[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 19152-19156]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                            SENATE SCHEDULE

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I was listening to the discussion among my 
colleagues, Senator Craig, Senator Byrd, and Senator Daschle was here 
earlier. I thought it would be useful to discuss the concept that has 
been discussed. In the end, it does not matter what is said one way or 
the other about who is at fault for this or for delaying that. The 
question people ask at the end of a legislative session is, Are things 
a little better in this country because those folks met and discussed 
things in the United States, what works, what does not, what we can do 
and cannot do?
  If the answer to that is yes, none of this matters much. But the 
Senator from West Virginia, in responding to some discussions earlier 
by the Senator from Idaho, makes a very interesting point. I have not 
been here nearly as long as the Senator from West Virginia has been.
  This is a calendar which shows this year, the year 2000. The red days 
on this calendar are the days the Senate was not in session. We will 
see the Senate was not in session a fair part of the year. In fact, 
another chart will show the number of days we have been in session. It 
is now the end of September, and we have been in session 115 days out 
of all of this year. Of those 115 days we were in session, on 34 of 
them, there were no votes at all. So we have been in session 115 days, 
but on 34 of those days, there have been no votes.
  There have been only two Mondays in this entire year in which the 
Senate has voted, and if I may continue with this chart presentation, 
there have been only six Fridays in all of this year on which the 
Senate has voted. Out of 13 appropriations bills, only two have been 
signed into law by the President. In the month of September, when we 
must try to finish the remaining 11 appropriations bills, we have not 
had any votes on Mondays, except for possibly today if we have a vote 
later today. And there have been no votes on Fridays in the month of 
September.
  I thought it would be useful to describe what is going on here. Let 
me read this statement from my friend and colleague, the Senate 
majority leader, earlier in the year. He said:

       We were out of town two months and our approval rating went 
     up 11 points. I think I've got this thing figured out.

  I know Senator Lott wants this place to work and work well. I 
mentioned the other day to Senator Lott that there is a television 
commercial about these grizzled, leather-faced cowboys on horseback 
herding cats. It is actually a funny commercial because they even get 
those cats in a river and try to move them across the river. These big 
cowboys with these leather coats, the big dusters they wear for storms, 
are holding these little stray cats.
  I said to the Senate majority leader: That reminds me a little 
perhaps of the job you and others have of keeping things moving around 
here.
  The Senator from West Virginia makes a very important point, and I 
want to outline it. We have had plenty of time to get to work to pass 
this legislation. We just have not been in session in the Senate much 
of the year. Frankly, most people run for the privilege of serving in 
the Senate because they have an agenda, too, and they want to offer 
amendments. They want to offer ideas that come from their 
constituencies that say: Here is what we think should be done to 
improve life in this country; here is what we think should be done to 
deal with education, health care, crime, and a whole range of issues.
  When there are circumstances like we have seen this year where 
legislation does not even, in some cases, come to the floor of the 
Senate, but instead goes right to conference, it says to Senators: You 
have no right to offer any amendments. That does not make sense.
  The reason I came over, I say to the Senator from West Virginia, is 
that I heard the discussion by my colleague from Idaho saying Senator 
Daschle is to blame for all of this. Nonsense. Winston Churchill used 
to say the greatest thrill in the world is to be shot at and missed. 
The Senator from Idaho has just given all of us a thrill. But Senator 
Daschle is at fault?
  Senator Daschle does not schedule this Senate. We are not in charge. 
I wish we were, but we are not in charge. We are the minority party, 
not the majority party. I hope that will change very soon.
  What Senator Daschle said is clear. In fact, he said it again last 
week: If I had been majority leader, and I am not, today would be a day 
in which we take up an appropriations bill and we would be in session 
until we finish that bill and everybody has a chance to offer 
amendments. If it takes 24 hours, then we will not get a lot of sleep, 
but we will finish that bill.
  Senator Daschle said: My preference is to take these bills up 
individually. I would be willing to do an appropriations bill a day--
long days, sure; tough days, absolutely. But he said let's do them. 
Bring them to the floor. Open them up for amendment. Let's have 
debates, offer amendments, and then let's vote. Democracy, after all, 
is about voting. It is not always convenient.
