Political Quotes

“this morning I wish to join my longtime colleague and friend, the senior Senator from Maryland and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Barbara Mikulski, in supporting the consideration of three bills before us today. All three bills received strong bipartisan support at the full Committee on Appropriations level. I am pleased we have begun to reestablish regular order in the appropriations process. We started that last year, and we need to continue it, and we are. After the uncertainty of sequestration and last year's disagreement over the Budget Control Act caps, this past December's Murray-Ryan budget deal provided the clarity needed to move us toward a regular budget and a regular appropriations process. The Murray-Ryan deal, which became the Bipartisan Budget Act, provided a compromise solution that ended the congressional deadlock over top-line discretionary spending. While I appreciate that the chairwoman was operating in a tight fiscal environment, we did not ultimately agree everywhere on how to allocate funds within the new caps. All 14 Republican members of the Appropriations Committee wrote to the chair on May 21 of this year expressing our concerns over the use of budgetary mechanisms in subcommittee allocations. In that letter we also stated and we continue to express our opposition to increasing the level of total CHIMPs in the Federal discretionary budget beyond current levels.…”