John Cornyn: “responding to the question of the distinguished assistant majority leader, I would say that we would all like to try to…”

“responding to the question of the distinguished assistant majority leader, I would say that we would all like to try to find some way to get back to business as usual when it comes to funding the government through the regular appropriations process. We haven't done that for a long time, and so we have been operating not on individual bills--I think there are 13 separate bills as part of the appropriations process. So now we have unfortunately already degenerated to this continuing resolution process, which has its own problems. I would say to my friend that for every one of the hardships we can mitigate through passing narrow legislation absent a global agreement on the continuing resolution, it seems to me we ought to be doing that. If there are other suggestions the Democratic side has about how we can do that, I think that would be a good thing to do. The problem is that I know the majority leader--I will give the majority leader the benefit of the doubt. I hope he didn't really mean he thought this was a show process, trying to restore these survivor benefits through this unanimous consent request, and I will give him the benefit of the doubt. I do think there are a lot of questions raised in the minds of the American people whether what is happening here is being done purely for political purposes. We have veterans of World War II and Korea who come to the World War II Memorial only to be met with barricades.…”