  The Senator from West Virginia had a reputation for not always making 
it very convenient for people because he has insisted that 
appropriations bills be brought to the Senate floor and that they be 
debated fully and that everybody have the opportunity to bring their 
amendments to the floor of the Senate, have a debate, and then have a 
vote.
  Again, sometimes that is difficult. People want to be here and there 
and everywhere else on Fridays and Mondays and parts of the week. But 
the fact is, we are now in September, towards the end of the month, and 
11 of the 13 appropriations bills are not yet signed. I am a conferee 
on at least two of them for which no conference has been held.
  I might mention to the Senator from West Virginia, I think perhaps 
you

[[Page 19153]]

were referring earlier to the Agriculture appropriations bill. The 
House passed it July 11. The Senate passed it July 20. I am a conferee. 
There has been no conference. The House has not even appointed its 
conferees. In today's edition of the CQ Daily Monitor, one of my 
colleagues is quoted as saying that ``aides'' have worked out a 
compromise in the Agriculture spending conference report, and it will 
come to the floor on Wednesday.
  Now, that is a surprise to those of us who are supposed to be 
conferees. This is a bill on which there has been no conference, and 
someone in the majority party is saying aides have worked this all out, 
and it is going to come to the floor of the Senate on Wednesday. Boy, I 
tell you, this system is flat out broken. That is not the way this 
system ought to work. Aides do the work without a conference?
  Mr. BYRD. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. DORGAN. I am happy to yield.
  Mr. BYRD. The Senator is precisely correct. The system is not 
operating as it was intended to operate. We are improvising it as we go 
along. We are changing it all the time. The Senate is changing. And I 
regret to say that.
  I simply want to thank the Senator for using the charts. They are 
very persuasive. They tell the story. They tell it concisely.
  I also thank the Senator for standing up for the Senate and the true 
system. The Appropriations Committee was created in 1867. So for 133 
years we have had this system. The Appropriations Committee was very 
small in the beginning. I think it was made up of only five members.
  The system is being changed by Senators who have come here, most of 
them, from the other body. They don't know how the Senate is supposed 
to work. They never saw it operate under the rules. It is being run 
mostly by unanimous consent now, not by the rules. For example, we 
never have calendar Mondays here anymore. We ought to try that just 
once in a while to keep the system--the real system--alive.
  I thank the Senator for his timely comments.
  Mr. DORGAN. I appreciate the comments of the Senator from West 
Virginia as well. It should never, ever be considered old-fashioned to 
have the Senate work in a manner in which it was intended to work; that 
is, to have debates and to have votes. That is not old-fashioned. That 
is a timeless truth about how democracy ought to work.
  A timeless truth here is that we will get the best for the American 
people by soliciting all of the best ideas that come from every corner 
of this Chamber. Those ideas come from every corner of our country. 
People come here not for their own sake; they come to represent the 
people of West Virginia and Maine and California and my State of North 
Dakota. The development of all of those ideas--through debate, through 
the offering of amendments, and so on--represents what I think can 
contribute best to America's well-being.
  There are so many things that I wanted to do this year that we are 
not doing. There is so little time left. We have a farm program that 
does not work. Families out on the land--family farmers are the best in 
America--are just struggling mightily. The farm program does not work. 
It ought to be repealed and replaced with one that does. That is not 
rocket science. Europe does it. We can do it.
  A Patients' Bill of Rights: We debated that forever. We ought to pass 
that. A prescription drug benefit in the Medicare program: We know we 
should do that and do it soon. Fixing the education system: Again, we 
know what needs to be done there. There is a whole series of things we 
ought to be doing that have not been done this year, let alone most of 
the appropriations bills, which we should pass.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, would the Senator yield?
  Mr. DORGAN. Of course, I yield.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I am constrained to say, as I have said 
before, that the fault is not all on one side. And I have complained 
about this to my own caucus. Too many times, on this side of the aisle, 
we have called up the same old amendment over and over and over again. 
I have said this in my own caucus, and I have said this before to my 
colleagues. So we are at fault to an extent in that regard. That is not 
to say a Senator does not have the right to call up an amendment. He 
has the right to call up his amendment as many times as he wishes. But 
I see no point in beating a dead horse over and over and over. That is 
something I think we, on our own side, should talk about and try to 
avoid.
