On the recordMay 6, 2013
this afternoon I offered a consent agreement dealing with the budget. I withdrew that because we did not have anyone here to object, and I had an inkling there would be an objection if a Republican were here. We have been asked to move with regular order. We have done that. We have done our very best to do that. People wanted amendments. We have done our best to have bills with amendments. We have been asked, let's do as much work as we can with committees, and we have done that. We have bills reported out from the committee. Those are the bills we have handled here, with rare exception. Now we have had our Republican friends saying for months and months, let's do things with regular order. We know how hard it was to get a budget passed. We have had over 100 amendments on which we actually voted. We were here until 5 o'clock in the morning. We got a budget, even though--you know, we have been through this before. We do not need to go into more detail. We had a law signed by the President of the United States that gave us our budget allocations for several years. But we decided to do a resolution. It didn't have to be signed by the President. I am glad we did. It was hard. Senators Murray and Sessions did a good job allowing us to move forward on that, so now it is time to go forward. We have a budget resolution we passed in the Senate. We want to meet with the House and work out our differences. That is what we have done here for two centuries.…





