Dan Coats: “when I go back to Indiana and meet with Hoosiers, they often ask why Washington seems to experience a crisis every few…”

“when I go back to Indiana and meet with Hoosiers, they often ask why Washington seems to experience a crisis every few weeks. It is a debt limit battle. It is a threat of a government shutdown. It is the fiscal cliff on New Year's Eve. It is the sequester. And the list goes on and on, including the funding battle we are in now. Of course, the next round of the debt limit debate is scheduled for May, and on and on it goes. Hoosiers and I think most Americans--and I think most Members of this body--are getting awfully tired of this soap opera drama that occurs every few weeks here. I think we need to move to the point where we can address the major issues. One of the steps in doing that is to fund this government for the next 6 months. I do not know of anyone here who wants a government shutdown. We do have some urgent things we need to do. We do need to address our funding imbalance that is significantly creating a major problem for us, but in order to get there, we have to do some interim things here to keep the country functioning. We need to commit to go forward and do the big things. In the meantime a 6-month funding resolution has been brought forward here. There are things in this that none of us are going to like. Everybody is going to have problems with parts of this. Everybody is going to think it should have been fashioned just a little bit differently.…”