  Now, there are occasions when, for one reason or another, perhaps a 
Senator is absent or a supporter of a given amendment may be away for a 
funeral or something else, and the amendment may be called up, and it 
loses. Then I think there is real justification for calling up that 
amendment again on a future date.
  But there are times here when it seems to me my own side is only 
interested in sending a ``message.'' We want to send ``messages.'' This 
is alright up to a point. I have kind of grown tired of just sending 
``messages.''
  For example, nobody has supported campaign financing longer than I 
have in this Senate. As a matter of fact, I offered a campaign 
financing bill with former Senator David Boren in this Senate in the 
100th Congress. Now, I offered cloture on that bill eight times. No 
other majority leader has ever offered cloture on the same bill eight 
times. But I was disappointed eight times because only four or five 
Members of the Republican Party ever joined the Democrats in supporting 
that campaign financing bill. So we tried and we tried again.
  I think we send too many ``messages'' on this side of the aisle. I 
can understand the majority leader, in trying to avoid this repetition 
of having to vote on the same old amendment--and they are political 
amendments--has attempted to bypass the Senate by not calling up bills.
  Many authorization bills--if one will take a look at this calendar, 
look at the bills on this calendar. If the Senator will look at the 
bills on this calendar, we have a calendar that is 71 pages in length. 
Some of those probably are authorization bills. They are not called up. 
So, Senators all too often only have appropriations bills to use as 
vehicles for amendments which they otherwise would call up if the 
authorization bills were on the calendar and were called up.
  The authorizing committees need to do their work. They need to get 
the bills out on the calendars. And then, when the bills are on the 
calendar, if they are not called up, Senators are going to resort to 
calling up amendments on appropriations bills. So there is enough fault 
and enough blame here to go around.
  But I think the greatest danger of all is for the Senate to be 
relegated to a position in which it cannot be effective in carrying out 
the intentions of the framers. And that can best be done by not calling 
up appropriations bills, sending them directly to conference, and 
preventing Senators from carrying out the wishes of their constituents, 
by not allowing Senators to debate and call up amendments.
  I thank the distinguished Senator. He has taken the floor on several 
occasions to mention this and to call our attention to it. I thank him.
  (Ms. COLLINS assumed the chair.)
  Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, the Senator from West Virginia will 
recall that he told me a story some long while ago about this desk that 
I occupy in the Senate. This desk, as do all of these desks, has an 
interesting history. This desk was the desk of former Senator Robert La 
Follette from Wisconsin. It was Senator Byrd who informed me of 
something that happened 91 years ago, I believe, in late May in the 
year 1909.
  Senator La Follette was standing at this desk--this desk may not have 
been in this exact spot, but it was this desk--involved in a 
filibuster.
  During those days, this Senate had a lot of aggressive, robust 
debates. Senator La Follette was a very forceful man with strong 
feelings, and he stood at this desk engaged in a filibuster. As the 
story goes, apparently someone sent up a glass of eggnog for him to sip 
on during the filibuster. He brought

[[Page 19154]]

that glass of eggnog to his lips and drank then spat and began to 
scream that he had been poisoned. He thought he had tasted poison in 
this glass of eggnog. The glass was sent away--I believe this was in 
1909--to have it evaluated. They discovered someone had, in fact, put 
poison in his drink. They never found the culprit.
  I think of stories such as this one about this Chamber, what a 
wonderful tradition in the Senate of people who feel so strongly. We 
should not diminish the role of the Senate as the place of great 
debates.
  I served in the House. It is a wonderful institution. There are 435 
Members. There they package their debates through the Rules Committee. 
They say: You get 1 minute, you get 2 minutes, you get 5 minutes. We 
will entertain these 10 amendments, and that is all. And if you are not 
on the list, you are not there. That is the way the House works because 
that is the only way it could work with 435 Members. But the Senate was 
never designed to work that way. It was never intended to work that 
way. The Senate was to be the center of the great debates, debates that 
are unfettered by time, unfettered by restriction. Is that in some ways 
inefficient? Yes. Is it cumbersome, sometimes inconvenient? Sure. It is 
all of that. But it is also the hallmark of the center of democracy. We 
ought not ever dilute that, nor should we ever dilute the opportunity 
of every single person who comes to sit and at times stand in the 
Senate to represent his or her constituents to make the strongest case 
they can make on whatever the issue is that day.
  Mr. BYRD. Madam President, will the Senator yield?
