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Floor Speech
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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, it has been a good discussion.
I want to reiterate something that was said by the Senator from Kansas who chairs the relevant subcommittee and the chairman of the full committee, Senator Collins, when I say that the Senator from Maryland was offered an amendment to vote here on the floor of the U.S. Senate. That is--that is--the article I branch of the government working.
You had a markup at the committee. The Senator offered his amendment. And, yes, there was a lot of swirl when that amendment was offered. But at the end of the day, the committee voted, and the committee defeated it. That is article I working.
Now the Senator from Maryland wants to see article I work and have Congress be restored to its constitutional responsibility, the power of the purse. The way to do it is to let us get on these bills and debate them and vote on amendments. That is what we are talking about here. That is what we didn't do last year.
He could have had a vote on the floor on the amendment last year, but, oh, that is right, we didn't do an appropriations bill last year. Actually, he is actually trying to restore regular order where people like the Senator from Maryland, who has an important role on the Senate Appropriations Committee, has an opportunity, in front of all U.S. Senators, to get a vote on his amendment. What he is insisting on is a guaranteed result. Well, that doesn't happen here. In the process, he is holding hostage 99 other Senators who want to proceed to this bill-- 99 other Senators--because many of them have an interest in this legislation. As was pointed out by Senator Moran, there are lots of things funded, programs that are important to Senators here on both sides of the aisle.
We are trying to do something here this year that wasn't done at all last year. Despite the fact that the Appropriations Committee reported 11 of the 12 bills out of the committee last year, not a single one was brought to the floor for consideration. We are trying to do not one, not two, not three but four appropriations bills with an amendment process that enables Senators from all parts of the country to have an opportunity to shape the bill or, in their view, perhaps improve the bill to their liking. The Senator from Maryland has decided that he is going to stand in the way of that because he can't get a guaranteed result--something that nobody around here is guaranteed.
That is why we have votes. And that is what I would love to get back to, is actually voting, actually putting bills on the floor, having an amendment process, and letting the Senate work its will.
It doesn't look like we will be able to do that, at least not on that bill. The unfortunate outcome, as has been pointed out multiple times now, is that it probably ends up in some continuing resolution where all the work that was done by the Senator from Kansas, the Senator from Maryland, the Senator from Maine, the Senator from Washington, and others could very well go by the wayside and we end up funding the government at some CR level without all the input that all the members of the committee have had up to this point. I find that really unfortunate, but that is where we are.
Just so everybody understands what happens next, if this consent agreement fails, we will have to strip out the Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill, which carries a lot of things that people have worked for some time on, and then we will see where it goes from there. But I can't predict the fate of that bill from this point forward.
And, at least, what the Senator from Maryland gets, if we get on this package of bills, is a vote on his amendment by the U.S. Senate. He had a vote in committee. We have had process. We have more regular order ahead of us. He is going to hold 99 Senators hostage to try and get a guaranteed result on his amendment. It is not the way this place works.
I hope that we can get back to where it works like it is supposed to--where bills come to the floor, we have an open amendment process, and we don't have individual Senators blocking the opportunity for every other Senator in this country to be heard from.
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