[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Page 18046]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                SCHEDULE

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, following any leader remarks, the Senate 
will turn to a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to 
speak for up to 10 minutes each.
  As a reminder to my colleagues, last night we were able to reach an 
agreement to limit action on the FDA Food Safety and Modernization Act. 
I filed a cloture motion with respect to the bill. The cloture vote on 
the substitute amendment will occur at 6:30 p.m. Monday, November 29. 
Senators should expect up to five additional votes Monday night so we 
can complete action on that bill on Monday. Basically what we have is 
we have the bill, and we will complete action on that, and we have a 
number of amendments offered by Senator Coburn. As I recall, there is 
only one side-by-side to the work we have done. So we should be able to 
complete that very important bill, which will be such a relief to the 
people of our country. This will be the first modernization of our food 
safety programs in more than 100 years--something long overdue.
  There will be no rollcall votes today. We have a number of matters we 
are working on, trying to have cleared today, and we hope we can do 
that. We will have to wait and see what the outcome of the day is.
  But I appreciated everyone's cooperation late yesterday. It was very 
difficult to work through that. We had, of course, the Jack Lew 
nomination that was a problem that we were able to get cleared. We had 
to get that cleared because statutorily the President has a budget he 
has to submit to us. Without a leader at the Office of Management and 
Budget, it could not be done. So we got that done. We were able to 
arrive at an agreement on the food safety bill so we would not have to 
have multiple votes over the weekend. So I think we accomplished a lot 
this week.
  For me personally, I had three caucuses, which were all extremely 
important for me and the caucus. We spent about 10 or 11 hours over the 
last few days discussing the lameduck and what we have next Congress.
  The floor is now open.

                          ____________________