  Mr. DORGAN. I am happy to yield.
  Mr. BYRD. Speaking of the old days, I sat in that presiding chair up 
there on one occasion 22 hours. I sat there 22 hours, through a night 
of debate on civil rights legislation, when I first came here. It fell 
to my lot to have that as a chore, as it falls to the lot of newer 
Senators. I sat there 22 hours.
  I can remember the civil rights debate of 1964. I hope my memory is 
not playing tricks on me. One hundred sixteen days elapsed between the 
day that Mr. Mansfield motioned up that bill and the day that we cast 
the final vote on that bill, 116 days. We were on the motion to proceed 
for 2 weeks. I believe the Senate spent 58 days, including 6 Saturdays 
and, it seems to me, 1 Sunday--the Parliamentarian will remember this--
but 6 Saturdays, get me now, in debating the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
  I voted against the act. I was the only Northern Democrat who voted 
against it. I was the only northern Democrat who voted against cloture. 
And the only other Democrats who voted against cloture were Alan Bible 
of Nevada--and I am talking about Senators outside the South--and 
perhaps Senator Hayden of Arizona. We spent six Saturdays. We didn't go 
home on Saturdays. We stayed here and we voted. I forget how many 
rollcall votes we cast. Even following the cloture, we were on that 
bill, I believe, 10 days or so, on the bill even after cloture was 
invoked but we stayed here and did the work.
  Had Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader, not voted for cloture and 
led some of the Senators on the other side to vote for cloture, had 
that Republican leader not worked with Mr. Mansfield and Hubert 
Humphrey in those days to pass an important act, that act would not 
have passed. Cloture would never have been invoked on that act, if 
Everett Dirksen, the leader on the other side, and some of the Senators 
who went with him, had they not decided to vote for cloture and vote 
for the bill. That was teamwork. That was cooperation. That was stick-
to-it-iveness. That was the Senate at its best.
  I spoke against that bill. I spoke 14 hours 13 minutes against that 
bill. If I had it to do over again, I would vote for it. But I was just 
out of law school. I thought I knew a lot about constitutional law. And 
there were some great constitutional lawyers here then. Sam Ervin was 
here, Lister Hill, John Sparkman, Richard Russell, Russell Long; these 
were men who had been in this chamber for a long time. They didn't come 
to the Senate in order to use it as a stepping stone in a lateral move 
to the Presidency. They came here to be Senators. But the Senate 
argued. It debated. It amended. It took whatever time was necessary, 
and the Senate spoke its will. That is what we don't have these days. 
We don't have that these days.
  I thank the Senator for the service he is performing.
  Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, let me try to summarize what brought me 
to the floor.
  A colleague arrived on the Senate floor and said the reason we are in 
the circumstance in which, at nearly the end of a legislative session 
and only 2 of 13 appropriations bills have been completed by the 
Congress, and not much of the major legislation we had hopes for in the 
106th Congress has been passed, is that Senator Daschle is stalling, 
causing problems, is just not going to wash.
  It is sheer nonsense to suggest somehow that the minority leader of 
the Senate is determining the schedule of the Senate. There are times 
when one has to be repetitious in the Senate.
  Let me give an example: increasing the minimum wage. When it comes 
time for increasing the tax benefits for the highest income groups in 
America, we have people rushing to the floor, standing up and talking 
about tax cuts. Good for them. If you happen to be in the top one-tenth 
of 1 percent of the income earners, there are people here coming to the 
floor of the Senate saying: Let's give you a big tax cut. They won't 
call it that. They will say it is for the little guy. But just unwrap 
the package and see what is there.
  If you are in the top one-tenth of 1 percent of the income earners, 
good for you. You have great representation in the Senate. At least on 
a half dozen occasions this year, you had people coming over to vote 
for big tax cuts for you.
  But what if you are at the bottom of the economic ladder? What if you 
are a single mother, working the midnight shift for the minimum wage, 
trying to make ends meet, trying to pay the rent, trying to buy food 
and see if there is any way you can scratch out money to have health 
insurance for your children? What about you? Who is rushing to the 
Senate floor to say perhaps we ought to provide a small increase in the 
minimum wage?
