Roy Blunt: “this is the first time in 11 years that the chairman of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee…”

“this is the first time in 11 years that the chairman of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee has had a chance to stand on the floor and present a bill. It is a subcommittee that I am honored to chair. As a subcommittee member, I am honored to get to serve on that committee with the Presiding Officer. It is a subcommittee that is led on the other side by Senator Murray from Washington, the ranking member on this committee. This is not a bill that either Senator Murray nor I would have drafted on our own, but our job was not to draft a bill that I thought was the perfect bill for me to vote for or the perfect way for all of these agencies to be run. There is a reason that this bill has not been on the floor in 11 years. It is big. It is complex. It can be contentious. But Senator Shelby, the chairman of the full committee, and Senator Leahy, the lead Democrat on the full committee, have made an incredible, good-faith effort to come to the floor with a bill that focuses on how we spend the money. There is not much new in this bill about all of the things we could try to determine about social policy and about issues that all of us feel strongly about, but there are other committees whose principal job is to do that. Our committee's principal job is to decide how we establish the priorities for the country and how we spend the money.…”