Durbin Applauds Bipartisan Appropriations Negotiations In The Senate, Calls On House Leadership To Take Up Serious Effort To Fund Government
Press Release
"What you've just witnessed here is, we hope, a new day in the United States Senate. You see, we have the responsibility of appropriating the money for the federal government. We do it in 12 different bills. Total costs to taxpayers and resources for the government come to the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. So it's a big undertaking. For five years, we've failed to pass those 12 bills individually. We passed them in a group known as an omnibus.
This year, we decided, in the Senate, to do it differently, to try to do it better. What we've done through the Appropriations Committee, which I serve on, is to take up each individual bill of the 12 bills. We're trying to pass them on a bipartisan basis.
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We picked two of the best legislators in the Senate to accomplish this, Senator Patty Murray, from the state of Washington and a Democrat, and Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine. The two of them did miracle work in the Committee. They got all 12 bills individually passed.
This isn't an easy chamber to get things done in. But I think we're on the right track. It's a bipartisan undertaking. We're considering each of the bills, subjecting them to amendments, just the way it used to be for many years, formany decades Contrast that with what's going on in the House of Representatives. At this point, they can't pass any bills Now they're considering a bill for short-term spending for our government. Speaker McCarthy said he'd call it for a vote this week. I don't know if it'll pass or not.
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I hope that the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives can get their act together. We'll find out this week This is a historic, bipartisan undertaking. I think the American people, more than anything, want us to get along and work together to solve some problems. This would be a step in that direction."
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