Proposing A Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN.

Mr. Speaker, our good friends across the aisle have been bristling when my colleagues have pointed out the breathtaking budget hypocrisy being shown by the majority today, so I thought, instead, I would offer the comments of their fellow Republicans.

Here is headline news: ``Conservatives irate over GOP's budget hypocrisy.'' ``Critics chafe over a balanced budget amendment vote on the heels of an omnibus spending spree.''

And then we get quotes from a number of Members, including Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, who says: ``There is no one on Capitol Hill, and certainly no one on Main Street, that will take this vote seriously.''

We hear from someone named Barbara Boland, who equated the exercise to ``gorging on a sumptuous feast while insisting that you want a svelte physique.''

Mr. Speaker, America knows they just drove a $2 trillion deficit hole into our budget with their gold-plated tax-and-spend scam; and the CBO now predicts the deficit will reach an astounding $1 trillion in 2019, and will continue increasing annually to $1.5 trillion by 2028.

That is not something the Constitution made them do. That is not something the Declaration of Independence made them do, or the Gettysburg Address. That is something they cooked up all by themselves.

Mr. Speaker, they promised to drain the swamp, but they just moved into the swamp and drained the Treasury instead. The Treasury is ransacked, but the swamp is teeming with monstrous special interests devouring the common wealth of the American people.

After slashing taxes on the wealthiest corporations and individuals, they propose cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, the programs built up by the American people with their blood, sweat, tears, and hard-earned labor.

And now, today, after giving us one of the most regressive tax plans in history, they effectively want to make it unconstitutional to spend what we need on the people's Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security.

The whole idea defies a basic principle of our Constitution, which was enunciated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in his famous Lochner dissent in 1905. He said: ``A constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory.''

President Trump just signed a spending bill into law while complaining bitterly about it and saying he would never sign a bill like that again. Perhaps he shouldn't have signed it in the first place, but he has got the right solution in mind, Mr. Speaker: Show some courage.

Here is the bottom line: If you show political courage and wisdom, you don't need a balanced budget amendment; and if you show no courage and no wisdom, then a balanced budget amendment will not save you.

We have the constitutional power right now to pass completely balanced budgets. Indeed, one of our recent Presidents, Bill Clinton, saw to it that we posted not just balanced budgets, but big surpluses in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001, all of it done without a constitutional amendment.

Mr. Speaker, if this political-camouflaged constitutional amendment had been in place when President Obama took office with nearly 10 percent unemployment and GDP having fallen 3.5 percent over the previous year, it would have locked the Bush era recession into place and driven our country into a deep depression.

If you have a Congress that can't balance the budget, you don't need a new constitutional amendment; you need a new Congress.

If you have a majority that won't govern responsibly, you don't need to spray-paint political graffiti all over our Constitution; you need a new political program and new political vision.

They burned fiscal discipline and budget planning to the ground with their tax bill. Let's not throw the Constitution into the bonfire, too.

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