[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 62 (Thursday, May 18, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4179-S4181]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          PROCEEDING TO DEBATE

  Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I just finished presiding, and the last 15 
minutes I presided was a quorum call. It occurred to me there are 
probably people watching the quorum call who wonder why there was a 
quorum call. Since I had to listen to some of the previous discussion 
that I don't think gave a full explanation of why there is a quorum 
call, or why we are not proceeding on the business of this country, I 
feel compelled to give a brief explanation.
  In the Senate, we have to get permission to proceed to debate a bill. 
That is where we are right now. We are trying to get permission to 
proceed to debate an appropriations bill. It is a foreign operations 
appropriations bill. The Democrats have decided, because of a 
procedural motion on which they lost yesterday, which will have an 
effect on the debate of the Senate for years to come perhaps, that we 
are not going to debate anything for a while.
  Let me explain a little more about what that is. What we are having 
is a filibuster. It is being done rather silently, and sometimes in a 
whining way. We are having a filibuster over whether we are going to 
debate any of the appropriations bills. What you heard earlier was them 
saying that if we can't debate extraneous, nongermane items on any one 
of the appropriations bills, we are going to see that the business of 
this country does not go forward. I want to tell you, I think that is 
wrong and I think the American people need to know about it.
  We can do a lot of finger-pointing over why things aren't happening 
around here, and that isn't going to get anything done except allow the 
voters in November to make a decision. But the voters need to know what 
it is that is happening. We are talking about whether a Senator ought 
to be able to run down here to the floor on any measure that comes up 
under appropriations--we have 13 appropriations bills to pass, and it 
usually takes a week to pass each one, and we have about 13 weeks left 
of the session this year. We are debating now whether or not you can 
come down here and just stick in any amendment you want, on any issue 
you want, and call it ``deliberative debate.''

  You can't have an appropriations amendment that legislates. Nobody 
questions that. That has been determined. We have a Senate rule that 
says you can't legislate on an appropriations bill. But there is a 
loophole there. It isn't clear whether you can pontificate on an 
appropriations bill, whether you can't stick in something that is your 
pet project and talk ad infinitum on it. That is what this is about. 
That is what the silence is about. That is what the inability to go 
forward is about. It is about whether we ought to be able to 
pontificate on anything we want to, whether or not it is relevant to 
the item that is up.
  Why is that important? I guess it is because this Chamber has 
television in it now and what we say can be carried to people all 
across this country. It is cheaper than buying a campaign ad. But it 
doesn't make it right.
  You can't legislate on an appropriations bill, so should you be able 
to do a sense of the Senate? I say you should not be able to. We should 
be at the business of taking the appropriations bills we have and 
deciding on each and every issue that is in that appropriations bill to 
see if it is the right thing to do. If it is some other issue we want 
to debate, we should not get to do it then. When we finish up the 13 
appropriations bills, we can go back to the regular legislation of this 
body. On those, there is no requirement on what can be added to them. 
You can debate and put in an amendment whether it has anything to do 
with the bill or not. My personal opinion is that you should not be 
able to do that either. We would get more business done. But there 
isn't a rule that keeps you from doing nongermane amendments on the 
regular legislative business; it is only on the appropriations.
  Why would we do that? Why would there be requirements on what can be 
debated when we are talking about appropriations? Well, the bill on 
which we are trying to get permission to debate right now is one of the 
smaller ones. A lot of people probably don't think it is very important 
to this country. In fact, if this bill didn't pass, a lot of people in 
Wyoming would probably be overjoyed. But it is our business to make 
sure we deliberate and pass this bill before October 1. What bill is 
it? The permission that has been requested is to debate the foreign 
operations appropriations bill.
  Earlier, a couple of my colleagues mentioned that if people come to 
see them in their office and they want to talk about the dairy 
business, they expect them to be able to come over here to the floor 
and solve their problem. Well, I want to tell you, that isn't how it 
happens. You can't talk to somebody in your office, leave your office, 
come over here, and solve their problem. There are days I wish it were 
that easy and that fast. But it is designed not to be that easy and 
that fast. You really have to be able to put it with something that 
will convince enough Senators it is a good idea that you can do it.

[[Page S4180]]

  If we happen to be debating a bill that has that dairy problem in it 
and the funding allocated for it, you can make a difference at that 
point in time. That is what we are talking about--how to spend the 
money of this country. As I said, this is a very small bill. This is a 
$13 billion bill--$13 billion that we are going to spend partly in the 
United States and partly around the world. It has some interesting 
provisions in it that are probably worthy of debate--funds for 
university development assistance programs across the United States. On 
page 23, they go into a whole bunch of countries that we help. In the 
report on the bill on page 34, we talk about physician exchanges, so we 
can have better health around the world. We have vitamins for at-risk 
women. On page 35, we have violence against women. One of the items 
that will undoubtedly be debated at some length in this bill is whether 
there ought to be some bilateral economic assistance to Colombia for 
narcotics control and law enforcement. But we are not going to get to 
debate those because perhaps we ought to be able to debate a sense of 
the Senate on this bill that has nothing to do with it. Patients' Bill 
of Rights is very important.
  I am one of the people on the Senate team negotiating between the 
Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate for a Patients' Bill 
of Rights. We passed that bill. It is an important bill. We are trying 
to get resolution on that bill.
  As a Senator, if we don't have the rule about how peripheral and how 
nongermane you can get, I could offer an amendment that says I have 
this sense of the Senate that everyone will agree with me on, and I 
would like that Patients' Bill of Rights finished by next week. It 
isn't going to happen because there are too many details that need to 
be worked out.
  I would have had the right day before yesterday to do that. That is 
what we are talking about. I could have demanded debate time.
  It is very difficult to bring debate to a close in this body. As you 
saw with the gun amendment which was a sense of the Senate, it was a 
nonbinding sort of thing that said they wanted the juvenile justice 
bill resolved between the House and the Senate, and they wanted it done 
by May 24, sometime next week. And it had to be done.
  Well, it isn't going to be done. It can't be done. They demanded 12 
hours of debate on that issue--12 hours of debate holding up the 
Senate. That issue is important to a lot of Members. We already debated 
it and sent it to the conference committee. It is being resolved in the 
conference committee.
  Does it deserve another 12 hours of debate when we are on 
appropriations? The appropriations bill that we are trying to get done 
now is on foreign ops. The one we finished when that came up was 
military construction, building the things that our military needs at 
home and abroad to do the right job for our national security.

