Roy Blunt: “later in the day--certainly today or tomorrow--we will have a vote on whether we want to move forward on this year's…”

“later in the day--certainly today or tomorrow--we will have a vote on whether we want to move forward on this year's appropriations process. The vote would allow us to move forward. Frankly, it would and should allow every Member to make any amendment they want and to debate this bill on the floor, as bills should be debated. If they don't like the House bill that we will take up--and many of us would not like the House bill--they have a chance to substitute that with another bill or make amendments on that bill. I would like to see this process get started. A significant part of the House bill was the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education portion. I chair that bill in the Senate. It is after the Defense bill, which would also be part of this bill, which, by the way, has the biggest pay increase for those who defend us, in a decade in it. After the Defense bill, the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education bill is about 30 percent of all the money left. So just those two bills together is a significant amount of all Federal spending. It would be great if we could get this done on time again this year, as we did for 70 percent of the spending last year. I am disappointed in the bill that we actually made public as part of an alternative today. For the first time in 4 years, we weren't able to work with our friends on the other side and have a bipartisan bill.…”