[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 106 (Friday, July 31, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9521-S9522]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                SCHEDULE

  Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, we will have a period for morning business 
today. Following that, the Senate will turn to the consideration of any 
legislative or Executive Calendar items cleared for action. We are 
hopeful that some bills can be cleared by unanimous consent. I believe 
that last night we were able to move around some 20 nominations, plus 
military nominations, plus at least two or three bills. The Work Force 
Development Conference Report was one of those. I am glad we were able 
to move it quickly by unanimous consent. It is almost a shame to do it 
just in wrap-up because that is such a monumental achievement. We have 
been working on that legislation now for at least 3 years. We have had 
difficulty getting it through each body and through conference. But I 
believe the conferees did a fine job.
  I commend Senators Jeffords, DeWine, and all the Senators on both 
sides of the aisle that were involved in that. That consolidation of 
jobs training programs will allow us to get better use of the money we 
have, and a better program for workplace development is an important 
cog in our effort to improve our overall education opportunities, which 
should include job training.
  As we continue to move toward more and more people going off of 
welfare and into meaningful jobs, it means we have to continue to work 
and improve elementary and secondary education, higher education, as 
well as vocational education and job training. I believe that 
conference report will do that. I wanted to point out once again this 
morning what did occur last night. We will continue to try to move 
other agreed-to bills and conference reports of that nature. We do 
expect that we will move a number of nominations throughout the day. We 
may even have to wait a little while to get those agreements worked out 
or to see if there are others that may be coming out that could be 
cleared today.
  When the Senate returns from the August break, there will be two 
back-to-back rollcall votes at a time to be determined by the two 
leaders. Obviously, as we announced last night, there will be no 
recorded votes today. I know all the Senators already knew that, but I 
just wanted to confirm it

[[Page S9522]]

again. As it stands now, we will have two votes when we return, either 
on August 31, or the 1st of September. The first one will be on the 
adoption of the Texas low-level waste conference report. There will be 
4 hours of debate on that, equally divided, and then a vote. Then we 
will have a vote on the conference report to accompany the military 
construction appropriations bill, which will be broadly supported, 
probably 99-0 or 100-0. As is usually the case, if we don't vote on an 
appropriations bill when it goes through the Senate the first time, we 
do usually want to have a vote on the final conference report.
  Again, I thank all our colleagues for their cooperation over the last 
couple of weeks. I think we made some really good progress. We have 
cleared eight appropriations bills, and the ninth, Treasury-Postal 
Service is probably within 30 minutes or an hour of completion. I hope 
we will be able to do that the first week we are back.
  We do expect to take up other appropriations bills when we return. I 
don't know the exact order now, but we have the foreign operations 
appropriations bill, the Interior appropriations bill, the District of 
Columbia appropriations bill, and the Labor-HHS, Education 
appropriations bill. We expect, also, to take up the bankruptcy 
legislation that came out of the Judiciary Committee. And we do have 
the trade package from the Finance Committee. I will need to talk with 
all interested Senators about exactly when and how to schedule that.
  I wish all my colleagues a very restful and productive August break. 
We will look forward to seeing our colleagues then.

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