On the recordDecember 21, 2010
I think all of us have an interest in the Defense authorization bill. Senator McCain and I have been working on this bill with members of the committee for about a year. This is a bill that has a lot of provisions critically important to our troops. To give a few examples, it authorizes health care coverage for military children, impact aid to local civilian schools, so-called CERP authority, which is the commander's emergency response program, and transfer of defense articles to the Afghan Army. It is about 800 pages. We have removed from this bill what we thought were the controversial items so that we could get it passed. We don't have the time to go through them, but that was our intent. We missed one controversial item which came over from the House having to do with Guam funding. We have now reached an agreement that we would remove that provision from the bill. That is a removal. But we can't add any controversial items to this bill; it will be objected to. The only way we can do this for the troops, as we have done for 45 years, is if we proceed with a unanimous consent agreement tonight.
