Trent Lott

Mr. LOTT

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I send a second-degree amendment to the desk.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, for the information of all Senators, I have filled the tree on the juvenile justice bill with the text of the Senate bill in an effort to send this bill to conference. The cloture vote on the pending amendment will occur on Wednesday morning. I ask unanimous consent that the cloture vote occur at 9:45 a.m. on Wednesday and that the mandatory quorum under rule XXII be waived.

Mr. LOTT. It is interesting to note, Mr. President, that after a lot of concern or even complaints about the process of filling up the tree, here I am having to do that in order to go to conference. In this case, I am sure the Democrats and the Republicans support this effort so we can get this legislation to conference for its consideration. This is a perfect example of the majority leader sometimes having to use this type of technique.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I now send another cloture motion to the desk to the pending bill.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk to the pending substitute.

Mr. LOTT. I now ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. LOTT. Finally, Mr. President, I send a second-degree amendment to the desk.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. LOTT

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, when the Senator was talking about the rights of the minority, I thought it was I speaking. I remembered my saying the same thing. In fact, I was sitting right over there. I think there were only three desks there. I remember pleading with Senator Mitchell, who was standing right there, the majority leader. I believed I was being oppressed and that the minority rights were not being honored. I remember also sitting right over there pleading with the Senator from Texas, who was chairman of the Finance Committee, Senator Bentsen, to offer an amendment. As I recall, it had something to do with university loans or scholarships. I remember being prohibited from offering that amendment. I know when you are in the minority you are not always happy with the way you are treated. But I think we need to work together to try to not have that be the all-consuming viewpoint around here, and I don't think it has. I remember how rough it was being in the minority. I was there for 21 years. I didn't like it at all. I like the majority much better. But I think you have to try to be reasonable on both sides of the aisle. That is why I have been a little bit shocked today by the tone of the debate which I was watching. Although I was not participating in it, I thought I had to come out here and, in effect, explain what happened--explain what this really means, and a little bit to defend my honor. But I appreciate what the Senator has said. I know he has been helpful since I have been the majority leader. I am sure he will help us try to get our work done in the future as he has done in the past. If I could, let me ask unanimous consent.

Mr. LOTT. I wouldn't, couldn't, and would never expect to even try.

Mr. LOTT. I yield to the Senator.

Mr. LOTT. I would, but I would point out that we only have a few minutes left. I need to hold a few minutes. I see Senator Chafee may want to speak. I will yield one more time.

Mr. LOTT. Because if you take 3 weeks on a bill like Y2K liability limits, which should have gone through here relatively quickly, that makes it more difficult to call up other bills that Senators would also like to consider. I think maybe the Senator and I are involved in a discussion of scheduled events and rules which is important to us and important to the way the body works. I think the main thing we need to be saying to the American people is that we are going to work together to try to get our business done. By the way, the length of speech doesn't necessarily mean that the merit is all that great. In terms of bipartisanship, I think I have proven several times, including working with the administration in 1996 and 1997 to get Medicare reform, tax cuts for working Americans, budget restraint, welfare reform, illegal immigration reform, health care portability--we have worked in a lot of areas in a bipartisan way across the aisle and across the Capitol and with the administration. I would like for us to continue doing that. I am one of the few Members--to show just how nonpartisan or bipartisan I am, I came to the city thinking I was a Democrat, but I was elected as a Republican. So I served on both sides of the aisle.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I thank Senator Byrd. I ask unanimous consent that the votes in regard to the scope amendment and the vote on adoption of S. Res. 160 occur at 5:30 p.m. in stacked sequence with 2 minutes of debate between each vote and the final vote in the sequence being the cloture vote.

