Budget Negotiations
Floor Speech
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Mr. LEE. Madam President, the need has never been greater for us to avoid gimmicks. Gimmickry in this context can have very high stakes and can prove most detrimental to our economy and to the ability of our government to function.
We have to look out for those gimmicks that would say we are going to make a few cuts now, but most of the cuts we are going to propose in return for our ability to raise the debt limit will involve sacrifices by future Congresses, not the 112th Congress. We will just make a few. But we will say that the 113th and the 114th and successive Congresses after will make the difficult necessary sacrifices.
We can't do that. Nothing allows us to bind a future Congress. That is why we need something that is gimmick free. That is why we need to amend our laws of laws, our U.S. Constitution, to place important, meaningful, permanent restrictions on the ability of Congress to engage in perpetual reckless deficit spending of the sort that has produced a national debt now fast approaching $15 trillion, to a degree that is escalating now at a rate in excess of $1.5 trillion every single year.
In order to rid the problem, we have to change the root causes. We have to change the ability of the Congress to exercise its authority that it has so severely abused in recent decades under clause 2 of article I, section 8 to engage in deficit spending. A balanced budget amendment, the balanced budget amendment that has been endorsed and embraced and cosponsored by all 47 Republicans in the Senate will do that. We have a growing number of Republicans, a couple dozen, who have now gotten behind the one proposal that would allow us to approach the debt limit with this in mind, and would require the balanced budget amendment to be part of that, and I urge my colleagues to support that.
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Mr. LEE. The American people expect us to stop burying our children and our grandchildren under a mountain of debt, to stop spending money we don't have, particularly when we are spending about 40 cents out of every dollar that is borrowed, much of that being borrowed from foreign sovereign governments such as China.
Obviously there are times when as a country we have needed to do this, when our circumstances have required it. The reason Congress was given this power to begin with is to make sure that, particularly in a time of war, Congress had the means at its disposal to provide for our national defense and to provide for other immediate emergent needs.
But this practice of what I refer to as perpetual deficit spending has become not just something we do on an emergency basis, not just something we do in a time of war or other kind of unusual circumstance; it has become something we do as a matter of course to keep things moving, to keep business as usual operating in Washington to the point where we are accumulating over $1.5 trillion a year in new debt.
Our constituents in every single State expect more and they deserve better. The reason for this has everything to do with the fact that this unites people along every point along the political spectrum. Whether you are a conservative and you care about the deficit because you want to protect our national defense system or because you care deeply about our economy or whether you are a liberal and you care about the deficit because you are concerned about what this will do to our entitlement programs, all of those things stand in grave jeopardy as a result of this practice of spending, this practice that will result in the U.S. Government having to spend a lot more money every single year to pay interest on the national debt, interest that doesn't benefit anyone, interest that crowds out private investment and kills jobs. That is what voters in my State and every State are concerned about.
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