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“SCHEDULE” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the in the Senate section section on page S6822 on Dec. 15, 2014.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
SCHEDULE
Mr. REID. Mr. President, following my remarks, the Senate will proceed to executive session to debate the Murthy, Santos, Rose, Saldana, and Blinken nominations.
Blinken Nomination
I am not going to speak extensively on any of these. I will just say now, Tony Blinken I have known for many years. He was integral to the success of Joe Biden, as U.S. Senator, and has been with him as Vice President. Now he is going to be the second in command at the State Department.
When we have our briefings in the classified room, there is no one who is more articulate and can answer the questions any better than Tony Blinken. I have great admiration for him. I think we as a country are so fortunate he is going to be in the position he is in.
At 5:30 today there will be four rollcall votes. Those votes will be as follows: cloture on Murthy to be Surgeon General of the United States, confirmation of the Murthy nomination, cloture on the Santos nomination to be a member of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, and cloture on Executive Calendar No. 635, Frank Rose to be an Assistant Secretary of State.
This man has been waiting 513 days, an extremely important job: verification of plants, nuclear. I don't think the Republicans dislike him. They don't like the job he is going to have. They have left it basically empty for all this time.
So we have some important stuff to do. We can complete everything we wanted to today--today. Everything that is scheduled now for the week, we can finish today. I hope everyone understands we can move forward, but we are going to have to be here until we finish our work, whether that is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday or Saturday. So everyone should understand they can't be leaving.
I know we all have things to do. I haven't been home in such a long time and I want to go home. I bought a new home there. As everyone knows, I sold my place in Searchlight and bought a home in the Greater Las Vegas area. I would like to be able to see the home. I have not slept in it. We bought it in May and I have not been there. My wife is there waiting, getting ready for the move in, which is now taking place. So we have a lot of work to do. We have to work together to get it done as quickly as possible.
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