Mr. LOTT. That is partially because of the amount of time that has been taken up with other bills that were not scheduled. Bankruptcy, for instance, has been bumped several times because it took longer. The will of the Senate was to take longer in the debate of other bills. There is the case of the nuclear waste legislation, which the Senate passed a couple years ago. Now the Energy and Natural Resources Committee has come up with a bill that is very different. I think maybe it could have even broader support than the previous bill, which I think got about 63, 64, or 65 votes, or was going to have that many. So the point is, the majority has to try to bring up bills in which there is broad interest and that have support--things such as the State Department and Defense Department authorizations. My goodness, if we don't authorize the legislation for the Department of Defense, we can't get the appropriations bill, or it causes all kinds of problems. A lot of what I bring up is dictated by, frankly, what the Constitution requires, or what has to be done to keep the Government operating in an appropriate way. Here is a bill, the Workforce Incentives Improvement Act, which had problems when it came out of committee. They were worked on and this bill passed, I think, probably overwhelmingly, if not unanimously. It is one that was a high Democratic priority, but also had the support of the chairman of the Finance Committee and the ranking member. The Y2K bill was a bill that had bipartisan support out of Judiciary and also out of a second committee, where you had Democrats involved in both instances. Yet it took us weeks to get that bill done. I think we had to go through three cloture votes to get that bill done, which the President signed into law.

Mr. LOTT. I yield the floor, Mr. President.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, if I might respond to that, I think what is involved here is Democrats want to dictate the schedule around here. The Democrats want to dictate what the schedule is. When you say yes, juvenile justice and the Patients' Bill of Rights are examples of the way it can be done around here, it is because those were bills on which there was pressure to bring them up, not in the order that had been planned. But is the Senator saying, for instance, that the Democrats didn't also support or were not involved in these other bills that actually had bipartisan support, such as the national missile defense, which Senator Inouye was a cosponsor of; the soldiers and sailors pay raise bill, which had bipartisan support; education flexibility, which had bipartisan support; water resources, which passed unanimously, and defense authorization? These are not bills that I bring up because they are bills Republicans want; these are bills that are in the interest of the country.

Mr. LOTT. The list is very long here. I don't quite understand what the complaint is.

