On the recordFebruary 27, 2015
There it is. That is the bill the Senate finally passed. It has been 6 weeks--I said 3 weeks, earlier. I am corrected. It is 6 weeks that the House passed a funding bill for the Homeland Security Department, 6 weeks ago, sent it to the Senate, purposefully early, to give them plenty of time to consider and bring forward a funding bill of their own. I have to say the majority over there tried. The Democrats in the Senate stopped consideration of that spending bill four different times over 6 weeks. In the meantime, the House had to sit here waiting for the Senate, and we have been waiting 6 weeks, until just now. Finally, this morning, the Senate has passed a bill funding the Department for the balance of the year, which differs from the House- passed version of that bill, so we have got to go to conference. That is the way the framers set things up. When the House does something and the Senate does something different on the same subject, you have got to bring them together into a conference to work out the differences and come up with a bill for the President to sign. That is where we are. Finally, now, we can go to conference. We could not have earlier because the Senate had not passed the bill. Now, we can go to conference, and we will be asking the Speaker for that designation today. In the meantime, we can't let the Department stop working.…
