[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 14764-14765]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              IMMIGRATION

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, in reading this morning's paper, I was 
reminded of the times I would read Dr. Seuss to my boys and my girl. In 
today's New York Times, Tom Friedman quotes Dr. Seuss as follows:

     Then he shut the Things
     in the box with the hook.
     And the cat went away
     with a sad kind of look.
     ``That is good,'' said the fish.
     ``He has gone away. Yes.
     but your mother will come.
     She will find this big mess!
     And this mess is so big
     And so deep and so tall,
     we can not pick it up.
     There is no way at all!''

  Mr. President, some would say that is what we have in the Senate 
today--a big mess. But if you go back and read Dr. Seuss, the cat 
manages to clean up the mess. And as big of a mess as we have with 
immigration in the United States, we have the opportunity to clean up a 
big mess. If we work on a bipartisan basis in the next couple of days, 
we can clean up this mess. If we cannot, then we are back with the cat 
who didn't clean up the mess and the Senate didn't clean up its mess 
with immigration.
  We have known for 3 months the time set for doing immigration. People 
worked in good faith trying to come up with legislation, and they were 
a week short. They said: We need more time. So they got more time. They 
came up with a bipartisan bill. Ten Senators, Democrats and 
Republicans, came up with an immigration bill. Is it a perfect bill? Of 
course, not. Is it a good bill? It is not bad at all. It does some 
things that I think are extremely important, something I have talked 
about for a long time based on my experience in Smith Valley, NV, with 
a girl who couldn't go to college. She was Hispanic. Her parents were 
here illegally, and this young girl couldn't go to college even though 
she was the best student in her class. So we have in this bill the 
DREAM Act. It is a dream for many young Americans.
  AgJOBS. We have been talking about an AgJOBS bill for years. This 
bill has one in it.
  Border security. We have talked about the need for border security. 
This bill provides border security.
  Employer enforcement, employer sanctions. This legislation has good 
employer sanction language. Good enough? Well, we will have to see. 
Some want to improve it. Maybe that is the way to do things.
  Pathway to legalization. For millions of people here illegally with 
improper papers, a path to legalization is a way to bring them out of 
the shadows. That is in this legislation.
  This year's legislation builds on the bill passed by the Senate last 
year after extensive committee considerations and many floor 
amendments. This year, there were lengthy bipartisan negotiations 
involving about 10 Senators and a number of Cabinet officers, in 
addition to other people from the White House. The negotiators asked 
for additional time. We talked about that. It was agreed upon.
  We started the floor debate the week before Memorial Day recess. 
During that week, we disposed of more than a dozen amendments and 
allowed an additional 14 amendments to become pending to the bill. 
Proponents of the bill asked for an additional week of floor debate. I 
agreed. The minority leader said this time this is a 2-week bill. I 
agreed with him and scheduled a second week of debate, and that is 
where we are now.
  This week, we have conducted four rollcall votes, adopted four other 
amendments by voice vote, and we probably would have done more but for 
the unfortunate death of our colleague and friend, Senator Thomas. 
Yesterday morning, in memory of our friend, we decided not to work 
here, and that was the right thing to do. This morning, we have two 
more votes that are scheduled already on the Cornyn and Kennedy 
amendments regarding eligibility for the legalization program. We have 
proposed a unanimous consent agreement. We did that yesterday, and I 
understand the managers have that fairly well worked out on the 12 
pending amendments to have votes on those later today. That was not 
accepted last evening, but I am hopeful that agreement can be worked 
out soon.
  So it is clear we are working in good faith to process amendments and 
move forward on this bill. My decision about cloture last night was 
simply a way to ensure that we finish this bill in a timely manner. By 
offering to postpone the cloture vote, as I did yesterday, until 
tomorrow night, I am offering an additional full day of amendments 
before the cloture vote and, of course, germane amendments are 
considered postcloture.
  I had a meeting in my office just a few minutes ago with a bipartisan 
group of Senators. I believe there is a good-faith effort being made by 
a majority of Senators, Democrats and Republicans, to move this bill 
forward. That is what we are going to try to do.
  There are some people, rightly or wrongly--and that is all in the 
eyes of the beholder--who feel they have not had an opportunity to deal 
with this legislation. If that is the case, let's see