  Deliberation is different than publicizing.
  These desks down here on the floor were built two per State as the 
States came into the Nation. They are the same desks that all of the 
Senators have used through the years. If you have an opportunity to be 
on the floor, you can take out the bottom drawer of these desks. 
Senators, as they were leaving this deliberative body, carved their 
names in that drawer as a tradition. Those are now preserved in 
Plexiglass. That is taken out, and Members can add their names as they 
leave.
  There is a list in each desk that shows each and every Senator who 
sat at that desk in the history of the United States. It is fascinating 
to come down here at night and sit at these desks, look at those lists, 
and see the names of Senator after Senator whom you have read about in 
your history book who has been here and debated. You can read about 
some of the great debates they gave.
  For a long time there was not even a sense-of-the-Senate amendment. 
We didn't have this pontificating, saying I really think we will feel 
better if we debate and do a sense of the Senate on this nongermane 
issue. But if you sit here at night and read those names, it is like a 
walk through history. It is also an opportunity for you to get the 
feeling that they are still in this Chamber debating whether we are 
doing the job that we ought to be doing.
  In my opinion, the job that we ought to be doing is getting the 
appropriations bills of this country done as fast as we possibly can, 
as deliberately as we possibly can, as carefully as we possibly can but 
getting it done and sticking to the issue of what is in that 
appropriations bill, or what we think ought to be in that 
appropriations bill, or what we think ought to be disappearing from 
that appropriations bill.
  Those are the amendments that we ought to be debating, turning in, 
and turning over. Those are the ones that we ought to be giving grand 
consideration to in the style that used to in this Chamber--not 
bringing in peripheral amendments and saying I think I can delay this 
whole bill so that the President can negotiate it when the new year 
begins.
  It is even possible to delay the whole thing by doing genuine 
amendments to a genuine bill. It is important for Senators to be able 
to express themselves on all issues. I daresay if you watch television 
evenings and weekends you can see Senators debating absolutely every 
issue. You can't see them making progress on every issue. That is a 
very prized thing and very difficult to do around here.
  I have to tell you that a sense-of-the-Senate amendment doesn't do 
that. A sense of the Senate delays the actual amendments that change 
appropriations.
  I suspect that if we don't get some agreement to proceed on this 
bill, we will check and see if there are other appropriations bills 
they believe are maybe important enough that we ought to be getting on 
with the business of and debating. We have 13 of them.
  I think another one that has now cleared the committee is 
agriculture. I have to tell you that I think the farmers across this 
country are going to be pretty livid if this appropriations bill is 
being held up because somebody has a sense of the Senate where they 
kind of want to see if all of the Senators kind of feel good about 
something that doesn't have to do with agriculture. They ought to be 
livid about it.

  I know when I go home, they say: How come you guys put other 
nonrelated stuff in bills you are talking about? How come some of those 
get in there? They really want the stuff to be germane to the bill that 
we are working on and they want it debated. They want it debated in a 
timely fashion. They think we ought to be getting on with the business.
  We can finish appropriations. We can talk about other bills. We 
talked about a lot of them. They just need to be resolved. But we can 
talk about those other bills. On the other bills of the Senate, you can 
still add anything you want, including a sense-of-the-Senate amendment, 
or including a motion, or legislation that has nothing to do with 
anything.
  The debate should be moving on. The debate should not be held up over 
whether we can do feel-good motions on appropriations. The debate 
should center around whether an appropriations bill is justified or not 
justified, whether we ought to spend the money or we ought not to spend 
the money, whether the program is good or whether the program is bad.
  That is the appropriations process. We have plenty of it to do as we 
spend close to $2 trillion in this United States.
  For those of you who have family budgets and scrimp and save and 
worry and force that into your capability to buy things, you can 
recognize how important it would be for us even on something as small 
as $13 billion to get started on the debate, to look at the items that 
are included to decide whether or not they are justified and make a 
decision and move forward so that we can get to the bigger bills that 
amount to billions more dollars than this one. This should be a bill 
that is done in about 1 day. But it isn't going to be 1 day. It isn't 
even going to be started in 1 day. I suspect we may not be started on 
it next weekend, unless the American people get upset with the way 
their Government is being run. I am sure they will express their 
opinion that we ought to be debating every dollar that is involved, and 
when the debate on the dollars is over, get to the other business of 
passing laws in this country.
  I thank the President. I yield the floor.

[[Page S4181]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.

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