[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 2]
[Senate]
[Pages 1984-1985]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                SCHEDULE

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, this morning, we will be in a period of 
morning business for 60 minutes. The first half of the time will be 
under the control of the Republicans and the second half of the time 
will be under the control of the Democrats.
  Following morning business, we will resume consideration of H.R. 2, 
the minimum wage bill. We will be in recess today from 12:30 to 2:15 
for the party luncheons. As I indicated, we have two cloture motions 
that have been filed. The first vote, on line-item veto, will take 
place tomorrow. If cloture is not invoked, we will then proceed to a 
vote on the underlying bill, which is S. 2.
  There have been a number of amendments filed and that is very good. 
We are looking at a number of them closely to see if we can schedule a 
vote on one of them sometime this morning.
  Looking at the schedule, we are going to have a couple of votes 
Friday morning, and everyone should understand that. The only way I can 
see that we will not have votes Friday morning is if we can figure out 
a way to finish minimum wage on Thursday. That is certainly possible. I 
am impressed with the seriousness of the amendments that have been 
offered. To this point, five amendments have been offered, and we 
certainly could complete this bill this week if we put our minds to it. 
I hope we can do that. If we cannot, it will spill over into next week. 
I am not sure that is good; we have so many things that we have to do. 
I have had a number of conversations with the Republican leader and we 
are going to have debate on Iraq. We are going to make that as 
meaningful as possible. We are going to work together to see if we can 
limit the subject matter of the debate on Iraq. We hope we can do that. 
We also have other things that are facing us down the road, not the 
least of which is stem cell research and negotiation on Medicare. But 
more importantly, we have to make sure the Government has money after 
February 15. That is something, again, I have had a number of 
conversations on with the distinguished Republican leader. The 
Appropriations Committee, with Democrats and Republicans, has worked 
very well on that. Senator Cochran has been fully engaged and all of 
the subcommittee chairs and ranking members have been engaged.
  I think we are at a point where we have a pretty good idea of the 
subject matter of the CR. There will be no earmarks, zero, not a single 
earmark on the CR. That is what we have agreed

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upon. Senator McConnell agrees with that, as I do, and the two 
appropriating bodies agree with that. So we are going to move forward 
on the CR. It is not going to be fun. I have been an appropriator here 
for many years, as has Senator McConnell. We like to do the regular 
process, but in my opinion we cannot get to that unless we get the CR 
out of the way and work on the budget and get the appropriations bills 
done.
  It is my goal to work very hard to get the appropriations bills done 
this year. It has been done before and we can do it again. It has been 
done under Republican leadership and under Democratic leadership in the 
Senate. We have been working on it on a bipartisan basis. I think we 
can get it done.
  As a reminder, first-degree amendments must be filed at the desk by 
2:30 p.m. this afternoon.

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