Roy Blunt: “I am glad to finally be here today, talking about the final conclusions we have reached on the appropriations bill…”

“I am glad to finally be here today, talking about the final conclusions we have reached on the appropriations bill generally but, specifically, the Labor and Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill. We are now a bipartisan Congress, with Democrats in control on one side, Republicans on another. On this side, of course, we always have to have 60 people to go forward on these bills. We generally have had to have a bill here that would appeal to enough Democrats or enough Republicans to make this happen, but we have come to the conclusion of what is normally the hardest bill to negotiate. It is about 30 percent of all the spending after you take defense off the table. Defense is half of the discretionary spending; then you have 11 other bills that have the other half of that spending. This bill has 30 percent of that half. It has lots of things that you could argue about and, frankly, lots of things that you would just say ``If we can't all be happy about this, we won't move forward,'' which would mean you wouldn't move forward. This is a bill where Senator Murray and I and Congressman Cole and Chairman DeLauro on the other side had to decide if we were going to have a bill or not, and we decided we were going to have a bill. We decided at the end of the process, with some help from others, that we wouldn't have things in the bill that hadn't traditionally been there.…”