[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 19025-19027]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                           CONFERENCE ACTION

  Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, Senator Dorgan had indicated he had some 
questions he would like to ask. I have some tributes and routine 
business and also the closing script that we would like to go into. I 
thought maybe I would yield for some questions before we begin that.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I appreciate the Senator from Mississippi 
yielding to me. I wanted to propound a series of questions.
  First of all, let me say that I respect the difficult job the 
majority leader has. As we come to the end of the 106th Congress and 
try to put all the pieces together and make them fit, and so on, it is 
a difficult job.
  One specific piece of legislation that is very important to me--as 
are many others--is the Agriculture appropriations bill.
  I come from a farm State. This is a critically important piece of 
legislation.
  The House of Representatives passed an Agriculture appropriations 
bill on July 11. The Senate passed one on July 20. It is now September 
22. I was appointed a conferee for this appropriations conference. I am 
on the subcommittee, and there has been no appropriations conference at 
all. We are toward the end of this legislative session, and I worry 
about the regular process.
  Will we have an appropriations conference?
  The reason I am asking this question is, as the majority leader 
knows, there are some very controversial things in this legislation. I 
understand there are, because the Senate by a majority vote said we 
want them. One of those controversial issues is a policy that says: Let 
us stop using food as a weapon. We want to abolish sanctions on food 
shipments all around the world. It is controversial.
  Some don't want to do that. Some want to continue to use food 
sanctions against Cuba and other countries. I don't. Seventy Members of 
the Senate voted not to do it. We want to abolish that approach. That 
is one.
  The other controversial issue is--Senator Jeffords and I offered the 
amendment on the reimportation of prescription drugs approved by the 
FDA. That was controversial.
  The reason I am asking the question of the majority leader is, 
yesterday someone from the news media called me and said another Member 
of the Senate indicated that next week the Agriculture appropriations 
bill will be coming to the floor of the Senate. This Senator asked: How 
will that happen? He said: By magic.
  By magic? I am a conferee. If there is a conference report on the 
Agriculture appropriations bill being brought to the floor of the 
Senate, it is not coming from a conference I was ever invited to 
attend.
  These are very important issues.
  I haven't mentioned the issue of crop loss and quality loss on crops 
in North Dakota and across the country where farmers have been 
devastated by disease and quality loss in their crops. We want to focus 
on that in this bill as well.
  I will not give a speech. But I want to ask the majority leader: Can 
he tell me anything about this conference or anything about this 
``magic'' that one Member of the Senate suggested was going to happen? 
Do we expect to have a conference with the House on Agriculture 
appropriations? And will those of us who are conferees and who come 
from farm States and have an abiding interest in doing the right thing 
have the opportunity to pursue these policies and get votes on them?
  Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I would be glad to try to respond to some of 
the questions and comments.
  First of all, I certainly understand the Senator's interest in this 
very important funding bill for agriculture in America. There is a lot 
of funding here. I don't know the total amount of this bill, but it is 
multibillion dollars, and it is important for our farm economy, for 
food for our people in this country, and also for exports in many ways.
  My State also is heavily involved in agriculture and has to deal with 
a number of problems, all the way from droughts to floods--everything 
but locusts.
  Then, of course, we have the timber industry, which is an important 
part of

[[Page 19026]]

