REID: Senator Kennedy has been the leader on the Democratic side for decades now on immigration. And we’re hopeful and confident that we can get something.
I personally believe that four years ago, when President Bush met with President Fox, I felt very good that we were going to finally recognize that we have a problem. And we need to work with Mexico on this. That fizzled out and now nothing’s happened on it.
But we are aware of it being an issue.
QUESTION: Senator Reid, how concerned are you about holding the caucus together? Five senators, Democrats that are up next year in states carried by President Bush...
REID: Senator Frist wishes every day that he had a caucus like mine that he could keep together. We are doing so well. We are a family, a Senate family.
This legislation that we’ve come up with today, this has been vetted -- using that overworked term here in Washington -- with every Democratic senator. And we feel so comfortable and confident about the unity of our caucus that I am not concerned at all.
QUESTION: You said that what you heard in your campaign was not what the Republicans were pushing, but many of the proposals in here from Medicare to defense, to even the tuition credits are what Senator Kerry ran on and lost in the election. I mean, how do you have a mandate for this?
REID: Well, first of all, let’s not get carried away with the mandate of President Bush. For example, let’s recognize what happened across this country.
We realize that we lost three Senate seats. We understand that. But if you look at what happened in this country with state legislative races as an example, out of the 3,000-plus state assemblies and senates across the country, when we started this election cycle we were 12 behind the Republicans. Now that the election’s over we’re 64 ahead of the Republicans: a pickup of 76.
So we did fine around the country. So there is no mandate and the issues that Senator Kerry ran on, you’ve outlined a few of them, are good issues.
REID: And we’re going to carry those forward. These are important issues, important to the American people.
QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)
REID: President Bush should hope that we have the same kind of blockage this time as we had last time. That would mean he would have 408 judges and turn down 20. So the president should, every day, hope that he gets the same cooperation from us he got last time.
QUESTION: When he was running for president, Senator Kerry promised that there would be an immigration bill, not a bipartisan compromise immigration bill, within the first 100 days of his time in office. Are you folks prepared to live up to something where you might have something introduced with regard to problems both with immigration and immigrants who are denied driver’s licenses and so many other things?
REID: I have indicated that we’re depending on Senators Kennedy and McCain to come up with something. If they don’t, there will be individual amendments offered on other pieces of legislation coming through.
The problems that we have with immigration in this country are significant and we recognize that.
QUESTION: Senator Frist is talking about taking the class action bill to the floor without allowing any non-germane amendments attached to it. This was a problem last year. And I’m wondering -- some Democrats actually support the bill. So I’m wondering what you think about that legislation.
REID: I’ve had a number of conversations with Senator Frist. I’ve spend a lot of time with Senator Leahy, who’s the ranking member on Judiciary, and other people who are in our caucus who are for and against class action. And there are a lot of alternatives that we have come up with.
One thing I think is so important -- and I’ve expressed this many times to Senator Frist -- is that we go through the regular order. That is that the legislation go to the Senate Judiciary Committee, report out a bill.
REID: They should be able to do that very quickly. And then when it gets to the floor, with the leeway that we have procedurally in the Senate, there are a lot of things we can do.
One of the thins I am concerned about is what the Senate does isn’t torn to pieces in the conference with the House. So one of the things that we’ve talked about with Senator Frist is perhaps we can come up with some agreement that we would work out an arrangement here in the Senate as what amendments could be offered with the provision that the House would approve whatever we pass here in the Senate.
So that’s one of the things we’re working on.
QUESTION: There are tens of thousands of pro-life activists marching on Washington today. They want to overturn Roe v. Wade. What’s your message to them?
REID: Well, I think if you look at our legislation, we have a message to everyone concerned about the issue.
We want to make sure that pregnant women, no matter how much money they have or how little money they have, have the ability to go to a doctor. We also want to make sure that contraceptives are available without any type of unfairness. And we’ve worked on this for a long time and we’ve received opposition from the majority of the Republicans on this for many years now.
So the way we feel about this is that we think that abortion should be rare. We feel that anything that we can do to prevent unwanted pregnancies is a step ahead.
And we have people, as you know, who are here in Washington advocating to maintain Roe v. Wade, and we have people who are here to do away with Roe v. Wade. That’s what our democratic process is all about.
I think our legislation directs what should be done.
QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE) that the tsunami issue was going to be pensions. Yet the administration has come up with reforms to the...
REID: You said they "have come up"?
QUESTION: Yes, the (OFF-MIKE)
REID: Well, I personally don’t know what they’ve come up with. If they have, they haven’t vetted it with me.
And we know that, for example, what happened with -- was it Delta or United last week? United. They basically threw away their pensions and left it up to the federal government to bail everybody out.
A few more of these and this will make the problems we had with the savings and loan look like a baby.
REID: We have deep-seated problems -- as Senator Durbin indicated -- with our pension programs. We have these large companies who are running as quickly as they can to do away with them, hoping that the federal government will bail them out.
And I don’t know, personally, what the Labor Department suggested, but they better get some -- for example, I wish they would talk to me about that.
Thank you all very much.
END
