Endless Frontier Act-- continued

Floor Speech

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I just want to
reiterate again what we have dealt with.

As originally introduced, the bill was 160 pages. Yes, it ran through committee. Then it went out of committee, and it was reported out by the committee at 730 pages. Then you had the May 19 substitute--1,445 pages--and you had a substitute today that took it up to over 2,300 pages. Then at 10:59 p.m., just a little over an hour and a half ago, we received notice of this managers' package. The list that we received is a simple list of numbers attached to last names. It doesn't contain the text of those; it just contains references back to other amendments--10:59 p.m. We still don't know exactly how long that is.

Yet people are fond of saying, well, as I believe my colleague from Washington said a minute ago, people have been talking about this for hours. What does that even mean? It is not the same as presenting an amendment, saying this will be presented as a package.

Keep in mind, these aren't just mere sequential pages, pieces of paper. Every time you add another piece of paper, every time you add an amendment, it gets a lot more complicated because you have to know not just what each page says but how it interacts with every other page.

Although this is how it came out of committee, this is the rest of the bill as it existed as of early this morning. As of this afternoon, we added about another 900 pages to it. Then at 10:59, again, just about an hour and a half ago, we received an as-yet-to-be-ascertained managers' package that we still haven't seen in its entirety. We have just seen a list, and we are told that we have to vote on that right now.

Look, the American people understand that when you are throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars at a time, we really have an obligation to know what on Earth we are voting for. We don't know that. We can't credibly maintain that. We certainly shouldn't pretend to be competent to understand everything that is in here.

I find it absolutely stunning--I find it disappointing more than anything that in response to the very reasonable request made by my friend and distinguished colleague from Wisconsin to give us 3 hours to look at it, that even that was too much.

This, Mr. President, is too much for the American people, and I object.

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