[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 16] [Senate] [Page 22163] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]SCHEDULE Mr. REID. Mr. President, following the remarks of the leaders, if there are any, we will be in a period of morning business, with Senators allowed to speak for up to 10 minutes each. I ask that on the Democratic side--we are going to try to do this on a rotating basis--on the Democratic side Senator Harkin and Senator Schumer be the first speakers. Negotiations on the agreement to vote in relation to the stimulus legislation is ongoing. If we have a vote on that legislation, it will be at 11 or 11:30 a.m. today. That will be the only vote today. We hope to reach agreement so we can have that vote, as I indicated. We also should tell everyone we are working very hard to do something on the bailout of our financial institutions. We know we have an obligation to do that. A lot of Senators have a lot of questions about where we are in this situation. We were at the White House last night. Our meeting was reconvened on the second floor of the Capitol last night, and Secretary Paulson was here, Senator Dodd, Senator Gregg, Chairman Frank, and Chairman Baucus. They worked into the nighttime and finished at 10:30, 11 o'clock last night. They are going to reconvene this morning. Right now, out of 100 percent of the Congress--we have the Democrats in the Senate, Republicans in the Senate, Democrats in the House, Republicans in the House--we only have three of those Members trying to work something out. The House has basically walked away from everything. We were doing pretty well until the meeting at the White House yesterday. We are going to continue to work hard. We understand the urgency of addressing this situation. We will have more to say about this issue later. We are doing our very best. I hope the two Presidential candidates will go to the debate tonight and leave us alone to get our work done here. It would be a great aid to what we are trying to do. We are going to come in about 9:30 Saturday morning. We are going to vote an hour after that time on the CR. There is other business we can do tomorrow. We will try. It is quite evident we will be in session next week. We have a lot of business to do that has not been done. I will mention a couple. We have the DOD authorization, which is very important, rail safety, Amtrak. Of course, I have already talked about the financial crisis legislation. We have the Indian nuclear agreement. I have had a number of conversations with Secretary Rice and President Bush on this issue. We have another bunch of bills a Republican Senator has held up, and we probably will have to file cloture on those before we leave. There are a number of moving parts. We are going to try to put them together. We are going to do our very best to keep Senators advised as to what is going to happen chronologically. As everyone who serves in the Senate knows, we cannot be specific at any given time. We will do our best so people have an idea of what the weekend holds and what next week holds. Next week, as I indicated before, is a little bit more complicated because we have a Jewish holiday starting at sundown on Monday, ending sundown on Tuesday. So we will not be working that period of time, that is for sure. ____________________