Henry Cuellar: “I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the ranking member, Mrs. Lowey, for her leadership…”

“I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the ranking member, Mrs. Lowey, for her leadership, along with Chairman Frelinghuysen, for many months of working together in a bipartisan way. I certainly want to thank both of them for the hard work that they have done. I want to thank the appropriators, Democrats and Republicans, working together. Certainly, I want to thank the committee staff on both sides who have worked so hard to make sure we get this bill together. I know this is not a perfect bill. But, again, we got together, we negotiated, and this is the bill that we have got under the system, working together. This bill, first of all, funds our military's and veterans' needs. This bill provides over $21.2 billion for infrastructure projects across the Nation. This bill addresses the opioid epidemic and also puts in increases for the Office of National Drug Control Policy and other programs to make sure that we fight the drug issues that we have. It adds extra money for the COPS program, which is important for our men and women in blue. It also adds 100 new immigration judges to address the issue of the backlog for the immigration cases that we have. It adds 10 percent of new moneys for Community Development Block Grant programs, which is, again, very important to all communities, urban and rural areas. It starts to address the issue of school safety and gun violence by providing the funds for safety programs.…”