[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 23 (Wednesday, February 7, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1656-S1658]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         RESOLUTIONS PROCEDURE

  Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I was pleased to hear just a moment ago the 
suggestion that maybe we go to the Omnibus appropriations bill in such 
a way that would allow some amendments to be offered on both sides. 
That is good. That is the way it ought to be. That is why I have been 
surprised and, frankly, disappointed that we have not been able to come 
to some sort of agreement about how to proceed to these resolutions 
dealing with the President's plan to take action in Iraq and have a 
full debate on the substance.

  Of the plan and the resolutions, I don't think there is any excuse 
for the fact that we have come to the point where we are throwing up 
our hands and saying: I can't have it my way, you can't have it your 
way, therefore, we will have it no way.
  If this were the Super Bowl, whether you were Grossman or Manning, 
you would call a time out and say, wait a minute here, there has got to 
be a way we can get a plan to go forward. I know how difficult it is to 
do this because our leaders on both sides of the aisle get pressured 
from all sides. They are pulled. Don't agree to that, you have to agree 
to that.
  In the end, the leaders have to decide how we go forward in a fair 
and an open way, and the rest of us have to support that decision. The 
majority has strong power in the House of Representatives, and a good 
bit in the Senate. But I think the most difficult job in the city is 
the job of being majority leader, the job that Senator Reid has right 
now because he doesn't have a Rules Committee. He is not the President. 
He can't give an order and have the bureaucracy move, not that the 
bureaucracy ever moves. He has to work with the minority. He has to 
find a way to move things forward.
  Some people say: Oh, that is the process. Look, the process is 
substance because if you can't figure out how to get it done, you never 
get to the substance. This is not an autocracy. No one person possesses 
unlimited power. You have got to give to get a little. You can't have a 
deal where you say: No, no, you can't offer but one amendment; and, by 
the way, it has to be this.
  If we were going to do anything, we should have gone with more, not 
less. So I don't get it. If this is the big, important, serious issue 
we all say it is, surely we could have worked out a way to proceed. 
Well, I guess the one thing we could say is, we will get back to this. 
We are going to get back to it in many different ways. But at least in 
the future, when we get to the debate, it is going to be a serious 
debate about something that is real.
  We were talking about taking up resolutions that had no binding 
effect. It was a feel-good deal. Yeah, we are going to take a pop at 
the President. Yeah, we support the troops, but no, we don't support 
the troops.
  Oh, yes, thank you very much, General Petraeus, 81 to nothing, you 
are confirmed. Go over to Iraq. Oh, and by the way, we don't agree with 
what you are going to try to do. We don't support the plan. How did we 
get into that?
  At least at some point, men and women of strong principle and beliefs 
are going to offer up amendments that are going to say: Support the 
troops, stick with the plan or pull out. High tail it out. Get out of 
there now. And then we will have a real debate and we will have real 
votes. That is what, under our Constitution, we should be doing, 
actually.
  I think the proposal that Senator Gregg had, made eminent good sense. 
Let's show we support the troops. Gee whiz, why is that a bad idea? The 
American people don't want to send our troops into harm's way around 
the world or even in Baghdad without knowing we are behind them.
  So what is the problem? The problem is that it was able to get 80, I 
don't

[[Page S1657]]

know, or 90 votes. We can't have that vote because later on we may want 
to actually cut off the funds to the troops. There are some little, 
bitty twists of language, too, such as we support funding for the 
troops in the field. What does that mean, ``in the field''? What if you 
are on the way? What if you are in a brigade that is pulling out of 
Texas now or pulling out of Kentucky or that has landed in Kuwait? We 
don't support them. There are too many nuances.
  Let me get away from process and talk about substance. We have a 
problem in Iraq. A lot of people now have shifted their position and 
are saying: Well, I voted for it earlier, but I am against it now. 
Yeah, it has gotten tough, so I don't like it.
  Everybody says change the status quo. I had a chance to talk to some 
world leaders recently in Switzerland and they were saying: My 
goodness, you can't do that, can't do this, can't do something else.
  I said: Here is the choice: Stay, leave or do what?
  They said: No, you can't leave. You have to stay. Well, what do you 
propose? Deafening silence. The President understood we had to change 
the status quo. Action had to be taken. A plan had to be developed. He 
proposed a plan. He met with us. He came to the Congress. He spoke at 
the State of the Union: Here is what I propose to do. Give this plan a 
chance. Give the plan a chance.
  And General Petraeus, maybe the General Grant of this war, or the 
General Washington of a previous war--this is the man of the hour, and 
I hope and pray the good Lord will guide him in the right way because 
he has a serious challenge before him.
  But this is not just about a surge, although that is a part of the 
plan. This is a plan with at least three other key components. But ask 
yourself, we say to the Iraqis: You have to get a political solution. 
Everybody is saying: No, we will never get a military solution without 
a political and economic solution.
  Well, yeah. But how do you get a political solution in chaos? How can 
you get a political solution when your capital is being blown up every 
day by insurgents of all stripes? You have got to get a grip on 
security. It is similar to here in our Nation's Capital. We couldn't 
have orderly Government if we didn't have order. So we are going to try 
to send in the best we have, under the best general we have, and get 
some control of the violence and the chaos in Baghdad and then give the 
Iraqis a chance to deal with the politics.

