David Perdue: “I rise to talk about the vote we are going to have in just a few minutes to appropriate our first appropriations bill…”

“I rise to talk about the vote we are going to have in just a few minutes to appropriate our first appropriations bill for this fiscal year, which, by the way, we are already in the first month of our new fiscal year. We are under a continuing resolution, which we have talked about ad nauseam in this body and how damaging that is to our military and how expensive it is over the long run. I had breakfast with one of our Secretaries in the DOD today, and he told me that just in the Navy alone, a continuing resolution this year would cost the Navy almost $5 billion. That is $50 billion just in one service over the next decade. We can do better than this. I want to praise Senator Shelby and Senator Leahy, the ranking member and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. They have done their job. The subcommittee chairman and ranking members have done their jobs. We are ready to vote on these bills, and it comes down to just an obstructionist issue about funding the wall versus funding our military. Just last weekend, President Trump announced that Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, had been taken off the battlefield by his own hand, I might say. This is a win not just for our country but for the world in this fight against terrorism. As we now know, the world has gotten to be very dangerous--maybe the most dangerous in my lifetime--with five threats across five domains.…”