To suspend temporarily the duty on certain synthetic staple fibers that are not carded, combed, or otherwise processed for spinning.

I thank the Republican whip for yielding.

On Monday, the House will meet at 12:30 p.m. for morning hour and 2 p.m. for legislative business with votes postponed until 6:30 p.m.

On Tuesday, Mr. Speaker, the House will meet at 9 a.m. for morning hour and 10 a.m. for legislative business.

Mr. Speaker, we will consider several bills under suspension of the rules, including a bill to address cuts in Medicare physician rates. I will reiterate that. We will have a suspension bill on Medicare physician rates.

The complete list of suspension bills will be announced by the close of business today.

In addition, we will consider H.R. 5876, the Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens Act; H.R. 6275, the Alternative Minimum Tax Relief Act of 2008; H.R. 3195, the Americans with Disabilities Restoration Act; two bills dealing with Michigan Indian Land Claim Settlements, H.R. 4415 and H.R. 2176.

And we also anticipate considering important energy-related legislation including H.R. 6052, the Saving Energy Through Public Transportation Act of 2008.

And I yield.

I want to thank you for your very generous remarks. I also want to thank you for not only working on this particular piece of legislation with me and with others, but also for the spirit that you bring to trying to work together if that's possible within the context of reaching a compromise, again, if that is possible. So I thank you very much.

Also I want to say that while you and I worked very hard together, I think both of us would say that Mariah Sixkiller and Brian Diffell probably worked more together and longer and harder than we did. And I want to thank Brian on your staff for the work that he did, and of course, Mariah Sixkiller on my staff for the work they did, as we worked with all of the individuals and committees who are involved in the jurisdictional matters here.

So I thank you for your kind words and I thank you for your efforts. I think that the product that we produced is a product that will be good for the country. And I'm hopeful, as you are, that the Senate will pass it next week and send it to the President for his signature.

If the gentleman will yield.

The committee is working on that now. As the gentleman knows, we discuss this problem all the time. Of course, we had passed a Medicare physicians' reimbursement bill which precluded the 10 percent cut from going into effect, and it provided for a modest increase in the reimbursement rates to physicians. We passed that, of course, as you know, approximately, maybe, a little over a year ago. The Senate did not include it in the SCHIP bill, of which the SCHIP was a part of the CHAMP bill. The only thing they passed was SCHIP, and they indicated to us at that point in time that they would certainly pass the Medicare reimbursement. That has not yet happened.

Unfortunately, the failure of that to happen has now put us in a position where we are facing the June 30 expiration date of the authorization and, therefore, the 10 percent reduction.

Late yesterday, it was apparent that the Senate would not be able to reach a compromise or at least it had not with Chairman Rangel and Chairman Dingell after discussions--and I don't know how long those discussions took--yesterday with Chairman Bachus, and I don't know whether Senator Grassley was involved in those conversations.

In any event, they determined that they needed to come up with legislation for the House to vote on to provide for reimbursement. They're working on that now. I expect it to be filed today, if possible.

I thank the gentleman.

Obviously, we realize that there is that possibility. We hope that does not occur, but we are very interested in getting a bill in light of the fact this will not be until probably next Tuesday. I'm sure it will not be until next Tuesday that we vote on this. We need to get that bill to the Senate because we know they've had great difficulty passing a bill. I'm not sure whether they'll be in next Friday as well or on Saturday of next week, but we simply believe that it needs to pass as quickly as possible, but we do realize the risk.

It would fail on suspension.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

We all agree that this should have been done earlier. At least all of us in this body agree that it should have been done earlier. Frankly, I presume that everybody in the other body agrees that it should have been done earlier.

The problem has been, as you well know, the failure to get agreement and to get 60 votes in the Senate to allow almost any alternative to go forward. Obviously, we passed a bill that had pay-fors in it, which is what you're talking about, some of which were unacceptable to many on your side and to some on our side.

Whatever we offer is going to be paid for. Mr. Dingell and Mr. Rangel, in particular, and his committee are working on that as we speak to see what they can fashion, and we hope that the two-thirds majority necessary to pass a suspension bill will be there--we'll see-- but we'll be working on this next week.

The answer to your question is we do intend to consider that bill under a rule.

I thank the gentleman for mentioning that.

As you know, I was the sponsor and principal manager of the Americans with Disabilities Act when it passed. Some of your Members don't remember him, but he was a great Member of this body: Steve Bartlett, from Texas, who ended up being the Mayor of Dallas and who is a good friend of mine, has been working very hard on this as we attempt to restore it to what we thought it was when we passed it.

