[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 17]
[Senate]
[Page 22120]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                SCHEDULE

  Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, I again want to congratulate the new 
leadership in the Senate for the 110th Congress. Democrats 2 days ago 
elected their leadership and the Republicans yesterday elected our 
leadership. A lot of planning is underway for the 110th Congress. As 
everyone knows, we have before us the objective of finishing the 
business of the 109th Congress, both over the course of today and 
possibly tomorrow, and then in a period that will begin the week of 
December 4, and possibly continue into the week following that. Both 
the Democratic leader and I have outlined what we have to accomplish. 
It is still a very long list in terms of appropriations bills, in terms 
of the United States-India nuclear agreement, in terms of potentially 
other trade agreements. We have tax extenders and a whole range of 
issues.
  The Democratic leader and I will go into a quorum call very shortly 
and we will finalize the plan for today. But as we stated yesterday, 
before we leave this week--either tomorrow or we could finish later 
tonight--we do need to finish the United States-India nuclear 
agreement. We talked yesterday in our own conference about the 
importance of that particular piece of legislation, legislation that 
all our colleagues are familiar with, and we have a unanimous consent 
agreement to proceed to that with a fixed number of amendments. If you 
look at the amendments, it is clear that we won't have to do all of 
those amendments on that legislation. So I am confident that we can and 
we will finish that bill before we leave.
  We do have an understanding that we will go to the agriculture 
appropriations bill as well. At some point I want to be able to do that 
and hopefully we can work out the details on how we can accomplish at 
least starting that particular bill, with the objective of finishing 
the United States-India nuclear agreement before we leave. So in the 
next few minutes we will be coming back with an announcement of that 
schedule as agreed to, but we will finish that bill before we leave.

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