Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) urged key Democrats Thursday to reconsider their objection to filing energy bill amendments by July 23 so that the Senate can complete the long-awaited legislation during the last week before August recess.

Frist earlier this week asked the Senate for unanimous consent to file the 393 amendments expected to be offered to the comprehensive energy measure by the close of business next Wednesday. There was no opposition from Republican senators to the request, but key Democrats challenged it, putting off a filing deadline for now.

“We began consideration of the energy bill on May 6 of this year. I believe that there has been more than adequate time to draft amendments, and, therefore, I would hope that we could set this reasonable filing deadline,” Frist said from the Senate floor. Acknowledging the Democratic opposition, he said he would continue to work with Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) to reach consent on the issue.

“I do want to complete this bill,” he told senators. “We’re setting aside adequate time to do that. If we can reach some sort of agreement by midweek next week to what amendments we’re going to be looking at, it would be hugely helpful.” He said he wanted to get the amendments down to a “manageable number.”

The filing deadline “strikes many Democrats as premature when we’re not even on the energy bill yet,” said Bill Wicker, a spokesman for the Democratic members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “Instead of getting into a big debate over process,” he noted Senate Democrats are “more interested” in addressing “substantive” energy issues, such as electricity.

Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid (D-NV) criticized Frist for allotting too little time for the energy bill this year. Sens. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) of the Senate Energy Committee have “worked hard” on the legislation, but the full Senate “[has] spent not even two full weeks on that bill” this year, he said.

“We had eight weeks” last year to debate the energy bill, which eventually died in conference committee “We’re going to do what we can to cooperate with the [Majority Leader] on this bill,” who along with Democrat leaders “wants this bill passed very badly,” Reid noted.

But “we can only do so much. There’s more than 300 amendments” that are expected to be filed, “so it’s going to be a heavy task to get through this in a week,” he said.

Responding to Reid, Frist said he anticipated critics would say that “we’re running out of time” on the energy bill. “The reason I come to the floor every day [is] because I want to encourage members on both sides of the aisle to focus on this [legislation] right now.”

Of the list of 393 amendments, 272 are sponsored by Democrats, and 121 are from Republicans, a spokeswoman for Republican members of the Senate Energy Committee said. She could not say how many of the amendments have been filed so far.

Not all of the 393 amendments are real amendments, according to Wicker. Some are called “placeholders,” by which a senator reserves the right to offer an amendment. “They may have an idea for an amendment, but they haven’t written it yet. Still, they have to put their name on a ‘finite list’ of amendments. It’s kind of like last call at a bar.” Moreover, there are probably a number of “duplicate amendments,” he said.

Nevertheless, it’s still a “pretty daunting list” of amendments that the Senate will have to sow through.

If an accord on the July 23 filing deadline isn’t reached, “we’re [still] going forward with the energy bill” during the last week of July, the committee’s Republican spokeswoman said. Absent such agreement, senators would be able to bring up their amendments anytime on the floor, which could prolong debate over energy legislation, she noted.

Pre-debate filing of the amendments “would have given us a sense of the landscape” of what to expect during the upcoming deliberations on the bill, she said. “Now we’re going into this a little bit handicapped.”

But Wicker believes Democrats will consent to a filing deadline once the Senate actually gets to the energy measure.

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