Funding the Government
Floor Speech
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Mrs. MURRAY. Will the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. McCONNELL. Will the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. REID. Yes, I will yield for a question, and, of course, I maintain the floor.
Go ahead.
Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I ask the Senator to yield for a question.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I would ask the leader through the Chair, is he aware that the bill that is before us, that apparently we do not have enough votes for now, has gone through a very long committee process? The transportation and housing bill that I worked with my Republican colleague on, I did not agree with all of his requests, but I gave him a lot in this bill, as we worked our way through it and passed it out of subcommittee, passed it out of the full committee, a committee of which the minority leader is a member.
All of the bills that are involved in this omnibus bill--every one of them--went through a long, long process of committee hearings, subcommittee markups and passage, and full committee markups and passage.
The changes to this bill that have come to the floor have come as a result not of a change in policy, but because we all were told that in order to get an omnibus passed, we had to reduce the amount of that bill that passed out of committee--each of those bills a significant amount--to meet the McCaskill-Sessions level. So we went back and cut a significant amount out of each one of our bills. The result is the omnibus bill before us.
So the 2,000 pages that we are referring to have worked their way through a process. I would ask the leader if he knows this. And the difference is, we had to cut money to meet the level of Sessions-McCaskill. That is what we have before us. And that is what we are being told, after a year's worth of work, that somehow we do not have the capability of knowing what is in the bill. Is the leader aware of that?
Mr. REID. I am aware of it. But my friend, the Republican leader, wants to ask a question or make some statement. But I would say this to my friend from Washington, remember, this bill, which is 1,900 pages long, consists of the work of 12 subcommittees.
Mrs. MURRAY. Right.
Mr. REID. It is work that has been done over the last year, or more in some instances, to come up with a product. So if you break it down per subcommittee, it is certainly a reasonable number of pages on each subcommittee. Remember, there are 12 subcommittees that are a part of it.
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