Tom Harkin: “the legislation that is pending provides funding for nearly all domestic discretionary programs for the upcoming year.…”

“the legislation that is pending provides funding for nearly all domestic discretionary programs for the upcoming year. As we know, it combines 8 of the 13 regular spending bills, as well as a large number of other unrelated legislative provisions. It truly is a legislative behemoth, and is one which I have very mixed feelings about. One part I don't have any mixed feelings about is the process, particularly for the unrelated nonappropriation measures. It is the worst that I have witnessed in my years in Congress. Here we have a 40-pound, nearly 4,000-page bill which not only includes over half of the year's appropriations bills, but countless other unrelated measures, many of which were never debated and never brought to the floor of the Senate. Then we are given less than a day--just a matter of hours--to look it over. That certainly is not any way to do the people's business. In fact, I say that the Republican leadership in the Senate and the House has shown a tremendous disrespect for the taxpayers' dollars. This is really a cavalier treatment of taxpayers dollars when you think about the way this bill was put together. Nobody knows how much is in there. Billions of dollars are being spent, and a lot of it was never debated or shown the light of day in either the House or the Senate. The taxpayers deserve a little bit better treatment for their tax dollars than that.”