John Cornyn: “here we are, following the Thanksgiving holiday, where I hope that people got to get together with friends and family…”

“here we are, following the Thanksgiving holiday, where I hope that people got to get together with friends and family and enjoy a little respite from the hectic schedule here in Congress. But here we are now, with just a few short days intervening between now and Christmas, and the end-of-the-year legislative mad dash is officially upon us. This year, our Democratic colleagues, who control the Senate agenda, have ignored some of the Senate's most important and basic responsibilities, leaving us with a whole lot to do and not a whole lot of time in which to do it. In September, when the Senate should have passed a group of bills to fund the government for the next fiscal year, our colleagues instead kicked the can down the road. You would have thought they would have used the past couple of months to pass the annual appropriations bills, which is one of most basic and fundamental responsibilities of Congress; but, no, they chose not to do that. Instead, our Democratic colleagues found time for partisan, dead-on- arrival messaging bills while they failed to bring a single appropriations bill to the floor with a December 3 deadline. As things stand today, it looks like these funding bills are nowhere near ready. This risks leaving millions of Americans without a paycheck right before the Christmas holidays or punting on our funding responsibilities once again. And that is not the only potential fiscal disaster we are careening toward.…”