  Am I convinced all of this is going to work? I don't know. I am not 
the best expert in the world. I have been on the Armed Services 
Committee, I have been on Intelligence. I have been around awhile. But 
I am not going to impose my military judgment on a man such as General 
Petraeus. But let's see if the politics will not work. There is a lot 
of pressure. They know, they know.
  I met with the Vice President of Iraq recently and he was talking 
about: Well, what is your strategic plan? I said: No, sir. Excuse me. 
With all due respect, it is not about what is our plan. What is your 
plan? It is your country, your Government. When are you going to ante 
up and kick in, in a way that brings leadership and order out of all of 
this?
  So the second part of the President's plan is for different rules of 
engagement. It is for a requirement that some political achievements be 
reached. That is why I like the McCain-Lieberman-Graham proposal. I 
like benchmarks. So the question is: It is one thing to lay down 
benchmarks, but what if they don't meet them? Then, you decide. If we 
conclude it would not work, that they can't govern themselves, then we 
have to go with the next plan. Somebody said: Well, this is the last 
plan. It is never the last plan. There is always another plan.
  But the politics, I think, we can be successful. We certainly have to 
try. I do think that regional solutions--getting particular provinces 
under control or particular sectors under control, getting generals in 
for different sectors--makes good sense. But also the economy. Look at 
America where you have people who are not working. Their life is 
insecure. They get into trouble. I understand that 40 percent of the 
young men in Baghdad don't have a job. There has to be a better job 
done of getting the money--the oil money--fairly distributed and done 
in an economic way that will create jobs so that these young men and 
women will not be bored and looking for ways to kill themselves.
  Mr. President, we should have found a way to go forward with this 
debate. I don't quite understand what is going on. Maybe we are all 
having to learn a little different roles of who is in the majority and 
who is in the minority and how it works. I know for sure that in some 
respects it is easier to be in the minority than to in the majority.
  The majority leader has to be--he has to be tough. He has to eat a 
little crow every now and then. He has to be prepared to say to the 
Republicans: We will find a way to work this out. You have to keep 
poking at it. Somehow or another, we didn't want to do it this time. I 
don't know. Maybe everybody is going to leave the field and say we won. 
This is not about winning or losing. This shouldn't be about the 
political winner or who won the PR battle.
  We are playing with lives. America's finest. I think we should 
support them, as Senator Gregg proposes. We need to give the plan the 
President has developed a chance because nobody else has come up with a 
better plan, other than pull back at the borders. What good is that? 
Which way are we going to shoot? To me, that is the worst of all 
worlds.
  We can make this work, but the President, General Petraeus, our 
troops, the American people need our support and our confidence in what 
we are attempting.
  We can go on and have the debate today about these nominees--two good 
men. We can turn to the omnibus appropriations and find a way to get it 
done with order.
  Nobody wants to play games. Nobody should be trying to say: Oh, if 
you don't do it this way, or my way, you are trying to shut down the 
Government. Nobody should be saying we are going to filibuster if we 
don't get everything we want.
  This is the Senate. You have got to give everybody their chances. You 
have to have some order out of the chaos. This is sort of similar to 
Baghdad. Sometimes we get divided up into provinces. I appreciate the 
efforts that have been made, but the important thing is not the process 
in the Senate. The important thing is what our men and women are going 
to be trying to do in Iraq. Let's give this plan a chance.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The majority leader is recognized.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I appreciate the advice and counsel of my 
friend from Mississippi. He certainly has the experience to offer 
suggestions, having served in various capacities in leadership. I have 
been with him. He is a pleasant man to work with, and I like him very 
much. But I would suggest, this morning, that we not use Super Bowl 
terminology and Manning and Grossman because I think, if we do that, we 
would find we would have a lot of objection if suddenly we looked 
around and Grossman was using a baseball or basketball rather than a 
football. I think what they have tried to do is change the rules in the 
middle of the game, and they are playing around with this procedural 
argument.
  I have to acknowledge to my friend from Mississippi that the people 
over there who are trying to make the President not look bad had a 
little victory because they have been able to stall and stall. As a 
result of that, soldiers are being shipped, as we speak, without the 
Senate having to take a vote on whether that surge should take place. 
So in that respect, their stalling has probably benefited the 
President.
  As far as process, we have worked through the ethics bill, the 
minimum wage bill, and even though there were cloture motions filed and 
cloture not invoked, finally, we were able to get those things passed. 
But I think debate on the surge would have been very important. We have 
been denied that. I understand the rules of the Senate.
  My friend from Mississippi also says we should be doing something 
that is real. I tried to talk about something real this morning. More 
American troops were killed in combat in Iraq over the past 4 months 
than in any comparable stretch since the war began--334 dead American 
soldiers,

