Roy Blunt: “I was interested to hear my good friend talk about the uncertainty of the appropriations process. Frankly, I think we…”

“I was interested to hear my good friend talk about the uncertainty of the appropriations process. Frankly, I think we could debate no issue that would change the Congress more totally than the issue of getting back to the certainty of the appropriations process. For 200 years, the principal work of the Congress--the House and the Senate--was to set our national priorities based on how we spend our national trust of the money given to this government by the people who pay taxes, the revenue of the government. We have gotten out of the habit of doing that. Frankly, one of the reasons we have an authorizing process--and have always had that--and an appropriating process is because that gave the Congress the annual ability to look at those programs, see how they were working, see if they were still working, and gave the Congress the ability to reach out to a program and have that program answer every question because there was an annual review of how we spent the money. If there is an incredible indictment over the last 7 years, it is that the Senate has stopped doing that work.…”