Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009

Floor Speech

SERVICE MEMBERS HOME OWNERSHIP TAX ACT OF 2009 -- (Senate - December 06, 2009)

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Mr. REID. Mr. President, I have had a brief conversation this afternoon
with the Republican leader. We originally were not going to offer a side-by-side to the Gregg amendment. We have one more vote. We would like Senators Gregg and Pryor to lay down their amendments after that. Because we have told everybody we wouldn't be voting late tonight, we need to complete work on these matters in the morning. So we will debate this tomorrow.

It is my understanding that tomorrow there will be a bipartisan amendment on abortion. We can debate the Pryor and Gregg thing in the morning, and then we will debate abortion, and we will be able to dispose of the Gregg and Pryor matters no earlier than 3:15 tomorrow. So we are going to be debating these two things tomorrow.

I say this off the subject: We have been grinding things out here for some time on a very partisan basis. I was confronted yesterday with an issue. We are here working on a Sunday. We had the President come here to talk to the caucus. The Republican leader said: I don't really think that is fair. Why should we be out of session? It is your caucus. So I said: You keep talking; you can preside. I had no concern about any untoward action taken. In a situation such as that, I had no problem. I trust implicitly Senator McConnell and Senator Kyl.

I hope that is kind of a breakthrough here. We have to start trusting each other. It is rarely done. I have never seen that happen before. I think it is the right thing to do. I am disappointed that there weren't more Democrats listening to what they had to say. From a procedural perspective, I never doubted that everything would go fine.

We are going to have one more vote. We will not be in session much longer today.

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