbent upon the Congress to complete this legislation before we 
go home--I mean in its entirety--for the Memorial Day recess.
  We need the cooperation of all Senators in order to complete action 
on this important bill today, and we all have assumed it will be done 
today. It should be done today. We don't need to, and should not, drag 
it over until next week because if it does it will bump everything 
else. We have high tech, crop insurance, and Department of State 
authorization, just next week. Higher education is pending out there. 
We need to act on that.
  There will be a lot of work during the next 10 days to see if we can 
get an understanding of how to proceed, if we are going to proceed, on 
the tobacco bill. We need to get this done. For those who think I am 
huffing and puffing here, we can replicate last Thursday night if the 
Members want to. We can be sitting right here at 11 o'clock finishing 
up this bill or we can get going. Progress was made yesterday because 
we got an agreement to limit amendments, but I didn't feel the sense of 
urgency.
  So I say to the managers of the legislation, let's get going. Let's 
get the amendments racked up and be prepared to tell Senators that if 
they are not going to come to the floor and offer their amendments they 
will be shoved off at the end and they will get 5 minutes or 2 minutes 
to describe their amendments.
  Again, we don't want to stifle the Senate being able to work its 
will, but I think we have to be reasonable and be prepared to complete 
our work.
  I thank my colleagues for their attention. I yield the floor.

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