  An increase in the minimum wage doesn't happen very often. Time and 
time again, we have tried to address the needs by increasing the 
minimum wage. It hasn't gotten done. We are near the end of the 
session. Is it repetitious to bring it back up? You bet it is. But some 
of us intend to be repetitious when it means standing up for the rights 
of the people at the bottom of the economic ladder who are working hard 
but who are losing ground because the cost of living is going up and 
their wages are not.
  How about the issue of trying to keep guns out of the hands of 
criminals? Let me describe that problem in this session of the 
Congress. Most everybody agrees--certainly the law requires--that we 
prevent criminals from having access to guns. If you have been 
convicted of a felony, you don't have a right to own a gun. The second 
amendment doesn't apply to you, but it applies to law-abiding citizens. 
Criminals have no right to have a gun.
  The NRA and virtually everybody else has agreed that we ought to have 
an instant check system where, if somebody wants to buy a gun, there 
name will be run through a computer check to see if this person is a 
convicted felon. If in running this check you discover the person has 
previously been convicted of a felony, that person has no right to a 
gun. At every gun store in this country, when you go in to buy a gun, 
that happens.
  Everybody supports that--the National Rifle Association, Republicans, 
and Democrats; everybody supports that. But there is a loophole. If you 
don't go to a gun store but instead go to a Saturday gun show, there is 
no requirement when you purchase a gun at that Saturday gun show that 
they run your name through an instant check.
  A fair number of guns are passing from one hand to another on 
Saturdays

[[Page 19155]]

and Sundays at gun shows with no determination of whether the person 
buying the gun is a felon. So we in the Congress pass a provision that 
closes that gun show loophole. Is it erratic? Not at all. It is very 
simple, common sense. It says no matter where you buy a gun, a gun 
store or a gun show, your name has to be run through an instant check 
to determine whether you are a convicted felon. If you are not, you can 
buy the gun. If you are a convicted criminal, you can't because you 
don't have a right to a gun. That bill passed the Senate by one vote. 
It went into a piece of legislation and went to conference and never 
came back out.
  A week or so ago, an appropriations subcommittee was considering 
legislation that would have allowed the introduction of an amendment to 
close that loophole once again because that provision is on a bill that 
apparently is not going to move in this session. This would have 
provided an opportunity to offer an amendment to close the gun show 
loophole. Instead of allowing that, guess what? They took that 
appropriations subcommittee bill and moved it directly to conference. 
It never came to the floor of the Senate. Those who would have offered 
the amendment to close the loophole were never offered the opportunity 
to do that. That is not the regular process in the Senate, not the way 
things ought to be done.
  So there are reasons to insist on some of these issues from time to 
time. We wish, for example, that on many of these days when we weren't 
in session, we would have been in session. Perhaps we would have 
finished most of the appropriations bills. Perhaps we would have been 
able to reach agreement on issues such as education.
  We have had a fairly significant debate, over many months in the 
106th Congress, on the issue of education. We know that smaller class 
size means better instruction and better education. We know that 1 
teacher with 30 students is less able to teach those students than 1 
teacher with 15 students. So we have a proposal to help in that regard 
by helping school districts and States have the resources to hire more 
teachers. Yet we are not able to get that completed because there is 
controversy in this Congress about that issue.
  There are also schools in this country that are crumbling. Anybody 
who visits any number of schools will recognize that there are a lot of 
schools in this country that were built after the Second World War when 
the folks came back from that war and got married and had families. 
They built schools in a prodigious quantity all across the country. 
School after school was built in the fifties, and now many of those 
schools are 50 years old and in desperate need of repair.
  Every Republican and Democrat, man or woman, ought to understand that 
when we send a kid through a schoolroom door, as I have described Rosie 
Two Bears going through a third grade door the day I was visiting her 
school, we ought to have some pride in that school, some understanding 
that every young ``Rosie'' who is walking through the school doors is 
walking into a classroom that is the best we can provide, that will 
offer that child the best opportunity for an education we can offer 
that child.
  But I have been to schools where 150 kids have 1 water fountain and 2 
toilets. I have been to schools where kids are sitting at desks 1 inch 
apart, and there is no opportunity to plug in computers and get to the 
Internet because the school is partially condemned and they don't have 
access to that technology; they don't have a football field, a track, 
or physical education facilities. I have been to those schools. We can 
do better than that. There are ways for us to help school districts 
modernize, rehabilitate, and rebuild some of those schools, and 
proposals to do that have largely fallen on deaf ears in this Congress.
