Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act

Floor Speech

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Madam Speaker, last night in the Committee on Rules we looked at this bill. We talked about it and its importance to the Nation.

   Madam Speaker, first let me say that this is an agreement between the White House, the Senate, and the House. This is an agreement that we can move forward on and avoid many destructive things that might have happened not only to the American people and the economy, but, really, our own credibility. Our ability to work together at this very careful time is important so that we show the American people that this can happen.

   There are a lot of things that I agree and disagree with that were said. First of all, harm the economy? Good gosh, when you only have a 1 percent GDP growth, the President has already done that with massive tax increases. The President has done that with rules and regulations. We are trying to make sure that what we are doing in this bill is to stick to the Republican plan.

   What is the Republican plan? It has been--going into our sixth year--that we are going to hold government spending flat. We do that essentially not only with a CR, which we will do again in a few weeks, but through effective use of sequestration. What we have done is been able to take the sequestration dollars and to utilize them in such a way that, as the chairman was speaking about, we are pulling in mandatory spending.

   We believe, after 5 years of staying flat with government spending, that we are in a more dangerous world than ever, and our military must have more money, our security operations must have more money. What we are going to do is to look at the entire process, come up with an idea about bringing in more money that funds our security, that funds our military, and offsets that so that we can do this by looking at long-term mandatory spending that will bring in over 170 billion dollars' worth of savings over the mirror that we look at, over the timeframe that is important for the American people to have confidence that we will not bankrupt this country and that we can continue.

   Now, the bottom line to this whole exercise is that what we have done is worked together. Working together, we now have a plan to move forward; and we will simply go to the next exercise, and that is funding the government for the year.

   The Republican plan is simple. We are not going to give this government one extra penny to put us into a bankruptcy circumstance, but we are asking also, back, that the President of the United States give us an opportunity to grow our economy. Taxes are too high, and we have too many rules and regulations; but the Republican Party will stick to our plan, and that is what we are doing here.

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