William M. ``Mac'' Thornberry: “I presume the chair has no further speakers and, therefore, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I want…”

“I presume the chair has no further speakers and, therefore, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I want to, again, thank each and every one of the members of the House Armed Services Committee. Every one of them, Republican, Democrat, those of us who have been there a while, those who are new to the committee, have contributed to this product. As the chairman and I were saying, the dedicated professionals who work on the committee staff have done an outstanding job, especially, I think, under these conditions this year. I also want to thank my personal office, which has contributed in many ways to this whole effort. This has been all-hands-on-deck sort of work, and I appreciate their work as well. Finally, Mr. Speaker, I want to emphasize the importance of maintaining the bipartisan approach by which this bill came out of committee; 56-0 is not easy, and it is the chairman's leadership that enabled it to be so. Now, we have some work to do. We have some amendments to go through. If some of those amendments pass, it would be very hard to maintain that approach going through. But assuming we can maintain this bipartisan approach, where nobody gets everything they want, but there is enough there and a higher purpose that holds us together so that it can come out of this House on final passage tomorrow with a similar or roughly similar vote, I think that will be very important.…”