[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Page 15989]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                PROGRAM

  Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, today we made great progress toward 
finishing the prescription drug/Medicare reform legislation. We debated 
many amendments. We had nine rollcall votes in relation to the pending 
amendments during today's consideration of this bill.
  Tomorrow morning, we will resume consideration of S. 1. I would 
anticipate another busy day on this bill as well tomorrow. On 
Wednesday, the first rollcall vote was anticipated to be at 10 a.m. 
However, at this time the final legislative draft is not ready. We will 
continue to work on that draft over the course of the evening and into 
the morning, but at this juncture I will likely have to notify our 
Members as early as possible tomorrow morning as to whether we will 
actually call that rollcall vote at 10 a.m. I am hopeful that we can. 
If the legislative language is not ready, we will not have that vote at 
10 a.m., but I hope to be able to announce that at 9:30 in the morning.
  I do want to remind my colleagues that at this juncture we have 
approximately 42 amendments still pending to the bill. These amendments 
will have to be addressed by the Senate in some fashion, although I am 
very hopeful that many of these amendments can be disposed of without a 
rollcall vote. In any event, we have a lot of work to do before we have 
passage of this bill.
  I, once again, will state that it is my intention that we will finish 
consideration of the prescription drug/Medicare reform bill prior to 
the July 4 recess--many hours, a lot of hard work, but we are on course 
to accomplish that, and I expect that we will do so.
  I look forward to another productive day tomorrow as we begin the 
final consideration of this bill.

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