On the recordAugust 23, 2018
we will vote in a few minutes to move forward with the Defense, Labor, HHS, and Education appropriations bill. That probably sounds like a pretty unusual combination, even though I think most voters, most taxpayers, understand that to get this work done in the timeframe we have to do it, we generally need to bring more than one topic together on the floor at the same time. But why Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education? Well, first of all, that is 62 percent of all the spending. If we can get this bill passed today, get a conference with the House, get this single bill on the President's desk by the end of the fiscal year, we will have funded that much of the government in a timely way for the first time in a decade. If we can add the other bills to it that the House and Senate have passed, we will have 90 percent of the spending on the President's desk and in place before the spending year starts. It doesn't sound as if that would be a very big accomplishment, but by the standards of the last decade, it would be an incredible accomplishment to bring these bills to the floor, to allow them to be debated, to allow them to be amended. We have a managers' package that would include a number of the 60 or so proposed amendments just on the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education part of the bill.…