our agricultural economy. Now that is in very difficult straits, caused 
to a large degree because of subsidized timber products and lumber from 
other countries--Canada, Russia, and every place else. It is just 
killing our domestic timber industry. When you add to that the 
administration's very bad national forest policy and timber policies, 
they are having a hard time. So I agree, it is important, and I share 
the Senator's interest in it.
  Maybe he is asking the wrong Mississippian about this bill. I 
certainly have an interest, and as majority leader I continue to try to 
urge the various Senate committees of appropriations and conferees to 
get together and complete their work. But the Senator from Mississippi, 
Mr. Cochran, is the chairman of the Senate agriculture appropriations 
subcommittee. He is directly and intimately involved.
  I think there are two or three reasons that conference has not yet 
met. First of all, the main reason is the House hasn't appointed 
conferees. They have to appoint conferees. One of the reasons they 
haven't done that, as the Senator from North Dakota knows, as a former 
House Member knows, and I do, after they do that, they are then subject 
to motions in the House that could be a further complicating factor in 
getting the work done. I think they are waiting to appoint conferees 
when they are ready to complete action in conference. That is one 
thing.
  The second thing is there still has been, up until yesterday, I 
think, some question about exactly how much money was going to be 
needed in the disaster area because, as the Senator knows, there 
continue to be problems that are related to the fires, and they are 
still trying to get an estimate of exactly what that amount of money 
would be.
  Then there are some issues that are not going to be easy to resolve, 
but they are going to have to be resolved--reimportation of drugs, as 
the Senator mentioned. The Senate acted on that. We had the Jeffords-
Dorgan amendment as amended by Senator Cochran, then the House language 
by Congressman Coburn, I believe.
  You have to find some way to get a result. I am satisfied that there 
is going to be some language in that bill in this area. I don't know 
what it is going to be. There are a lot of people with a lot more 
expertise in how that will work, and the safety aspects of it, and what 
individuals will be able to do. All of that is going to have to be 
resolved.
  You have the sanctions question. There is no easy solution there. You 
have kind of the Senate position, the House position, a third position, 
and other options. I wish the Senator the very best in working all of 
that out. I am not a member of the agriculture appropriations 
subcommittee, and I hope not to be there when the final decision is 
made.
  Last but not least, I assume within the next week or so the conferees 
will meet.
  There are areas sometimes when communication between the bodies of 
the Congress or between the parties is not as good as it could be, I 
guess. But usually in agriculture you have pretty good input all around 
because it is so important to individual Senators.
  But I am assuming conferees will be appointed at some point before 
too long and that there will be a vote and action taken. I quite often 
wish for magic, but I rarely see it in dealing with these 
appropriations issues.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, if the Senator will yield for one further 
point, I have consulted with the senior Senator from Mississippi, Mr. 
Cochran, someone for whom I have great regard. He has done a wonderful 
job as chairman of that subcommittee. He indicated, pretty much as the 
majority leader did, that the House didn't appoint conferees. The House 
passed the agriculture appropriations bill on July 11.
  It may be a stretch, but I think sometimes there are teams around 
here, and the team kind of gets together to talk about how they are 
going to do something. When teams huddle up, they do not call both a 
pass play and run play; they normally call one play. It may be a 
stretch on my part, but I figured there is a team that has huddled up 
and said: You know the play. We are not going to call on agriculture 
because we have a couple of things we don't want to have people vote 
on, and we are not going to have a conference.
  That is the only explanation I can have for being a conferee and 
never having a conference. I guess the easiest choice is the obvious 
choice. Let the House and the Senate vote on these controversial 
issues. Both of them that I mentioned would have passed by 75 percent 
of the House and the Senate easily.
  The reason the Senator from Mississippi, the majority leader, knows I 
have a little bit of tension about this is, last year we had the same 
issue on sanctions and food shipments. The same issue went through the 
Senate with 70 votes and went into conference. I was a conferee. The 
first order of business in the conference was to say: We insist on the 
Senate's position. Let's stop using food as a weapon. Let's stop having 
embargoes on food shipments.
  The Senate voted. The Senate conferees insisted on their position, 
and the conference was disbanded and never met again, because the House 
conferees were prepared to support us and the House leadership said: 
No. We are going to disband the conference and bring the conference 
report to the floor that we haven't had a chance to work on.
  My great concern is, that might happen again this year and maybe 
there has been no play called yet. But I hope that, really soon the 
majority leader will tell them that the easiest play for these 
controversial issues is to bring them back, and let's have votes in the 
House and Senate. I am willing to lose the votes if, after we count 
them, I am on the wrong end. But we won't lose on either of these 
issues.
  I finally say to the majority leader, it is true that we have 
suffered, and his State has suffered droughts and floods. We have had 
fires in my State and devastating quality losses on top of floods. We 
need to put a piece in this agriculture appropriations bill in response 
to those disasters as well. That is another significant part of it.
  I want to work with the majority leader. But my great concern is that 
there won't be a conference. If the majority leader is telling me he 
thinks there will be, I hope he will consult with the Speaker of the 
House. We both served in the House. I think it is unusual to have a 
bill passed on July 11, and now on September 22 they haven't appointed 
conferees.
  Mr. LOTT. Has the Senator ever tried giving Senate or House 
appropriations members orders or directions? What I am saying to the 
Senator is, it won't do any good; they are going to do what they are 
going to do in due time.
  All I ask from the appropriators on Agriculture, Energy and Water, 
and Interior is to give me a bill. Whatever you agree on is fine with 
me. All I want is to be able to schedule the conference report. I have 
tried saying, Do this; do that. How about that? What about this time? 
What about another time? They will act when they get ready, I guess. 
They will have a conference meeting and do their work or they won't. It 
beats the heck out of me. It is mystifying.
  They have a job to do. All I am saying is I have confidence in Thad 
Cochran. I will support whatever he wants to do. I believe the farmers 
of North Dakota and Mississippi are going to be better for whatever he 
does. That is all I can do.
  I am ready to go the minute they get a conference report. We will 
bring it to the floor like white lightning. Hopefully, that is next 
week. I would love to do it next week. The last time I checked, that is 
the end of the fiscal year. If they have it ready Tuesday, Wednesday, 
Thursday, the happier I will be.
  Mr. DORGAN. If they get it ready, I hope it goes through a conference 
at some point. If I am a conferee, I hope I am invited.
  There is the television commercial where the cowboys are trying to 
herd cats.
  Mr. LOTT. I was one of the cowboys trying to keep the cats; they 
won't herd up, though.

[[Page 19027]]


  Mr. DORGAN. I know that.
  It is one thing for me to be mystified; that is probably acceptable, 
but I am worried when the leader is mystified.
  Mr. LOTT. You are a cat, and you will want to get grouped up for a 
conclusion.
  Mr. DORGAN. Things will slow down a lot if we have a process that 
tries to partition people off from this. These are important issues, 
and they are not done at the end of the session; they probably should 
have been done long ago. As we get to the end of the session, I am 
asking we have conferences.
  To the extent you are talking to the Speaker, I hope you will 
encourage them: Appoint conferees, get to conference, and get the 
business done. That is all I am asking today. I expect to be at a 
conference next week.
  Somebody in this Senate said yesterday to a member of the press--I 
assume it is probably printed today--that the conference report was 
going to come to the Senate floor by ``magic.'' Well, that is a magic 
carpet that will surprise a lot of Members, I suppose, and will cause a 
lot of problems. If the Senator will support us in regular order in 
having a conference in which we can all participate, that is what we 
expect to be the case in the Senate.

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