Political Quotes

“Today the Senate will begin consideration of H.R. 4899, the FEMA supplemental as passed by the House on March 24 and marked up by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday, May 13. As my colleagues may be aware, several attempts were made to proceed to the House-passed bill, but there were objections to proceeding. Because of the delay in acting upon the House bill, the vice chairman and I agreed that we should consider all of the supplemental provisions in the jurisdiction of the Appropriations Committee that are pending before the Congress instead of just the FEMA portion as proposed by the House. The committee concurred in this recommendation and forwarded the bill to the full Senate by a unanimous vote of 30 to 0. This bill contains $45.4 billion in discretionary spending and $13.4 billion in spending on mandatory programs. This amount is the same as the amount requested by the President. I want to point out to all of my colleagues that the bill does not include funding for the settlements between the Federal Government and African American-farmers and Native Americans. While I am strongly in favor of funding these settlements, these items are, in fact not in the jurisdiction of the Appropriations Committee.”