I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record. There being no objection, the text of the bill was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:

We have these elitists that will sometimes fly in on their private jets and seek to shut down what is going on in Montana in terms of common sense, responsible, natural resource operations.

I will make a commitment to you to do our level best to get this thing to the floor as soon as we can because it is important.

The ideology of violent and radical Islamic extremism is a challenging topic, and it certainly takes moral, political, and at times physical courage to speak up.

What we are at war with is an ideology and violence that threatens our free society and the liberty of every individual.

I have introduced Senate bill 685, the Clean Water for Rural Communities Act, with my colleague from Montana, Senator Tester.

I think it is important to say that our thoughts are with the colleagues who were with the victims this morning.

Anytime someone desecrates our flag, they exploit the protections of our Constitution.

All I want is predictability because I think it is important.

That uncertainty, by the way... does not add confidence to the VA moving forward.

We need to have a budget that accurately reflects what we need to do.

I think that is something that folks lose sight of when you are from a northern state. We sometimes say we have nine months of winter and three months of bad sledding.

We cannot assume that private care will work in rural communities where there are no providers in the first place.

We know that the vast majority of veterans using Choice over the last 2 years are eligible due to long wait lines, not because they live too far from a VA facility.

You talked about in your opening statement Choice being down to $821 million and the fact that there was additional dollars in Community Care that you wanted to transfer over.

The fact that we have 1.2 percent increase for in-house medical care and 33 percent for outside medical care is disturbing.

I worry that the budget proposed by this administration starts us down a path of unfettered choice that will hollow out the VA.

We want to thank Senator Steve Daines and his dedicated staff, who have helped us craft this important legislation.