Mike Enzi: “I thank the ranking member for his comments. Madam President, I appreciate the civility with which we went through the…”

“I thank the ranking member for his comments. Madam President, I appreciate the civility with which we went through the committee process and look forward to having that same civility on the floor. Yes, there are some very important things for us to talk about. I have to agree, we need to do some things. The areas that were mentioned were taxes, wages, health insurance, infrastructure, and student debt. We just have a little bit different direction on how to achieve those things, but I am hoping we can find the common ground on those. The budget itself didn't get into specificity on how to do these things because our Budget Committee--while we have people who represent a lot of those different committees--don't have the range of expertise that the committees themselves do. So what we tried to do in the budget was set the parameters for them to work in and to find the solutions that would work best within those parameters. We are trying to get this budget done by April 15. That is actually a statutory deadline--it is seldom ever met--and I intend to meet that deadline. That is so the appropriators, the people doing the spending bills, can actually get started, so that for once maybe we can have all 12 spending bills debated on the floor, unlimited amendments, so we can get as many of the 100 opinions that we have--it is 300 or 400 opinions actually--involved in the decisions on how to best to spend the money the United States spends.…”