Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Authorization Act - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. REID. I want the record to reflect how much I appreciate the hard work of the Senator from North Carolina, Senator Hagan, working on this bipartisan bill. She did it with the ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Senator Murkowski, and they have done good work coming up with this bill.

But the Senator from Alaska spoke this morning about her desire for consideration of amendments. Typical, typical, typical of the last 6 years here. This bill has 26 Republican cosponsors. This bill was brought up 2 years ago. They have worked hard to improve the bill since then, and you would think with 26 Republican cosponsors to this bill we could move forward on it. But, as usual, they come down here and they say, well, a good bill, but we want to have a bunch of amendments.

I am all for consideration of amendments on this bill. We all are. But the Republicans can't agree on what amendments they want.

I just met with a number of people earlier today about this and explained to them how we used to do things. There wasn't on virtually every piece of legislation a necessity to get cloture on a bill and now even to get on a bill we need cloture, as we find on the bill we just finished some procedural work on, the sportsmen's bill. It affects millions and millions of Americans, but they want amendments. They want amendments because they want to kill the bill as they have tried to kill everything in the last 6 years.

So I repeat, I am all for consideration of amendments. But as we have repeatedly done, we need to have a list of amendments from which to work. Senators have for decades and decades started with a list of amendments and worked through those lists. So I ask Republicans, if you want an amendment process, bring me a reasonable list that leads to passage of the bill.

They can't do that because they can't agree on what amendments they want, and there are so many examples. Energy efficiency is something similar to this, where the senior Senator from New Hampshire worked on a bill with--it doesn't matter if it was the senior or junior Senator--Senator Portman. They worked together on this legislation for months and months--in fact, about a year--and we had a bill on the floor and we were moving forward. I was told before the bill, by the Republicans, let's get this done; it is a great bill.

So I am again reflecting on what happened with the history here.

They said before recess, we need a sense-of-the-Senate on Keystone. I said we have an agreement. Why do we need to do that? But I said OK, a few hours later, you want that, let's do it, because this bill is important.

We need to do that. The recess was a week. We came back. They said: Well, we want to change things a little bit. We want an up-or-down vote on Keystone. They keep changing things. That is not right.

I said: OK, we will vote on Keystone.

They couldn't take yes for an answer. We agreed for an up-or-down vote for Keystone. They wouldn't take it. It is the same thing on this, a bill the Republicans support. They oppose their own legislation. So we are going to move forward.

Now we have the terrorism insurance legislation that I just moved to proceed to. This is an important piece of legislation. Let's hope we can get this done. If we can't, construction in America--whether it is in Indiana, Nevada, Maryland, Iowa, Oregon or Mississippi; it doesn't matter where it is--won't go forward because people won't be able to get insurance.

So I would hope we can get this bill done, but we will see. There are discussions going on, and we will get the same: Yes, I think we can work something out. But when it comes right down to it, Republicans can't agree on what they want. I hope on that important piece of legislation we can get a list of amendments from the Republicans. I am told they are willing to do that. I hope that in fact is the case, because it would be a shame for our country if we couldn't get this done.

The economy is doing better. We added almost 300,000 jobs last reporting period. But if we can't get this done and we can't get the highway bill done, it is going to be a slam to our economy.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source