[[Page S1658]]

men and women, with mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and 
husbands and wives.

  I think over the last few days, though, there has been a deafening 
silence, and people standing here and saying what the President is 
doing is the right thing to do, because it hasn't been the right thing 
to do, what the President has been doing, and he wants to continue more 
of the same.
  I understand we are now at a point where we are going to talk about a 
couple of important nominations. We are going to try to get our fiscal 
house in order, which is not in order, because unless we do something 
by February 15, basically the Government closes. This is very unusual. 
I have spoken with the distinguished Republican leader, and one thing 
we are going to work on together this year, once we get out of this 
situation with the continuing resolution, is to work together to try to 
pass appropriations bills. That is good for the institution and good 
for the country. We are going to try to do that. It may require some 
late nights and long weeks, but we are going to do that. We have 13 
appropriations bills, and we are going to work very hard to get them 
passed.
  So I am terribly disappointed we haven't had the opportunity to vote 
on Senator Warner's and Senator Levin's resolution, and on the McCain 
resolution, but we have heard enough about that. We are not going to be 
able to do that, and we will move on to other things.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The minority leader is recognized.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Briefly, it is hard for me to remember how many times 
we were told by the other side last year that you come to the Senate to 
cast tough votes, but I don't think Senator Gregg's vote was a tough 
vote. Why would it be a tough vote to vote on supporting the troops? To 
me, that is an easy vote. We all will be forced, because of the process 
in the Senate, to cast votes we don't like. If you are in the majority, 
you get more of those than when you are in the minority. I can't 
imagine being, in effect, afraid of voting on the Gregg amendment to 
support the troops. That would be one of the easiest votes we ever cast 
around here.

  Let me conclude by saying I am disappointed, as other members of my 
party in the Senate are disappointed, we are not having the Iraq debate 
this week. The distinguished minority whip, in his remarks, summed it 
up quite well. We will continue to talk about this important subject. 
There is no more important subject in the country right now. I know we 
will be debating other proposals in the coming months.
  Mr. GREGG. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. McCONNELL. I yield.
  Mr. GREGG. I was just wondering if the Republican leader, and I ask 
this question through the Chair, believes that the Democratic leader is 
correct in his characterization that we have stopped this in a 
procedural manner. Is it not true that the Democratic leader controls 
the procedure as to whether there would be a vote? And is it not true, 
also, that we agreed to the Democratic leader's request that we offer 
only one amendment but that we just ask we be able to choose our 
amendment, and they be able to choose their amendment?
  Mr. McCONNELL. The Senator is entirely correct. We kept paring down 
the options that we wanted to offer in the course of this debate on the 
most important issue in the country. And at the end, as the Senator 
from New Hampshire just suggested, we were down to two: one that the 
majority leader and most of his party favor--and some of ours--and the 
amendment of the Senator from New Hampshire in support of the troops.
  Apparently, the majority wanted to tell us which amendment we would 
offer.
  Mr. GREGG. I thank the Republican leader.
  Mr. McCONNELL. I thank the Senator from New Hampshire.
  I yield the floor.

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