  Prescription drugs: We know what we should do on that issue. We know 
life-saving drugs only save lives if you can afford to access those 
drugs. The current Medicare program doesn't provide a prescription drug 
benefit. 12 percent of our population are senior citizens and they 
consume one-third of all the prescription drugs. The cost of 
prescription drugs increased 16 percent last year alone. It is hard 
when you go to the homes of older Americans or go to meetings and have 
them come talk to you about the price of prescription drugs and see 
their eyes fill with tears and their chins begin to quiver as they talk 
about having diabetes, heart troubles, and other problems. They say 
they have been to the doctor and the doctor prescribed drugs, but they 
can't afford them. They ask, ``What shall we do?'' It happens all 
across the country all the time. We know we should add a prescription 
drug benefit to the Medicare program.
  The Patients' Bill of Rights: If any issue ought to be just a slam 
dunk, it is this issue. Yet we are at the end of this session and can't 
pass a real Patients' Bill of Rights. The House passed one; it was 
bipartisan. And then the Senate passed a ``patients' bill of goods''--
well, they don't call it that, but that is what it is. It is just an 
empty vessel to say they have done something.
  We should pass the Patients' Bill of Rights and make sure that in 
doctors' offices and in hospital rooms across this country, medical 
care is administered by the doctors and by skilled medical personnel.
  I won't recite all the stories. One is sufficient to make the point.
  A woman fell off a cliff in the Shenandoah mountains and was in a 
coma. She had multiple broken bones. She was taken to an emergency room 
on a gurney and unconscious. She was treated and eventually recovered. 
Her managed care organization said it would not pay for her emergency 
care because she didn't have prior approval to visit the emergency 
room. This is a person hauled in on a gurney, unconscious, and she was 
told she needed prior approval in order to have the emergency room 
treatment covered by her managed care organization. Examples of that 
sort of treatment go on and on and on.
  Patients should have a right to know all of their medical options, 
not just the cheapest. Patients ought to have a right to get emergency 
room treatment during emergencies. A patient ought to be able to 
continue treatment with the same oncologist. If a woman is being 
treated for breast cancer and her spouse has an employer who changes 
health care plans, she ought to be able to continue treatment with the 
same cancer specialist she had been working with for 3 or 5 years. 
Those are basic rights, in my judgment, which are embodied in the 
Patients' Bill of Rights. It is so simple and so straightforward and so 
compelling. Yet this Congress has not been able to get it done.
  The list goes on. Agriculture sanctions: We have sanctions 
prohibiting food shipments to so many countries--about a half dozen 
around the world. We have economic sanctions against them, and those 
sanctions include a sanction on the shipment of food. President Clinton 
has relaxed that some; he is the first President to do so, and good for 
him. But he can't relax it, for example, with respect to Cuba. That is 
a legislative sanction, and we have to repeal it.
  We ought not to use food as a weapon in the world. There should be no 
more sanctions on food shipments anywhere. The same ought to be true 
with medicine. The Senate has spoken on that by 70 votes. We said let's 
stop it. We are too big and too good a country to use food as a weapon. 
We try to hit Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro and we end up hitting 
poor, sick, hungry people. It ought to stop. Yet we are near the end of 
this session and we don't seem to be able to do that.
  It does not wash for anyone to come to this Chamber and say the 
problem is the minority party. That is nonsense. The problem is we 
haven't been in session a majority of this year. These red dates are 
the dates in which we have not been in session. The problem is we have 
people who do not want to schedule debate on the floor of the Senate on 
amendments because they do not want to cast votes on those amendments. 
We ought to change that. Let's decide whatever the amendments are and 
whatever the policy is and debate it and vote and whoever has the votes 
wins. In a democracy, you don't weigh

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votes. You count votes. Whoever ends up with the most votes at the end 
wins. That, again, is not rocket science. But that is the way democracy 
ought to work.
  We have not been in session most of the year, and now we have people 
coming out suggesting that somehow the minority leader is responsible 
for the problems of scheduling in this session. It just does not wash. 
It is just not so.
  I hope perhaps in the coming 2 weeks that remain in this 106th 
Congress that we will have some burst of energy, some burst of 
creativity, and perhaps some industrial strength vitamin B-12 
administered to the entire Congress as a whole that would make us 
decide to do the things we know need doing.
