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Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, I certainly thank the gentleman for yielding and those extremely kind and gracious words, and I certainly rise in support of this very important bill. I want to echo the praise that has been offered on this floor by members of both parties for our chairman, who is bringing his last full appropriations bill to the floor as the full committee chairman, and just tell him what a pleasure it has been to work under his leadership and to learn, frankly, at his knee, and usually with a pretty good cigar at the same time. So I have enjoyed that, and I think he has done a great job.
I also want to congratulate my friend, the ranking member. This is a chairman and a ranking member that, frankly, have done their jobs the last 2 years. All 12 bills were reported out of the Appropriations Committee most years, and all 12 should have been on this floor and dealt with, and I regret that they were not.
There are a lot of good things in this continuing resolution--as has been mentioned earlier, the additional funds for biomedical research, the adjustments and extra funding for defense at a critical time for our country, and certainly the disaster relief funds which certain parts of our country share--but I know this is not the bill that Chairman Rogers wanted to bring to this floor. Frankly, we have got to get out of this.
I couldn't agree more with my friend from Indiana who said it pretty well: this is not this committee's fault. It is a failure in this Congress. This is the responsibility of this Congress and this administration to write the bill for next year. This is a failure to meet that responsibility. It is a necessary step, and I certainly will support it, but we have simply got to get back to the point of regular order.
Next year, believe me, I will push very hard to make sure we don't have another CR on April 28 and that we actually do the appropriations for FY17--we shouldn't be doing it in FY17, but that would be better than another CR--and then we will push to make sure that we do the FY18. I know the chairman has done everything humanly possible to do that, and I know he has had a willing partner in that in the ranking member.
So let's all make a New Year's resolution. Let's pass this bill, but let's get back to regular order. Let's restore things. There is a bipartisan sense of frustration on the Appropriations Committee, and, frankly, the leadership on both sides in this body need to work to achieve that. It is not an Appropriations Committee failure. This is the failure of Congress--the House of Representatives and the Senate-- to do its job. That should not happen again.
Mr. Speaker, I urge support for the measure.
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