-9999
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. BRAUN. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 5765 and ask that it be reported by number.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. BRAUN. Mr. President, my home State of Indiana is America's heartland. I have traveled to every county, listened to businesses, schools, churches. I think that is where we need to get our cue in terms of what needs to be done. Farmers, as well, are in the middle of something they never faced before--probably the toughest job and business out there. It has never been tougher.
The American people are strong and resilient, but they are represented by a government here that is not necessarily the same. Sometimes they get scoffed at, but they live within their household budgets. State and local governments have guardrails. But, naturally, they do it anyway because they know you can't borrow money from future generations and spend it today--bad business plan.
For this reason, I think the U.S. Congress is broken because we have kept shoving this issue down the road. We haven't done a budget that we adhered to in nearly 20 years. The last time we did it, we were most ingenious about how to unravel it--roughly 10 years ago.
When they look at our capital, they see a twisted knot of lobbyists, corporate interests, and a mountain of debt that just gets higher and higher.
We now spend over a trillion dollars more each year than we take in, and, recently, that has gone up to $1.5 trillion. To normalize that just does not make sense. We are here twiddling our thumbs while our kids' and grandkids' future goes up in smoke. Every American family is paying for our failures here.
Congress, as a whole, and particularly this body, seem to have no interest in turning this big ship away from the rocks. In the past year, I have brought to the floor four chances to do something. I offered a complete Federal budget that would match our spending and our revenues that are historical in nature. Only 34 Senators voted for it. It would have preserved Social Security, Medicare, and defense, just bringing it in line with what is sustainable.
I offered an amendment that if we fail to get our budget and appropriations bills done on time, by the deadline, which is like in a few days for this year, we don't get paid until we do so. Forty-seven Senators voted for it--close, but still not there.
I offered an amendment to cut pet projects through earmarks from our huge spending bill. It only got 35 votes. And we were doing that for almost 10 years, and now we have actually backslid into that bad behavior.
I offered an amendment to require a balanced budget, like so many States have--they live in fiscal sanity--47 votes, short again.
The Framers of our Constitution saw this coming. They had to raise revenue, especially back then, to do whatever they wanted to do. There were also checks and balances.
Congress isn't just balanced by the Supreme Court and the President, but also by the States. Article V of our Constitution gives the States the power to pick up the slack when Congress refuses to act, where it doesn't exercise discipline, good behavior, what all of us expect.
I believe the House and the Senate desperately need two things: term limits--the Founders never imagined people would come here and like that better than what they did before. Washington and Jefferson hurried back to their farms and their businesses. That is not the case anymore.
If we keep doing it the way we are, we are going to get increasingly, increasingly deeper in the hole. With term limits, we get a class of political entrepreneurs here who have actually done something in the real world, before they think they can run the biggest business in the world and deliver such poor results.
If two-thirds of the States petition to call a constitutional convention, we could take power away from the DC establishment and put it back in the hands of the American people. You are not going to believe how close that has come and how close it is currently. But the swamp, I think, knows it. That is why each time the right number of petitions have been filed, Congress refused to call the convention.
The last time was as recently as last year. Today, 32 States have active applications for the convention. We need 34. It was actually at the level or above until a few States rescinded that.
This plan is extremely popular because it makes sense. It puts political will and backbone into this place that we don't normally have. And a recent poll by Trafalgar found that 65 percent of likely voters agree with that. If you take either term limits or balanced budgets by themselves, it gets up close to 85 or 90 percent, and, in this poll, 81 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of Independents--who I think elect the swing State Senators and the President; so we ought to be really paying attention to them--and 50 percent of Democrats.
There is no Federal Government body managing this process. It is too easy for Congress to ignore what the States have done.
My amendment would be very, very simple. It would direct the Archivist, who has all of these petitions somewhere in a drawer, to publish them as they come in so all of us can see what the people are thinking.
We have conveniently just overlooked it or ignored it. It adds what we should all be for: transparency, having people be able to see what is going on here, and especially for something like this.
America is the most powerful country in history because we are founded on the rock of the Constitution. So simple and direct, it can all be right in here. We need to pay more attention to it.
The Framers were also wise to have a tool for the people and the States when Congress refuses to act on things so critical. Considering how broken and dysfunctional this place is currently and the dire threats we face from our debt and inflation crisis, you would think now, more than any other time in our country's history, that this would be at the forefront and we would at least give it to the States to weigh in and not hide it in a drawer somewhere.
When each one of us swore in as Senator, we didn't swear our allegiance to our political party. We did it to the Constitution. We didn't promise to support the Washington establishment. We did it to the people, to the Constitution.
It is in support of the American people and in defense of the Constitution that I come here to the floor today. It is not going to be litigated on the floor today, but I can tell you, for the time that I am here, I am not going to let the American public forget it.
And we have another critical date in the middle of December, 2\1/2\ months away, and I think that will be a place where it will even be more important, and I am going to try to make the case in the meantime that we at least don't keep in a drawer, hidden away somewhere, what the American people want.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source