[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Pages 5663-5664]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                SCHEDULE

  Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, this morning the Senate will resume the 
consideration of S. 3, the partial-birth abortion bill. It is my 
understanding Senator Murray will be prepared to offer an amendment 
this morning. The majority leader has stated it is his intention to 
finish this important legislation by the end of the week. Senators 
wishing to offer amendments to the bill are encouraged to notify the 
managers of their intent so that we can proceed to an orderly 
consideration of the amendments.
  Under the previous unanimous consent agreement, at 11 a.m. today the 
Senate will return to the Estrada nomination and begin a discussion of 
the Senate's constitutional role of advise and consent. Members are 
encouraged to come to the Chamber and engage in this discussion.
  The Senate will recess from 12:30 to 2:15 p.m. for the weekly party 
lunches. Following the recess, the Senate will return to the 
consideration of the partial-birth abortion bill. Additional amendments 
are expected and therefore Members should anticipate votes this 
afternoon.
  Lastly, I know it was the hope of the majority leader to schedule a 
vote on a district judge on the calendar this morning. We attempted to 
schedule a vote at 10:30. At this point, we understand there is an 
objection to setting the vote on Ralph Erickson of North Dakota to be a 
U.S. District Judge for the District of North Dakota. We will continue 
to and hopefully work out a unanimous consent agreement. We will 
certainly notify Members if we are able to succeed in getting a vote 
set sometime this morning.
  I thank all Members.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Murkowski). The Senator from Nevada.
  Mr. REID. Madam President, I say to the manager of this bill, first, 
we would probably agree to the judge without a vote. We are trying to 
run that through to find out if we would agree to the judge without a 
vote.
  Secondly, we have a finite list of amendments we have received on our 
side. We have run that through to the floor staff on the other side. We 
understand, rightfully so, that Senators want to see the amendments 
before there is an agreement on whether or not we could proceed on that 
basis. Yesterday, the majority leader indicated to me and to the 
Democratic leader that he wanted to finish this bill and could we 
cooperate and have a finite list of amendments. We have given those to 
the other side and we hope we can move forward.
  We have had a number of our Members who wanted to bring up amendments 
that are not related to this issue and we have worked to have them not 
do that. So we hope those amendments could be reviewed quickly. We will 
try to get all the amendments. The first amendment Senator Murray is 
going to offer, we hope there will be agreement that there would be no 
second-degree amendments to that. She is not going to offer it until 
there is some agreement to that effect. We hope to get that done 
quickly. We just gave the Senator the amendment. We understand it needs 
to be looked over.
  Mr. SANTORUM. Madam President, I have not had a chance to see the 
amendment, but I want to thank the leader for his willingness to come 
forward and offer a set of amendments. It is a reasonable set of 
amendments, from my estimation. We have not run a check on our side to 
see if there are any amendments. We are in the process of doing that. I 
do not anticipate very many, if any, at this point.
  We are going to look at the amendment of Senator Murray. If we can, 
we will certainly allow that to go forward and we will certainly 
consider all the other amendments. If my colleagues can get them to us, 
I think we can fairly quickly enter into a unanimous consent agreement 
and move forward on this legislation. Again, I thank the Senator from 
Nevada for his willingness to come forward last night with this consent 
agreement. We are off to a good start in trying to get this bill done 
in a timely fashion this week, and I thank him for his cooperation.
  With respect to the issue of the judge, if the Senator does not want 
to vote on a judge, I know our leader would like to have a vote this 
morning, whether it is on a judge or some procedural matter. The leader 
would like to get Members to the Chamber for this discussion. 
Obviously, this is a vitally

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important discussion. The role of advise and consent is one of the more 
fundamental issues we have to grapple with, and our leader would like 
to have as much participation as possible. As is the case in the 
Senate, we usually cannot get that participation unless Senators are in 
the Chamber for a vote, and I think that is his intention.
  We will certainly work with the other side in making sure we can come 
up with some accommodation that will suit both sides.

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