[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Page 17355]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                SCHEDULE

  Mr. REID. The Republican leader and I will make a few remarks today. 
After that, the majority will hold the first half and the Republicans 
the final half of 1 hour in morning business. Following morning 
business, the Senate will be in executive session to consider the 
Gleason and Rogers nominations. At this stage, we have two scheduled 
votes. We are going to work with the managers, Senators Leahy and 
Grassley, and see whether we need that second vote, and that decision 
will be made later this morning. At around 12, there will be, as I 
indicated, up to two rollcall votes on confirmation of these 
nominations. Following that vote, the Senate will recess until 2:15 
p.m. to allow for the weekly caucus meetings. At 2:15, we will resume 
consideration of the Energy and Water appropriations bill.
  As I indicated yesterday, we have a lot to do. Thanksgiving is the 
week after the day after tomorrow, and we have a lot of things we have 
to complete.
  I gave my word that we are going to do the Defense authorization 
bill. It still hasn't been worked out to the satisfaction of everyone, 
but there comes a time when we have to stop negotiating and move to the 
legislation. We are going to do that following our finishing the next 
minibus we have. It will be wonderful if we can complete that quickly. 
As I indicated yesterday, I am not going to fill the legislative tree, 
but I don't know how much time we are going to be able to spend on this 
with never-ending amendments. What I would like to do is what we have 
done in the past, which is to have people offer amendments. But we have 
to have some kind of a limit that will be self-imposed--that we will 
have maybe 10 stacked amendments and we will have to figure out some 
way to dispose of those before we move to another batch of amendments. 
We will work our way through that. Our staffs, Mr. Myrick and Mr. 
Schiappa, have been working to see if they can help us work through 
these issues we have.
  We also have the CR we have to do. We hope we will have the first 
minibus conference completed on that, and we will finish that this work 
period.
  So there is a lot to do. When we come back after Thanksgiving, we 
only have 3 or 4 weeks until we are there at Christmas.
  As I said yesterday, it looks as if we are going to be able to finish 
our work here at a reasonable time this week. I hope we don't have to 
work this weekend, and I hope we don't have to work next week. I don't 
think we will have to do that, but everyone should be prepared in case 
we do because we have some things that have to be done, such as the CR.
  When we come back after the Thanksgiving recess, I tell everyone now 
that we are not going to be able to do our normal short weeks here. So 
people are going to have to spend less time at home because the 
workload after Thanksgiving is really full of lots to do. Again, we 
have expiring tax provisions we have to work on. If we are fortunate, 
if the committee comes up with something, that is 30 hours they will 
have to debate that issue. So we have to be prepared after Thanksgiving 
to just be here until we are ready to leave for Christmas.

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