[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 176 (Tuesday, December 9, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Page S16082]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                SCHEDULE

  Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, I welcome everybody back from a short 
recess over the Thanksgiving holiday. I hope everyone did have a safe 
and a restful period after a very busy 3 to 4 weeks just prior to that. 
I hope everybody had an opportunity to spend good time, quality time 
with family and friends.
  As I announced before the break, we have returned today with the hope 
of completing our work on the appropriations process. Chairman Stevens 
finished the negotiations on the omnibus measure, and that conference 
report was filed in the House of Representatives before we departed for 
Thanksgiving.
  Today, we hope to take up that conference report and dispose of it, 
although I understand this will not be possible. I will be discussing 
momentarily other options with the Democratic leader and will likely be 
propounding a unanimous consent request for consideration of the 
omnibus bill here later this morning.
  We will not have any rollcall votes today, but in addition to any 
agreements we may reach here on the omnibus measure, we would like to 
also consider other legislative and executive matters that can be 
cleared over the course of the day. Specifically, there are a large 
number of important executive nominations that are pending on the 
calendar that I hope we will be able to address. Again, I will be 
working with the Democratic leader to proceed to any of these 
noncontroversial nominations before we conclude our business today.
  At this juncture, I will be happy to yield to the Democratic leader, 
and then likely we will go into a period of morning business, and we 
will have a discussion about the further plans for the day.

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