[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 33 (Wednesday, February 25, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Page S2433]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                SCHEDULE

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, following leader remarks, if any, the Senate 
will resume consideration of S. 160, the District of Columbia House 
Voting Rights Act. Rollcall votes are expected to occur today and 
tomorrow in an effort to advance this bill to passage this week so we 
can turn to the consideration of the omnibus appropriations bill next 
week.
  Mr. President, you will note that we have had no morning business. 
The reason for that is we are very in tune to finish this legislation. 
I want everyone to have ample opportunity to offer any amendment that 
they want on this bill. There should be no excuse. We have got all 
morning, all afternoon, all evening, all day tomorrow, but we are going 
to finish the bill one way or the other.
  I hope we can do it the right way, the easy way, so we do not have to 
file cloture on it. This is a bill that should advance. Senator 
Lieberman is so knowledgeable about Senate procedures that he will 
protect everyone's rights. But we cannot imagine what the amendments 
are going to be; they have to be offered. We have heard a lot of talk 
about amendments being offered, some germane, some not germane. But 
let's get it done and move on.
  I do not want to have to file cloture on this bill. There is no 
reason to file cloture. If people have amendments, they want to improve 
the legislation, let them offer the amendments. But if we do not have a 
lot of activity on this legislation, I will file cloture today for a 
Friday cloture vote. If we are unable to complete action on the bill 
tomorrow, Senators should be prepared to vote on Friday, even though it 
was previously announced that there would be no votes on that day. So 
everyone should be alerted that we may have votes on Friday.
  There is no reason in the world that this simple piece of legislation 
cannot be completed. I am surprised we have to go into this tomorrow, 
quite frankly. We should finish it today--that would also be good--and 
we could do our work that we have scheduled for the weekend, and we 
could move this bill so we can start on that on Friday, because, as I 
said yesterday, we have to complete action on the omnibus spending bill 
by next Friday, the reason being that the continuing resolution runs 
out at that time.
  Senator Cochran and Senator Inouye have worked hard to get the bill 
to this point. It has been available for everyone for days now. It is 
on our Web site. Everyone can read every word of it. All of the so-
called earmarks, the congressionally directed spending are there. We 
can look at them, know who asked for them.
  The earmarks are down by 50 percent from what they were. The amount 
of dollars in earmarks, congressionally directed spending, is way down 
from 4 percent to 1 percent. So let's move forward on the legislation 
we are dealing with here today and get this done as quickly as 
possible.
  Because this is a 6-week work period, we have a lot of work to do. 
Some of us were out late last night at President Obama's speech.

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