Vote on Hodge Nomination

Floor Speech

The result was announced--yeas 52, nays 44, as follows: [Rollcall Vote No. 377 Ex.] YEAS--52 Baldwin Bennet Blumenthal Booker Brown Cantwell Cardin Carper Casey Collins Coons Cortez Masto Duckworth Durbin Feinstein Gillibrand Graham Hassan Heinrich Hirono Kaine King Klobuchar Leahy Lujan Manchin Markey Menendez Merkley Murkowski Murray Ossoff Padilla Peters Reed Rosen Rounds Sanders Schatz Schumer Shaheen Sinema Smith Stabenow Tester Tillis Toomey Van Hollen Warner Warren Whitehouse Wyden NAYS--44 Barrasso Blackburn Blunt Boozman Braun Burr Capito Cassidy Cornyn Cotton Cramer Crapo Cruz Daines Ernst Fischer Grassley Hagerty Hawley Hoeven Hyde-Smith Inhofe Johnson Kennedy Lankford Lee Lummis Marshall McConnell Moran Paul Portman Risch Romney Rubio Sasse Scott (FL) Scott (SC) Shelby Sullivan Thune Tuberville Wicker Young NOT VOTING--4 Hickenlooper Kelly Murphy Warnock

The nomination was confirmed.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I know that Senator Roy Blunt has already delivered his farewell remarks a short time ago. Regrettably, I was tied up in a longstanding appointment and couldn't be on the floor to hear them, but I want to say a few words about my friend from Missouri and thank him for his service to the Senate and to our Nation.

I grew up in East St. Louis, IL, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, MO. My hometown now is Springfield, IL, and Roy Blunt's hometown is Springfield, MO. We often joke about catching the wrong plane to St. Louis and ending up in one another's homes.

Senator Blunt and I came from different parties, obviously. We have different ideas about a lot of things. But over the 12 years he served his State of Missouri in the Senate, he has become a friend and ally.

Managing the Mississippi River is an issue that we share. Many of the locks and dams that keep the river navigable are nearly 100 years old. For many years now, Senator Blunt has worked with me and with the Army Corps of Engineers to come up with a plan that we call the Navigation Ecosystem Sustainability Program--shorthand, NESP. It will expand and modernize seven locks at the most congested locations on the upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers to make sure the waterways can continue to serve as major navigation channels moving crops and other goods.

I am really grateful to Roy Blunt for his leadership supporting biomedical research. There is a good story here. My partnership with Senator Blunt started almost 10 years ago. I went up to the National Institutes of Health for a tour and sat down with legendary Dr. Francis Collins, who headed up the Institutes of Health. For years, NIH had limped along with flat funding and sequestration budget cuts. Inadequate funding had really hurt research at NIH. It discouraged a lot of young scientists who just couldn't count on regular funding from Congress, or they chose to maybe move back to other nations where they were born and the research funding was more predictable.

I asked Dr. Collins: What does NIH need?

He said: Just give me 5 percent real growth in our budget every year, consistently, and we will light up the scoreboard with our discoveries and cures.

So I came back and looked for Roy Blunt. He was the leading Republican on the Appropriations Committee for the National Institutes of Health. He chaired the Labor and HHS Appropriations Subcommittee. We decided to put together a team. The natural ally on that team was Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat for the State of Washington and the lead Democrat on the HELP Committee and on the Appropriations Committee. We rounded out with two Democrats and two Republicans, the now-retired Senator Lamar Alexander who led the HELP Committee when Patty Murray was ranking member, and vice versa.

We agreed on a common goal, the four of us: 5 percent real growth every year in the National Institutes of Health. In the first year working together, Senator Blunt overdid it. He helped steer $2 billion, or 7 percent, to the NIH.

I remember getting a phone call from Roy. It was a few weeks before Christmas. We were on break with our families, and it is uncommon for Senators to call one another under those circumstances. But he called me, and he said he had just spoken with the leaders from Barnes-Jewish Hospital, which is a major health and research institution in St. Louis. They were ecstatic about the care they were able to give their patients and research they were going to undertake because of this new level of funding.

Senator Blunt said it was unlike any call he had ever received in his congressional career.

Then he said to me, ``Durbin, we can't be one-hit wonders.'' And from there, we were off.

Since 2015, with the help of Senator Murray and others, through changes in the Presidency and through pretty divisive times, we succeeded on a bipartisan basis to keep steady, predictable funding for the National Institutes of Health as a bipartisan priority.

Over 7 years, we saw NIH funding increase by more than $14 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase from where we started. These new investments are supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide in research institutions large and small. They are saving lives, and they will continue to do so for decades to come.

So I want to personally thank Roy Blunt, the Senator from Missouri, for his leadership in funding this breakthrough medical research.

I also want to thank his staff for their wisdom and professionalism and calm demeanor. They consistently look for ways to work together for the common good.

Senator Blunt honored his commitment to medical research and made a difference in America.

I said to him today as we were gathering for a tribute to the Capitol Police for defending us on January 6, I said, ``Roy, the reason we all come here is to make a difference in this great nation that we live in. You have made that difference in medical research, and you will be remembered for it.''

He has pursued our shared goal with decency, genuine curiosity, and a vision for the promise of medical discovery. There are people here in America today and around the world who are going to have better lives because of Roy Blunt's commitment. That is a legacy which he can certainly be proud of.

Loretta and I wish him, his wife Abby, and his family all the best as they start this new chapter in life. I am sorry to see him go. I am losing a great friend and a great Senator.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source