[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Page 587]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                SCHEDULE

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, following leader remarks, there will be a 
period of morning business for up to 1 hour, with Senators permitted to 
speak for up to 10 minutes each. The majority will control the first 30 
minutes, and the Republicans will control the final 30 minutes. 
Following morning business, the Senate will resume consideration of S. 
22, the wilderness bill. Yesterday, I filed cloture on the bill. The 
cloture vote is expected to occur an hour after the Senate convenes 
tomorrow. We will be in recess today from 12:30 p.m. until 2:15 p.m. 
for our weekly caucus luncheons. The filing deadline for first-degree 
amendments is at 2:30 p.m. today.
  Mr. President, I have had a discussion with Senator Bingaman this 
morning. He is going to see if there is something that can be worked 
out to have a limited number of amendments on the wilderness bill. He 
will proceed to work on that. If, in fact, he can work something out 
with those interested on the other side, then we will have a number of 
votes on that. If they cannot work that out, then, as has been 
indicated in the past, we will go to cloture tomorrow. If we can work 
something out there, we can have those votes today and final passage of 
the bill this afternoon.
  We are going to move to the Ledbetter issue dealing with pay equity, 
the statute of limitations--call it whatever we wish. That is something 
we will move to this week. The Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, is 
now here with us, and there is a very strict deadline when we must 
finish that. We must have a vote on that by this Sunday. So we have our 
work cut out for us. We have a lot to do.
  These are very exciting times, as we know, for our country. We have a 
new Congress. We have a new President. Senator McConnell and I have 
done our utmost during these past many weeks to try to work together to 
get some things done here. We are now at a point where we have 
resolved, we believe, the issue relating to how committees are funded 
and what the ratios are going to be on the various committees, and it 
is easy for me to say that or Senator McConnell to say that, but it has 
taken weeks of work to get that done. But we are moving forward. We 
hope the work of this next week will be in keeping with how we intend 
to maintain a degree of bipartisanship in the Senate during this 
Congress. We hope that, in fact, is the case. We will do our utmost to 
comply with that.

                          ____________________