WASHINGTON— U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), joined several of his Senate Republican colleagues today at a press conference to urge Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to expedite floor consideration of funding bills and nominees in order to make substantial progress on the Senate’s work before the end of the fiscal year, September 30.
Along with Joni Ernst (R-IA), David Perdue (R-GA), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Steve Daines (R-MT), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Dean Heller (R-NV), Ron Johnson (R-WI), John Kennedy (R-LA), James Lankford (R-OK), Mike Lee (R-UT), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Ben Sasse (R-NE), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Roger Wicker (R-MS), Cassidy believes the Senate should work nights, weekends, and through the August state work period if it is necessary to confirm President Trump’s nominees and avoid last-minute funding battles.
A transcript of Senator Cassidy’s remarks at today’s press conference is below:
CASSIDY: Let me start off by emphasizing the success that this Congress has had so far. We have the best economy since the year 2000, the lowest taxes in 31 years, a stronger military, we’ve repealed 15 different regulations and we’ve been told that that has saved businesses $63 billion in compliance costs that instead they can use to employ people, to do long-term capital investment, to improve productivity. Twenty-one circuit conservative judges, open up ANWR which would be important to my friend Dan Sullivan, and I can go on. Repealing the individual mandate of Obamacare.
We think we’ve been successful, but we can go from success to greater success. And I liked how Mike Lee put it: you can get that boiler going, and once that boiler is going, then you can achieve even more. I’ll also echo what he said, I voted against the spending bill because within 24 hours we were supposed to review, digest, understand a 2,000-page bill spending quite a sum of money. That is not worthwhile.
So with this, we hope that either the deadline of we need to get it done before we go back to our states and engage in state activity, or the extra time that would then be afforded if we don’t get it done, will allow us to continue our success, take it to another level and if it comes to spending, allow us more time to review as opposed being dropped in our laps and saying, “we’re viewing tomorrow, we’re voting tomorrow.”
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