The good news is we have worked very hard, and the disability community has worked very hard with the business community, and we have agreement now with employers and with the disability community on a bill that makes sense for both.

I appreciate the distinguished Republican whip for cosponsoring this legislation, and I look forward to working with him to ensure the passage of this bill on Wednesday next.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my good friend from Maryland, the majority leader, for information about next week's schedule.

I thank my friend for that information.

I'm looking here at what we're going to be talking about. I will have some questions about that.

Before I get to that, I would like to congratulate my friend on the great work he did on the legislation we passed both yesterday and today. Particularly the legislation today took a tremendous amount of effort on the majority leader's part to get that legislation to the floor. I'm hopeful that the Senate, before we leave for the Fourth of July, will pass this and get it to the President's desk.

I'm convinced that the country will be significantly safer because of the tools we've given the intelligence community. But I'm also convinced that we have done a lot to structure this process in a way that not only protects individual rights, but also requires the government to be more forthcoming with its rules and regulations. And both the leader and his staff did a great job on this. And I know personally because we've worked together on it, and spent days, hours and weeks trying to get to a bill that would come to the floor that would have a significant vote from the majority side. And virtually every Republican at the end of the day was able to be there, as we have been on these bills generally.

But I am grateful to you, and I will just point out that while we almost got a majority of the majority voting for this, there wasn't a majority of the majority. And that makes it harder for a leader. And that can be easily overlooked. But this is something where you had to work hard to do what you thought was the right thing for the country. And I'm grateful to you for it.

Well, I thank the gentleman, and I certainly share his comments on our two principal staffers who have spent so much time on this.

But one of the things in this process that I was deeply appreciative of, and that you mentioned in your remarks today, was how great the entire staff was in coming together on very technical issues where every single word mattered. The staff on both sides of the aisle were in those rooms you and I were in--and many times we were not in the room--when they were working out the last technicalities of which word was the best word. With all of those involved, it made a big difference here as they do so often, but this is one of those moments where exactly what is done makes a big difference in both how we secure our country and in how we secure our liberties. I'm grateful to the staff for that.

On the Medicare bill that would come to the floor under suspension, as I believe I understood your announcement on Medicare physician rates, when would that bill be available? Will it be available?

We've known that we were going to face this deadline for about 8 months now or for at least 6 months now.

As to the process there of going through suspension, I would just tell my friend that I think, on a suspension bill, if this has Medicaid cuts that hurt rural communities or that hurt minority seniors, as we believe some of the cuts in the CHAMP bill did, I would be prepared for this bill to fail on suspension. It might pass with a rule. I wouldn't know about that, but I would give some prediction here that a suspension bill that does those things as pay-fors to appropriately see that physicians are reimbursed but then to have a big debate on the House floor as to whether or not seniors--minority seniors and rural seniors--are disproportionately impacted would, in my opinion, lead to at least a veto-sustaining number on our side.

I'd yield.

Well, to make the point, I'm not sure in my statement there that I mentioned a veto-sustaining majority. I'll just point out, if we had that veto-sustaining number, rather, it would also mean that the bill wouldn't pass and that it would fail on suspension.

So I'm certainly hoping that we deal with this important issue of physician reimbursement. I wish we could have done it with a bill that would have been developed sometime in the last 6 months, but we have some concern about that and, I think, appropriately so.

We have a number of physicians on our side who understand this process much better than I do, and I think it's very important that we try to involve them in this process. We've actually got a number of proposals on our side, as you very well may have, too, none of which I've seen in any kind of legislative form.

I'd yield.

My belief is that is largely not going to be dependent on the issue that solves the problem for physicians but on how that problem is solved. Of course, if two-thirds of the Members are not prepared to do it that way, that will not have gained any time. It will actually have lost time. We'll continue to talk, if you want to, on that.

I notice there is also a bill on energy that is potentially to be considered, and I wonder if that bill would be considered under a rule, and I would hope that it would be.

I'd yield.

I thank the gentleman for that.

As for the ADA update on the Americans with Disabilities Act Restoration, I, personally, anticipate I'll be working with you to pass that, and I look forward to seeing that on the House floor.

I'd yield.

I thank the gentleman for that.

Energy will continue to be an important focus of our discussion of what we think should be on the floor. We look forward to seeing an energy bill on the floor with a rule, and I would encourage the majority to bring every energy bill that we're trying to discharge right now to the floor as soon as possible.