Barbara Boxer: “I want to say this to Senator Inhofe. I know he has a hectic schedule ahead of him. What a pleasure it is to work with…”

“I want to say this to Senator Inhofe. I know he has a hectic schedule ahead of him. What a pleasure it is to work with him and his staff member Alex and our Jason and Ted and others. We had a lot of disagreements on a lot of issues, but we set those aside. It is exciting to get something done for the people. For example, in this managers' package, we have a new Chief's report in Pennsylvania, a critical restoration program in Oregon and Washington, funding for restoration of the Great Lakes, a wide variety of other policy recommendations that come from all over the country, from all of our colleagues. So I not only want to thank Senator Inhofe, who is my chairman, but also my staff and Senator Inhofe's staff--in particular, Bettina Poirier, Jason Albritton, and Ted Illston, from my staff. This has not been easy to get all of us together and to have a unanimous consent request agreed to. I also want to thank the floor staff--Trish and Gary on our side--because I made them a little crazy during this process. They actually allowed me to do that. But it does take a lot of push and pull to get a bill like this done. So what I would like to do for the next few minutes--I know Senator Murkowski will speak following me--is that I just want to talk about why we have worked so hard and why it is critical that we pass this bill this week--S. 2848, the Water Resources Development Act, which we called WRDA 2016. We need to repair our Nation's aging infrastructure.…”