Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to a period of morning business with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

I ask unanimous consent to proceed to Calendar No. 86, S. 579.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time, passed, and the motion to reconsider be made and laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of the following bills en bloc: Calendar No. 45, S. 23; Calendar No. 46, S. 25; Calendar No. 47, S. 26; Calendar No. 48, S. 112; Calendar No. 49, S. 130; Calendar No. 50, S. 157; Calendar No. 52, S. 230; Calendar No. 53, S. 244; Calendar No. 55, S. 276; Calendar No. 56, S. 304; Calendar No. 59, S. 352; Calendar No. 61, S. 383; Calendar No. 62, S. 393; and Calendar No. 63, S. 459.

I ask unanimous consent that the bills be agreed to en bloc, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. Res. 170, and the Senate proceed to its consideration.

I ask unanimous consent the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. President, we whipped right through this, but John Lewis in my lifetime is one of the finest, most patriotic, courageous people I have ever known. I have so much admiration for this man. I have told him this personally. I want the Record to be spread with this. He is a person who as a very young man wanted to change the world in his own way, and in his own way he has helped change the world. I so admire him.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 175, which was submitted earlier today.

I ask unanimous consent the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 176.

I ask unanimous consent the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to S. Res. 177, submitted earlier today.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be laid on the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Pursuant to the previous order, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of H.R. 475 and that it be read a third time and the Senate proceed to vote on passage as provided under the previous order.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:30 a.m., Thursday, June 20, 2013; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day; and that the time until 11:30 a.m. be equally divided and controlled between the majority and minority.

Mr. President, Senators should be prepared for a rollcall vote at 11:30 a.m. tomorrow morning. I am doing that in an effort to make progress on the bill. We will try to work through additional amendments tomorrow. Additional votes are expected, and that is an understatement.

I tell everyone again that we are doing our utmost to try to make it as convenient as possible for people who have amendments determined by a vote or in some other manner, but we may have to be here this weekend. I hope that is not the case. I have alerted people about this for days now.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it adjourn under the previous order.

Mr. President, following leader remarks the Senate will be in a period of morning business for an hour. The Republicans will control the first half, and the majority will control the final half. Following that morning business the Senate will resume consideration of the immigration bill.

The Senate will recess from 12:30 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. for our weekly caucus meetings. At 3 o'clock there will be four rollcall votes in relation to amendments to the immigration bill.

Mr. President, I would simply add on that, I have had a number of calls already this morning saying: You cannot have the votes then. I have this. We have meetings. We would like to have the votes at 4 o'clock.

This bill, we have to move forward on it. I was very happy we were able to get consent to have these four votes starting at 3 o'clock today. Time is of the essence on this legislation. I have been patient. We have all been patient waiting to see what amendments people want to offer. I want to make sure that on some of these major issues people have had the time to work through them. We know some of the issues are difficult. I have been told Senator Hoeven and Senator Corker are trying to work with the eight bipartisan Senators to come up with something they believe is important for them to vote on. I have no problem with that, but I am just telling everybody, as I have now for quite a long time, that we are going to either file cloture on this on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. We have to move forward on this legislation.

So I urge people to work together to come up with whatever amendments they believe are important. Of course, we are all looking at this major issue. I have talked to the Republicans' Gang of 8 and the Democrats' Gang of 8. They are working on something dealing with border security. I am not telling anyone what to do other than to do it as quickly as you can.

The time has come to make decisions on this important piece of legislation. We say we have been on it 2 weeks. We have really been on it longer than that. That first week after the break there were meetings going on all over this Capitol on what we should do with immigration.

So I would hope people understand that this may not be one of our normal weekends where we shoot out of town to go back to whereever we come from. We have to move forward on this legislation.

Mr. President, I talked yesterday at some length on the budget. It is important. We are approaching 3 months where we have not been able to go to conference on this budget. This is so extremely important. I spent yesterday morning at the NIH. I was not able to meet with all the heads of the Institutes, but I met with four of them, plus Dr. Collins, who runs the NIH, the National Institutes of Health.

I will have more to say about this later, but South Africa, England, France, India--China is increasing their spending by almost 25 percent for programs just like we have at NIH. What are we doing at NIH? We are cutting spending. They have been flat-funded since about 2004. With the stimulus bill, which is now going on 5 years ago, we gave them a shot in the arm because of Senator Specter. But that money has long since been gone. They are headed downhill, and they have been for several years now. These wonderful scientists we have there are leaving.

One of the scientists from the University of Michigan, who, by the way, is best friends with my chief of staff, is basically staying away from NIH because you cannot have--and he is an expert, one of if not the leading expert in the world on melanoma. He is not making application for NIH grants anymore because they cannot do scientific research when it is only available for a year or two. So I hope we can move forward on this budget conference and get something done on this to set the Nation's financial problems in the right direction. We are not going to get anything done unless we are able to get something done on the budget. We cannot do this.

I am proud of the budget we passed. I think it is a very good budget, but I realize if we go to conference we may have to change some of the things we have in our budget. But we are never going to get this done unless we sit down and work this out, as we have done for more than two centuries here in conferences between the House and the Senate.

Finally, I see on the floor my friend, the senior Senator from Tennessee, who has been a longtime Governor of his State. He has been the Secretary of Education. We have an issue coming up soon. If we do not work something out in this body before the end of this month, student loan interest rates will go up a lot. If we do nothing, they will double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. If we do what the House wants to do, if we do what Senate Republicans want to do, these student loans will be used to reduce the debt. I do not think that is what we should be doing with students. While this is not the time to debate this issue, everyone should be aware as we deal with immigration over the next couple weeks, we also have to keep this matter on the radar screen that we are going to have to do something about.

I have a number of meetings on this today, and I am sure my Republican colleagues have meetings throughout the day, and we need to have as many as we can to work something out to get this done.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be in order to be called up and that they not be subject to modification or division, with the exception of the technical modifications to the Merkley and Paul amendments contained in this agreement: Manchin No. 1268; Pryor No. 1298; Merkley No. 1237, as modified with the changes at the desk; Boxer No. 1240; Reed No. 1224; Cornyn No. 1251; Lee No. 1208; Paul No. 1200, as modified with the changes at the desk; Heller No. 1227; and Cruz No. 1320; finally, that no second-degree amendments be in order to any of these amendments prior to votes in relation to the amendments.

Madam President, we now have these amendments in order and we will work with all the parties to see if we can have some way of proceeding to set up votes. I would hope we can work something out so we do not have to do procedural things to try to get rid of them. We are going to do our utmost. I appreciate everyone's cooperation getting this long list of amendments so we can start voting on them.

I think it would be a pretty fair assumption that we are not going to have any votes tonight on these amendments. We will work something out tomorrow. It is about 7 o'clock and we still have a little more work to do on other issues.