Proposing An Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Requiring A Balanced Budget for the Federal Government
Floor Speech
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Mr. ARRINGTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend and classmate from Arizona for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, let's pause for a brief moment of intellectual honesty. Both parties have failed. This institution has failed. We have failed our country.
We have jeopardized our economy, our security, and our leadership in the world. Worst of all, we have compromised on our children's future and the blessing of their inheritance of freedom and opportunity.
We have failed. That is why we are talking about a constitutional amendment to impose fiscal responsibility on a body politic that has not done that, that has not mustered the political will to do that.
We have a national debt per GDP that exceeds World War II levels of debt, an annual deficit that is larger than both the defense and nondefense discretionary budgets, with 50 cents or greater on every dollar that we borrow up to $2 trillion going to service our interest payments.
Half of what we borrow, a trillion dollars, is more than what we spend on defense. Then, there is this ominous forecast by CBO that even at $39 trillion today, where we are teetering on a potential sovereign debt crisis, we will add $180 trillion to the national debt in the 30- year out. If that is not unacceptable to everybody, I don't know what is.
If we can't concede to the fact that this body politic does not have the political will to address it, to rein in the spending that is driving this unsustainable debt trajectory that will bankrupt our country and our children's future, then we must support this forcing mechanism. Force us to do what the American people have to do. Force us to do what State and local governments do.
Here is another stunning, and startling for some, but for all a sobering fact: We won't even get a simple majority vote today.
What shall we do? We should look to Article V of the Constitution, where the sovereign States and we the people can petition their government for another path to amend the Constitution. Guess what. They have done that.
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Mr. ARRINGTON. Mr. Speaker, they had the requisite applications to have an Article V convention of the States, to rein in us, the knuckleheads that refuse to accept that it is not a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. It is an institutional problem that persists and will destroy the greatest Nation in human history.
Let's look to the States, and let's call that convention like we should have done in the 1970s and 1980s. Let's let them rein us in, restore fiscal sanity in their Nation's Capital, and reverse the curse that looms large over this country.
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