[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Page 19473]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              ENERGY AND WATER DEVELOPMENT APPROPRIATIONS

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, let me just add to what I said to open the 
Senate. Senator Dorgan is an experienced legislator. He is working with 
one of our outstanding Republican legislators, Senator Bennett of Utah. 
They are here and will be, in an hour, ready to start accepting 
amendments, if there are any. I had one of my Democratic colleagues 
say: I have a problem with that bill. I said: Get your amendment there 
today because if you wait until tomorrow, you may not get a chance to 
offer it.
  We need to move forward. These are appropriations bills, and if 
Democrats and Republicans have not agreed on much here, there has been 
an absolute commitment to get our appropriations bills done. We are 
behind schedule even now. We do not want another big omnibus bill. We 
want to do these appropriations bills, get them done. And we are going 
to be able to say, when we leave here this work period, we at least got 
a third of them done before the August break. We are going to come back 
in September and continue to work through these.
  So I repeat, if you have an amendment, you better get it over here 
today because tomorrow it may not be available to you.

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