[[Page 14765]]

if we can come up with some amendments that will make them happy. We do 
a lot of business in this body by unanimous consent--in fact, most 
everything. The cloture vote is scheduled for tomorrow morning, an hour 
after we come into session. We can change that. It is my hope that we 
can finish the bill this week. I am very confident we can.
  I personally feel an obligation to go to the funeral in Wyoming. 
Craig Thomas was a Republican with whom I worked very closely on a 
number of issues, and I had great appreciation and admiration for him. 
Out of respect for him and Susan, I feel that I need to go to that 
funeral, and I am sure many others feel the same way. So that is going 
to change our schedule. It is my understanding that funeral is going to 
be Saturday. I have notified my caucus, and I have explained to the 
distinguished Republican leader that we may have to work longer hours 
this week. But let's try to finish this bill.
  There are some, and it is a small number of people, who don't want 
this bill finished under any circumstances. That happens on a lot of 
bills, and we have to try to work our way through that.
  I hope people understand that I would like to get a bill passed. We 
have responsibilities as Senators to not only deal with immigration, 
which is a system, as I have tried to explain with a little vignette 
from Dr. Seuss, that is badly in need of fixing, but we have a lot of 
other problems in this country that are badly in need of fixing. So we 
may have to work hours the Senate hasn't seen very often. We may have 
to work into the night, tonight and tomorrow night and maybe even 
Friday and Friday night, and who knows if that will be enough time to 
get us over the hump.
  I hope people will understand that it is not a question of how much 
time we spend on the bill, it is a question of whether people feel they 
have had the opportunity to change the provisions that are in the bill. 
I have gone over most of them: AgJOBS, DREAM Act, employer enforcement, 
legalization, border security.
  I hope we can get this bill done. We can debate this bill all year 
and end up right back where we are. The American people did not send us 
here to pontificate; they sent us here to legislate. That is what I am 
trying to do and most are trying to do.
  Recognizing that this immigration system is broken and that we need 
to fix it, I extend my appreciation to Senators--Democrats and 
Republicans--who believe this is the time for us to do something 
important for the country.
  I have said on a number of occasions that this bill, when it comes 
out of this body, is not the last word. We have other ways of working 
on this bill. We, as Senators, are going to be fully involved in the 
legislation until it comes out of conference, which is after the House 
passes a bill which will have the imprint of the White House on it.
  So I hope we can move forward in good faith and understand that 
everything we do in life has deadlines, even our legislation in the 
Senate.
  Mr. KENNEDY. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. REID. I will be happy to yield.
  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I thank our leader, someone who has been 
interested, along with many others, in the immigration issue, for the 
leadership he has provided in making sure the Senate was going to take 
up this issue. He had announced in January of this year that he was 
going to take a time for the Judiciary Committee to consider this 
legislation but that he was going to allocate 2 weeks of time, which 
was basically the time we took on the last bill, but it was a major 
period of time to consider the people's business regarding this issue. 
He has been accommodating in terms of working through the Senate's 
schedule. For all of us who are interested in getting a bill, we thank 
him for all he has done in terms of encouraging us to reach judgments 
on these various measures.
  As he has mentioned, we have made very important and significant 
progress, and I think there is a strong mood in the Senate, as there is 
in the country, that this is an extremely important issue. We are 
increasingly close to trying to at least make a recommendation to the 
country about what the Senate's judgment will be on this issue.
  I join with him, as others, to say we are eager to move ahead during 
the day today and tomorrow and to work with the leadership. I know they 
have full schedules. I do think we are making significant progress and 
it is being done in a bipartisan spirit with a desire that those who 
have differing views about this issue can come together and do the 
Nation's business. When we achieve that, hopefully by the end of this 
week, both the Senator from Nevada and the Senator from Kentucky will 
be very much appreciated for their support in helping this legislation 
move ahead.

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