[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 128 (Thursday, October 3, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9895-S9896]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          THE SENATE SCHEDULE

  Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, the Senate is not working. The Senator 
from Iowa is correct. The Senate is almost being dysfunctional when it 
comes to appropriations bills and the budget process. We haven't passed 
a budget. I could ask unanimous consent to bring up the budget.
  This is the first time since 1974 that the Senate has not passed a 
budget. The Senate has not passed any appropriations bills and sent 
them to the President. I can't remember any time that at the beginning 
of the fiscal year we haven't sent one appropriations bill to the 
President. I fault the Senate because we haven't passed a budget. 
Therefore, we haven't worked out an agreement with the House on the 
total amount of money we are going to spend. The House has passed some 
appropriations bills because they have a budget, and we don't have a 
budget. So the Senate passes bills that are much higher than the House. 
They don't want to go to conference when the two numbers are not the 
same. Usually, if you have a budget, both the House and the Senate will 
at least be working with the same figures and it is much easier to 
reconcile and actually have a bill that would pass.
  Also, I might mention that the President has already said he would 
veto a bill that would be in excess of what the House passed. We would 
be wasting our time in that respect.
  I would love to take up more appropriations bills, but we haven't 
finished the appropriations bill that is pending before the Senate. 
Since we came back on, I believe, September 3, the day after Labor Day, 
the majority leader said we would do a dual track. We would take up the 
Interior appropriations bill in the morning and then we would take up 
the Department of Homeland Security in the afternoon. We would double 
track those. We didn't object. It took unanimous consent to do that. 
One would have thought we would have rapidly finished both bills. 
Unfortunately, we haven't finished one in the entire month of September 
when we usually do a lot of appropriations bills. We have not done one 
appropriations bill.
  The Department of the Interior appropriations bill is still pending 
before the Senate. It is not up to the individual chairman of the 
subcommittee to advance this bill on the floor. It is up to the 
majority leader to move to consideration of the appropriations bill, 
and the majority leader did not do so--I would guess because we still 
had other items on the floor. The Department of the Interior 
appropriations bill should have taken 2 days. We have been on it for 4 
weeks.
  We have been stuck on an issue dealing with fire management. The 
State of South Dakota has an exemption. They have fire management that 
the majority leader was able to pass earlier to deal with cleaning up 
their forests so they do not have such a volatile fire situation in 
their forests. Many Senators wanted to do the same thing for their 
States. They have offered amendments to do so, and they have yet to get 
a vote on their amendments. I have stated repeatedly that they are 
entitled to a vote. That is on the Department of the Interior 
appropriations bill. Hopefully, we can vote on those amendments and 
finish the bill. We should be able to do that in no time. It should not 
take too long.
  People should be able to offer amendments. If people don't like the 
amendment, they can object. It doesn't take too long to finish 
appropriations bills if the managers and the leaders are willing to 
vote to table the amendments and find out where the votes are. If you 
win, you win. If you lose, you lose. We are willing to do that.

  We haven't finished the Department of the Interior appropriations 
bill, nor the homeland defense bill.
  People say, let us add another bill to the equation. I disagree. We 
just voted on a cloture motion. We have had several cloture votes. I 
happen to disagree. Every time we turn around we are voting on cloture. 
I disagree with that.
  I think we are trivializing the rules of the Senate. Cloture should 
be used to break a filibuster. There was no filibuster on the 
Department of Justice authorization bill. We had a cloture vote.
  Some of us were hoping we could get some agreement on when we would 
have more votes on judges. We are disappointed in the fact that we have 
a lot of judges who were nominated a long time ago and who have yet to 
get a vote, and in many cases even a hearing in the Judiciary 
Committee. I spoke to that yesterday. I don't need to repeat it. But 
several outstanding nominees have not been voted on and in some cases 
have not even had a hearing before the Judiciary Committee. That 
bothers me because we are going to finish this Congress and these 
people have been waiting in some cases 1\1/2\ years and they are not 
going to get a vote.
  John Roberts comes to mind. He was nominated on May 9. He has argued 
35 cases before the Supreme Court and he didn't even get a hearing this 
year. He is eminently qualified. He is a former assistant solicitor 
general and he didn't even get a hearing this year.
  I have been pushing and I hope maybe we will be successful in getting 
a vote on Michael McConnell this year. At least the committee has had a 
hearing on him. He is from Utah. He is from Senator Hatch's State. He 
was nominated by President Bush and is supported by Senator Hatch. The 
tradition of the Senate is that surely the ranking minority member of 
the Judiciary Committee is entitled to get a vote on his judge.
  I have asked for the Judiciary Committee--and I hope it is not too 
late--to put Michael McConnell on the docket to be voted on next week. 
I hope they will. I understand he is not on it yet. I am going to 
encourage our colleagues to include him, as well as Dennis Shedd and 
others.
  There is a lot of work to be done. Now we have a whole succession of 
people coming in asking to take up their bills. The majority leader has 
the right to move to whatever item is on the floor of the Senate. That 
is his prerogative. That is the prerogative of the majority leader, and 
I support maintaining that tradition. Obviously, we have others who are 
saying: Wait a minute. I want to take up my bill.
  Labor-HHS has not passed because we haven't passed a budget. Other 
bills haven't passed because the Senate didn't pass a budget. 
Unfortunately, the majority leader never called the budget up to put it 
on the floor for a vote. It may well have been because he didn't have 
the votes.
  But I know when Senator Domenici was chairman of the Budget Committee 
he had a difficult time. And every once in a while we went to the floor 
and fought lots of battles. We won some and we lost some. But we ended 
up with a budget resolution that we were able to work out with the 
House. We would pass a budget resolution, and it would be identical 
figures, total spending figures, between the House and the Senate. That 
enabled us to move forward on the appropriations bills. We did not get 
it done this year, so we have not passed appropriations bills.

  I would also like to say I heard: Well, all these education accounts, 
they are being cut, cut, cut. That is not actually correct. I believe 
the correct statement would be: We are continuing appropriations. We 
just passed a continuing resolution for funding until next week, and 
that continues at last year's level--not an increase, not a decrease.
  So I just mention that. I think people should understand we may be on 
a continuing resolution, unfortunately--because we have not done our 
work, because we have not passed a budget, because we have not passed 
appropriations bills--we may be on a continuing resolution for months, 
but that will not be a cut for anybody. It is basically going to be a 
continuation of funding levels at last month's, last year's level. I 
say that just for people's information,

[[Page S9896]]

so they will not be saying: Well, this group is being cut or this group 
is being hurt, and so on. There may be some groups for which there 
would be pluses or minuses as to what they would have received compared 
to last year, but basically a continuing resolution says: Continue at 
last year's level. So I want to make sure that is noted as well.

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