Mr. LOTT. First of all, with regard to the partisanship, as a matter of fact, I think I would have to disagree with the Senator from West Virginia. I have not been in the Senate nearly as long as he has, but I have been working with Congress for 30 years--30 years. I am 57. I came here when I was 26. I was a staff member for 4 years; 16 years in the House. I saw partisanship at its worst in the House when I was a Member and part of an oppressed minority in the House. I have been in the Senate for going on 11 years. I really do not feel that much partisanship. I feel a real warmth toward a number of Democrats. And I thought it was just this year, just a short time ago, that we came through a historic impeachment trial in which we stood in these aisles--this center aisle here--together and said, this was a tough task; it was a constitutional requirement we had a duty to do. We performed our duty, and whether you agreed with the end result or not, most folks felt it was done fairly and not with shrill partisanship. Even when we disagree on substantive issues, I think the Senate is almost the only place in this city where it does not get to be shrill partisanship. I see the distinguished ranking member from New York of the Finance Committee. The Finance Committee is probably the most bipartisan, nonpartisan committee in the entire Congress. We do not always come out with a bipartisan bill, but usually we report a bill that has votes from both sides of the aisle. That was the case just last week on the tax bill; a couple Democrats voted with the Republicans. I don't believe that is partisanship, No. 1. The reason I think it doesn't get that shrill is because we are sensitive to each other's needs to be heard, to our individual needs. We have tried to be a Senate that understands that Senators have families, and I think just that relationship helps because Members are not exhausted and mad at each other. I want to continue to further that. In terms of giving the Democrats a chance, while there has been a lot of hollering about it, the fact is, you have been getting a pretty good chance. As a matter of fact, on the juvenile justice bill, I could have gone through all kinds of contortions and gyrations to try to block that, but I thought it was a bill that came out of the Judiciary Committee on a bipartisan basis after 3 years of work, and we ought to take it up. Did I like the way it went on a week more than I had been told it would take to get it done? No. As the Senator from West Virginia said, the Senate had to work its will, and there were more amendments cooking out there. I didn't run around out here trying to block them. Some of my colleagues said I should have done that. We worked our will. We wrangled around on the Patients' Bill of Rights for almost a year. We could have done that bill last fall, but we couldn't come to agreement. We came to agreement. We took the bill up. We got it done. Now, there were some speeches made the day before we completed that bill about how terrible the process was, but the night we got it done, Senators on both sides stood up and said: Well, I don't like all this and it wasn't perfect, but basically we got our fair shot, and we got our work done. As far as giving people the chance, I have a list, two pages of bills that have been done this year that are not appropriations bills. We did the first concurrent budget resolution on time, only the second time in 25 years. We provided small business loan guarantees to small businesses that have year 2000 problems. We passed a national missile defense bill, which the President signed just the other day. And by the way, in his statement with his signing it, he misstated what the bill did. We passed a soldiers' and sailors' pay raise bill. We passed education flexibility. We had some Democrats who worked on that all the way. The President was saying all the way: I will veto it; I will veto it. Finally we got it done and he signed it. We passed the water resources bill. This is an area where we haven't passed an authorization bill, I think, in 5 years. We have passed it. The House has passed it, and after a lot of work, we actually got it into conference. Juvenile justice, we passed that through. The majority leader is trying to get to conference on that. We are going to have to have a bipartisan effort to get to conference. Defense authorization; energy bill package; financial modernization, a bill that has been coming for 10 years-- people didn't think the Senate would have any chance to pass a financial modernization bill. We got it through the Senate. Hopefully, we will get it through. The list goes on in terms of Senators being able to have amendments on authorizations bills and getting important authorization bills through. While the majority leader has to sometimes say we ought to be doing more, the fact of the matter is, we have been doing pretty good this year. I invite my colleagues and the public to take a look at this two- page list of bills. As a matter of fact, we have already passed eight appropriations bills. We are probably a week or maybe a bill or two behind where we ought to be on appropriations, but in recent history, that is pretty good progress. I would like to keep that going. In terms of filling up the tree, again, I didn't invent this idea. In fact, I think I first saw it when Senator Mitchell used it. But Senator Dole used it on the 1985 budget resolution. Senator Byrd used it in 1977 on the energy deregulation bill. In fact, to study the brilliant use of the rules of the Senate, I have gone back and read and reread that particular bill and how Senator Byrd handled it. Of course, as I recall, I think Senator Baker was probably working with you on that issue, but I know it was tough. You had to have vote after vote after vote after vote to break basically an amendment filibuster.

Mr. LOTT. We have other Senators who may want to speak, but I did not want to interrupt if you were about to make a point. But I do want to comment on some of those issues that you mentioned.

Mr. LOTT. Because there are several points you have made to which I would like to respond.

Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, could I respond to some of the comments Senator Byrd has made?

Mr. LOTT. The energy deregulation bill, of 1977, during the Carter years. As I recall Senator Metzenbaum and others were resisting in every way possible. Senator Byrd filled up the tree on the Grove City bill in 1984, and the campaign finance bill in 1988, Senator Byrd filled up the tree there--there were eight cloture votes on that particular bill--and then on the emergency supplemental appropriations bill in 1993. Sometimes I thought it was a brilliant move. Sometimes I thought it was the right thing; sometimes I didn't. But the Senator is right, the majority leader has a job to do. Sometimes it is not easy. Sometimes it is quite difficult. But I think it is important that he continues to try to encourage the Senate forward and do it in such a way that when he leaves at the close of business on Monday, the 26th, he will be able to come back the 27th and work with every Senator the next day. I wanted to respond on some of those comments.

Mr. LOTT. If the Senator will yield, I had the impression earlier that Senator Stevens wanted to reinstate rule XVI, and I actually had the impression that the Senator from West Virginia also wanted to.