Mike Rounds

Our friends on the other side of the aisle... have decided that this is a protest... their protest here by not showing up slows down the work of the Senate.

Would you commit, once again, your support to moving this from secondary payer to primary payer in the Veterans Choice Act?

I would like to talk about the Choice Act, and just reconfirm your thoughts about some directions we have got to go.

We stopped both of them.

The VA needs to find a way to pay for it.

Congress' intent was pretty clear and, in fact, not only has there been one court case on it, which went in favor of the veterans, there has now been an appeals case, which ruled that VA is wrong.

I appreciate that and your interest in working with us.

You are one of the guys that came in... with the intent of fixing and making things better for veterans.

Just because you are pro-economic development and pro-economic development growth does not mean that you have to be anti-environment.

I think veterans can be a healing balm for all of us because we can all agree on that.

What we should be doing is providing them with a service, which they are entitled to.

This is a system which is broken.

We need to bring back a little bit of common sense and have the people associated with those tribes involved in that decision making.

I am not going to ask you to make commitments, but would you please look at and just agree that you will give it fair consideration that we find a fairer way to make sure that these folks that literally have homes that it is all they got.

I would just like--I am not sure that you even had a chance to look at any of the materials that we had shared with you, but there was a real strong concern on the part of Native Americans in the rural areas that the current formula in…

I think there was some concern that you are not a housing expert, and that you do not have a background in construction and so forth. And I got to thinking that it seems to me that probably running this department is not really brain…

I thank the Senator for the question. The answer is, yes, we have spent a lot of time not only because it is critically a very important item to address--because in the United States today we spend over $1.9 trillion a year responding to…

Well, I know in rural areas it is critical that we have that available, simply because we do not have the numbers without them.

I just think that is very, very important and I appreciate all the work that you have done so far, sir.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First of all, let me add my congratulations for putting this together today with Ranking Member Blumenthal.

Can we protect critical infrastructure if it is under a cyberattack?

In July, for example, the President approved something called the Presidential Policy Directive on Cyberincident Coordination, PPD-41.

If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order. There being no objection, the Senate, at 7:56 p.m., adjourned until Wednesday, June 29, 2016, at 9:30 a.m…

I think what we will do is just in terms of since there are just a few of us here, I think we are going to try to do one more round.

It seems to me that there ought to be some kind of a timeframe in which the EPA should have a responsibility to at least let the organization know whether there is going to be an enforcement action that they are going to be following.