Reverse the Curse: Restoring Fiscal Responsibility

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas for yielding. I know that he cares deeply about this issue and spends a whole lot of time working across the aisle and with our own Conference, trying to get this body to focus on this issue of spending. Frankly, that is on both sides of the aisle.

We are sitting here now, $30.5 trillion of debt. That is a number that nobody in America can possibly understand what that means. We talk about it. We say it. We put charts up, but nobody knows. $30.5 trillion, if you set out to count to that, one Mississippi, it would take you 967,000 years. I mean, think about that. It is patently absurd.

Yet, we are going to rack up another trillion and a half here in the next year, and then another couple of trillion. We are just going to keep piling it on. Interest rates are going up, and interest rates are going to keep going up, so that debt is going to pile up even further.

The American people know this. They can't live their lives that way. Yet, here we are in this body, this so-called people's House, and we haven't had a single actual debate on spending in this body the entire time I have been here, much less this year.

We just passed another milestone in this great body, the United States House of Representatives, in which we just spent the sixth year in which not one amendment was offered on the floor of this body in open debate, not one amendment.

Has any rank-and-file Member of the United States House of Representatives been able to come to the floor and offer an amendment? You wonder why this place is broken?

I mean, we just passed that milestone yet again. You never get a chance to have open debate here in the so-called people's House.

I gave a speech a little while back from this podium on this floor that I called the United States House of free stuff because that is the way people view this body.

Oh, we just got another check we can go write, another bill we can pass. It sounds good. It has something great in the title. You are talking about infant formula. Oh, you better vote for that. You can't vote against a bill that has infant formula in the title. Doesn't matter what it does. Doesn't matter if it will make it worse. Didn't matter what the power of the government is.

If you put ALS in the title, don't vote ``no'' on an ALS bill. Well, then you hate people with ALS, right?

Don't vote ``no'' on any bill that has something in the title. United States House of free stuff.

Yet, this week, what are we going to vote on? We are going to have a bill, H.R. 7606, which will likely come up, that will give $400 million to ethanol producers. Never mind that that jacks up 30 cents a gallon on the price of gasoline.

We are going to have a bill that has $12.7 billion over 10 years on wildlife recovery. Man, we are really being great stewards of the public trust here in the United States House of Representatives.

That is the problem. That is what is broken, and the American people see it. They see that we are here not doing the work of the people because we never actually debate, vote, and figure out something, roll our sleeves up and say: ``Do you know what? We have X trillion dollars of income so we can only spend X trillion.'' We never do that.

That fundamentally is what my friend from Texas is getting at, what my colleagues are here on the floor talking about.

I would ask the Speaker where my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are having any conversation whatsoever about only spending that which we take in. But, no, we can never have that conversation in the United States House of free stuff because it is a hell of a lot easier to go out on the steps and go preen and posture to a bunch of people in the media, saying about how evil people are if they dare vote against spending money we don't have.

Madam Speaker, we should do our job, both sides of the aisle, to stop spending money we don't have.

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