  As I indicated when I started, at the end of the day, the American 
people do not care much about who offered amendments and who didn't, 
and who brought legislation to the floor trying to shut debate off and 
who didn't. They are interested at the end of the day in whether this 
106th Congress met and made much of a difference in their lives and in 
their families' lives. What people care about is the things they talk 
about around the supper table: Are my kids going to a good school? If 
not, what can I do about that? Do I have a good job that has some job 
security? Do I have a decent income? Am I able to believe that my 
parents and grandparents will have access to good health care? Do I 
live in a neighborhood that is safe?
  All of these are issues that affect American families. All of these 
are issues that we are working on. And, regrettably, in the 106th 
Congress we are not working on them in a very effective way because we 
have not been meeting most of the year.
  On those critical issues--health care, education, economic security, 
and a range of other issues--the things that will most affect working 
families in this country are things that this Congress is not inclined 
to want to work on, or are not inclined to want to pass. It would be 
one thing if we couldn't pass legislation addressing these issues 
because we had votes on these matters and we lost. But often we 
discover there are other ways to kill something by denying the 
opportunity to bring up the amendment for a vote.
  It is interesting. In this Congress, we have had something pretty 
unusual. We have actually had legislation brought to the floor of the 
Senate and then cloture motions are filed to shut debate off before the 
debate even begins. We have had legislation brought to the floor of the 
Senate with cloture motions designed to shut amendments off before the 
first amendment was offered.
  You wonder: How does that work? How does that comport with what the 
tradition of the Senate should be as a great debating society on which 
we take on all of the issues and hear all of the viewpoints and then 
have a vote about the direction in which we think this country should 
be moving?
  When I came to the Congress some years ago, one of the older Members 
of Congress was Claude Pepper, who was then in his eighties--a 
wonderful Congressman from Florida. He used to talk about the miracle 
in the U.S. Constitution--the miracle that says every even-numbered 
year the American people grab the steering wheel and decide which way 
they want to nudge this country. That is how he described the process 
of voting. That is the power that the American people have. The 
American people choose who comes to this Chamber. The rules of this 
Chamber provide that we do the same as the American people. We take 
their hopes and we take their aspirations and their thoughts for a 
better life and we offer them here in terms of public policy. Then we 
are supposed to vote. That is the bedrock notion of how you conduct 
democracy.
  Yet we are all too often getting in this rut of deciding that we 
don't have time; we don't want to have a vote on this; we want to 
sidetrack that; we want to hijack this.
  That is not the way the Senate ought to work.
  Again, I didn't intend to come to the floor this afternoon, but nor 
did I want to sit and listen to debate which suggests that the minority 
leader, or the Democratic caucus, or anybody else for that matter, is 
at fault for what is taking place.
  As the Senator from West Virginia indicated, there is perhaps 
sufficient blame to go around. I don't disagree with that. But I also 
know that we didn't win the election. I wish we had. We don't control 
the Senate. I wish we did.
  But between now and the date we finish in this session of Congress, 
let me encourage those who make schedules around here to heed the words 
of the minority leader, Senator Daschle. If we have a fair number of 
appropriations bills remaining and people are worrying about whether we 
are going to get them done, then what Senator Daschle suggests, and I 
firmly support, is to do one appropriations bill a day. Bring up a bill 
today. It is Monday. It is 3:30. Let's bring a bill up and debate it 
and stay here until it is done. That is a sure way of getting the bills 
done. It is a sure way of providing everybody with an opportunity to be 
heard. It is also a way perhaps to get the votes on the issues I 
described that I think this Congress ought to be doing.
  I assume we will have an interesting debate in the coming days. I 
hope Congress will be able to finish its work in the next 2 or 3 weeks. 
I hope that when we finish our work Democrats and Republicans can 
together say at the conclusion of the 106th Congress that we have done 
something good for America. But that will not happen unless things 
change, and unless we take a different tact in the next 3 weeks. There 
is a list of about 8 or 10 pieces that we ought to do. Bring them to 
the floor. Let's get them done, and then let's adjourn sine die feeling 
we have done something good for our country.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. In my capacity as a Senator from Maine, I 
suggest the absence of a quorum, and the clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SMITH of New Hampshire. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent 
that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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