[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 146 (Friday, September 28, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12319-S12320]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                SCHEDULE

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, the Senate will begin consideration shortly 
of the Department of Defense authorization bill. Last night cloture was 
invoked on the substitute amendment. Therefore, amendments in order 
need to have been timely filed and be germane.
  There will be no rollcall votes today, but the managers will be here 
to process amendments. Senator Kennedy is here to talk about the first 
amendment.
  The next vote will occur Monday beginning around 5:30 in the evening. 
This week has been a very busy week, and the Senate has successfully 
concluded action on a number of very important measures. Mr. President, 
next week we are going to, as soon as we finish this bill, the Defense 
authorization bill--which will be sometime Monday night--move to 
Defense appropriations. Senators Inouye and Stevens have been advised 
of that. They will start early Tuesday morning. We hope to complete 
that bill within a couple of days.
  The next bill we will take up prior to our October recess will be the 
Commerce-Justice-State appropriations bill. If we can finish those two 
bills, and I think we have a real opportunity to do that, we will have 
completed 6 of the 12 appropriations bills.
  The House has completed all of theirs. I have had a number of 
conversations with Chairman Obey, with the Speaker, in an effort to get 
these bills--as many as we can, as soon as we can--to the President.
  As you know, there is a controversy with the President over his 
threats to veto all of these bills. We hope he will see the wisdom of 
moving forward on these appropriations bills, as we hope he will on the 
Children's Health Insurance Program which passed overwhelmingly 
yesterday.
  I would say that last year, for example, the President accepted bills 
from the Republican-dominated Congress that were $55 billion over what 
he suggested. This year we are at $21 billion and none of that is 
extravagant spending. Most of it are things he has cut out of the 
budget, so it would only keep up with inflation. For example, with the 
tremendous rise in crime we have all over America today--we have had a 
jump this last year like we have not seen in recent decades. Aggravated

[[Page S12320]]

crimes are up significantly, and we have a situation where we are 
putting in this legislation--I have talked about these appropriations 
bills--$1.5 billion to make up for what we took out of the COPS 
Program. We have 100,000 less police officers on the street than we 
did. That is a result of the cuts of the President. So we hope he will 
see the light and do the right thing in regard to the appropriations 
bills.
  But I very much appreciate the cooperation we received from the 
Republicans with our appropriations bills to this point. We have not 
had great difficulty with those bills. We all know we should have 
gotten to them sooner, but we have had 48 filibusters we have had to 
deal with this year which have slowed things down significantly.

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