[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Page 19905]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                SCHEDULE

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, we are getting used to Senators Enzi and 
Kennedy. They seem to have been on the floor for several days now, and 
we have at least 1 more day, maybe part of another day, but I hope 
not--not because I don't want them here but because we have other 
things to do.
  The Senate is going to immediately proceed to S. 1642, the higher 
education reauthorization legislation. There will be no morning 
business. Under a previous agreement, there will be 8 hours for debate 
on the bill and amendments. First-degree amendments are limited to 12 
amendments per side, with 6 for each manager and an additional 
managers' amendment, with first-degree amendments limited to 30 minutes 
for debate equally divided and any second-degree amendments limited to 
15 minutes for debate equally divided. So at approximately 5:15 today, 
we will begin voting on the pending amendments. We are hopeful we will 
be able to dispose of all of them this evening.
  Following the disposition of this bill, we are going to proceed to 
H.R. 2638, the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill. I 
hope we can finish that bill quickly. I hope we don't have to file 
cloture on it. If we do, that is what we will do. Hopefully, we can 
finish the bill. It is extremely important. It deals with homeland 
security. I will tell all Senators, the bill we have calls for more 
money than the President's suggestion, but remember, we go to 
conference on all of these bills. The House will have passed by the end 
of this week--certainly by the middle of next week--all the 
appropriations bills. So we need to get some done over here so that we 
can go to conference. So I repeat, if somebody has a concern about ours 
being for more money than the President's, don't worry about it. We 
have conference to go to, and as we know, in years past, the White 
House always has the ability to work with us in conference.
  When we finish Homeland Security, we are going to go to the 
children's health bill, which is extremely important. It is important 
because the bill that has been brought before the Senate is one that is 
a compromise, a bipartisan piece of legislation, a bill that was 
reported out of the committee by a 17-to-4 vote. That certainly 
suggests bipartisanship, and it provides health care for millions of 
American children. So I hope we can get consent to proceed to this 
legislation following Homeland Security. If not, we will file cloture, 
and we will go to it after that.
  But as everyone has heard me say, this work period, we are going to 
complete Homeland Security, SCHIP, we are going to complete the 
conference report on the 9/11 Commission recommendations, we are going 
to complete work on the ethics and lobbying reform, and we are going to 
move to another appropriations bill, which will be Military 
Construction and VA. All Senators and staff should be alerted that we 
may have to work weekends. I say plural because it is according to 
where we are on the procedural matters.
  This weekend, I know there is a big trip planned to go to Greenland, 
and we certainly hope Senators can go there. It is something everyone 
needs to see and Senators need to see, with global warming being as it 
is. We will do our best to complete work so that people can have the 
weekend off to go to Greenland and to do whatever they need to do. But 
there are no guarantees in this business, especially at this time of 
the year. We worked all night one night last week, we worked until 
early in the morning one night, and that may be necessary this week and 
next week. I hope we can break in time for our recess, but, again, as I 
have said now for weeks, we have to finish this work first.
  I hope people who have amendments on this bill today will come and 
start offering them. We are going to make sure that all quorum time is 
charged against the bill itself so we can finish that time. The time, 
we are going to finish today; the amendments, we hope to finish today.

                          ____________________