Our Budget Process
Floor Speech
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Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Perdue for his leadership on this important colloquy.
As some of us have seen down here, as Senator Rounds mentioned, there are a lot of Members of the Senate who are very concerned. But what we are seeing here are a lot of the new Members--12 new Republican freshmen. It is good to see the Presiding Officer, who is one of them.
We are very concerned about this. We were concerned because a lot of us ran for office--a lot of us for the first time--because we saw what was going on with this budget process. With all due respect to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, they didn't even attempt to pass a budget for a number of years. They didn't even try.
Think about that. You are back home, in a State government such as Senator Rounds was talking about or in a household or a business, and you are not even going to try to pass a budget. That was what was going on in the Senate--remarkable. So what we are trying to do is to fix that.
The first thing we did--and Senator Enzi was on the floor a little bit ago--is we came here and we passed a budget. It hadn't happened in years. We passed a budget resolution. That was an important start. Then we started to pass appropriations bills. As a matter of fact, this year, to the majority leader's credit, we started working on appropriations bills at an earlier time than at any time in decades. We got 12 appropriations bills passed out of the Appropriations Committee.
Then what happened? We tried to start bringing them to the floor to vote on them, to move them. The vast majority of those bills--all of which were very bipartisan--were filibustered by the minority leader of the Senate.
Again, I am new here. I still don't understand why they did that. A lot of us who came down to the floor were really upset when the minority leader of the Senate filibustered the Defense appropriations bill--the bill that funds our troops--six times in the last year and a half--six times. That is a disgrace, in my view.
So what are we doing here? More delay. More delay. We just got through a continuing resolution, which is not how to run the government, and they were looking at opportunities for more delay. For example, at the very end of this discussion, there was the idea of maybe adding additional funds for Flint, MI. Well, nobody cares about clean water as much as I do. My State has huge challenges with communities that not just have aging infrastructure, like Flint, MI, but no infrastructure. I have over 30 communities in the great State of Alaska that don't have clean water and sewer and don't have flush toilets--Americans--if you can believe that. So I certainly wanted to focus on that. That is what we did in the regular order through the EPW Committee with the WRDA bill--for Flint, MI, the State of Alaska, and other communities that have challenges with clean water. We are going to address those through the regular order.
That is what Senator Perdue is leading on right now in the Senate-- the regular order and getting back to a budget process that can handle the enormous challenges that we have heard about on the floor here--$20 trillion in debt and exploding deficit. That is what we need to do, and I commend Senator Perdue for his leadership. What he did is something that takes a lot of courage here--a whiteboard approach. We just need to look at everything anew. With his leadership and his experience, a number of us lead by Senator Perdue have been working on this for months. This is what we need to do to finally get ahold of these enormous budget challenges.
I encourage all of my colleagues--Republicans and Democrats--to join in this process, to bring their ideas to fix what is clearly, clearly a broken process that is not helping our Nation, that is driving up the deficit, that is saddling the next generation with trillions of dollars of debt. We have the beginning of a way to start fixing this.
Again, I thank Senator Perdue and Senator Daines for their hard work on this. I am certainly going to be part of their important efforts as we look to put our country on a fiscal path of sustainable economic growth and budgets, which we are not on right now.
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