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Morning News

107th Congress Set to Convene with Emphasis on Bipartisanship

Aired January 2, 2001 - 11:33 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: In Washington, the 107th Congress convenes tomorrow, and the emphasis will be on bipartisanship. Joining us with the latest from Capitol Hill is Kate Snow.

Kate, good morning, once again.

KATE SNOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Daryn.

And speaking of all of those nominees -- you mentioned Governor George W. Bush, President-elect Bush, making those nominations -- well the Congress, the Senate, to be exact, will have to confirm those nominees, and CNN has learned that the Senate Commerce Committee will be taking up their work on Thursday, talking about Don Evans, who has been nominated as commerce secretary. They will do that on Thursday.

Also, the rest of the senators coming back to town today. Many new House members coming back as well. At 12:30 today, the senators who are here already in Washington will be meeting, the Republicans, I should say, will be meeting to talk about they are going to proceed. A lot of questions about what the rules will be, how they will share power. You remember, the Senate, of course, is split 50/50 right now.

On the House side, House Republicans plan to meet late tonight at about 8:00. They are going to talk about the rules that they will operate under.

Also, on Thursday, the Steering Committee of the House, will be talking about who should be chair of various committees. These are important decisions because, again, they will figure out the lay of the land as this 107th Congress gets under way -- Daryn.

KAGAN: Kate, let's talk Senate. Tomorrow is the day the first lady officials becomes Senator Clinton.

SNOW: That is right. She is, of course, one of many new senators. There are 11 new senators. She is one of the women. There are now 13 women senators, more than there have ever been before. They will all be here tomorrow, as well as all of the new House members. There are 42 new House members. All of them coming in, even the ones that got re-elected. coming in for their swearing-in ceremony. That will happen at noon tomorrow for both House members and Senate members.

They will, basically, walk in in groups of four. They will be sworn in, of course, by the president of the Senate, who you will remember right now is Vice President Al Gore. Which raises an interesting point, Daryn, for the next 17 days, from tomorrow until the day that Bush is inaugurated, technically Al Gore is the president of the Senate, And therefore, technically, the Senate is run by Democrats just for 17 days.

KAGAN: Seventeen days. They might take advantage of that. With those 17 days, what do you expect would be the first issues to come up then, and then after President-elect Bush becomes president.

SNOW: More likely, we should note, they probably won't take advantage of that. Democrats have already said, they are planning to work with the Republicans, even though for 17 days they have the majority, they will treat the Republicans as they would hope to be treated after January 20th.

But, in terms of what they are going to be working on: Confirmation hearings, clearly, the number one thing they have to get out of the way. They will be scheduling those over the coming weeks. Some of them expected to a bit contentious, notably Bush's appointment for attorney general, Senator John Ashcroft from Missouri. He has some things in the past that some democrats have questions about. So he will be, probably, grilled on those.

Also the tax plan, Bush's $1.3 tax plan on a proposal he made on the campaign trail likely to come up. Also his education proposals. He has already said that, as soon as Congress comes back, he wanted them to start working, start attacking his education proposals. And finally, campaign finance reform, Senator John McCain, a big advocate of this one, has said that he would like, in January, for that to be introduced. He would like to reintroduced the McCain-Feingold bill, which he believes has enough support now to possibly pass. So we might see that in the near future -- Daryn.

KAGAN: Kate Snow, on Capitol Hill, thank you very much.

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