[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Page 14964]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             THE JOBS BILL

  Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, in a few moments, I am going to be making 
another statement before closing, but before doing that, I want to 
point out to our colleagues that over the course of today, there have 
been a number of meetings held between both sides of the aisle and 
leadership to keep moving along issues that are important to this body 
and to the American people. One of the bills that the assistant 
Democratic leader and myself and the Democratic leader and our 
leadership addressed earlier this morning is the jobs in manufacturing 
bill, the FSC/ETI bill, and the efforts that we are making to move 
toward conference. This bill has passed the Senate, it has passed the 
House of Representatives, and now we are doing our best to address how 
to get to conference. This is a time-sensitive matter because the 
tariffs on U.S. products are increasing.
  Since we passed the Senate bill and the House bill, these tariffs, 
which started at 5 percent in March and reached 9 percent on July 1, 
continue to increase at 1 percent a month.
  We spent 14 days debating the bill. We had 100 amendments, made real 
progress, and now it is important that we go to conference to fully 
address and resolve the differences between the House and the Senate 
bills. For the benefit of all of our colleagues, I wanted to let them 
know that we are in constant discussion about how best to get to 
conference.

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