PAYGO
Floor Speech
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Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I find that our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are going a bit through revisionist history again. We hear them talk over and over again about the things that have happened, what was happening about gas prices last year. They never mentioned that the Democrats were in charge of the Congress when a lot of these things that they talk about were happening, but I think it's important that we always point that out.
A rule was just reported in by my colleague from the Rules Committee, and I've just come from the Rules Committee myself where we reported out a rule for a bill that's going to be heard on the floor tomorrow called the Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2009, and I thought it might be important to talk a little bit about that rule and that bill tonight because I know this is going to create some confusion in the minds of the American people as to why in the world are we passing something called Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2009 here just before the August recess.
It's also a confusing thing I think to people because they don't understand why we have to pass legislation that says you should pay for things as you go. Most people in this country do that. That's what they expect us to do in the Congress, but that isn't what's going to happen and there's several things going on with that bill that I think need to be explained. Some will be explained tomorrow.
But first of all, that bill did not go to the committee, the Budget Committee, from which it is coming. And when I asked the chairman of the Budget Committee today, he said there just wasn't time to do it. We're dealing with the appropriations bills, we're dealing with the health care bill, and there simply wasn't time to do that. But just like the American public expects us to read bills before we vote on them, I think they expect our bills to go through committee and go through the process of legislating. That's what we're here for.
But, no, there's no time to do that. We keep hearing that from the majority party: there's no time to do what we're sent here to do. But we know that this is just another diversion on their part, and I think I have an appreciation for why that's happening.
Today, the headline in Politico: "Poll, Public Starts to Lose Trust in Obama; Health Timeline on Life Support; Obama Good for K Street; Energy, Health Care and Finance Agenda a Boon to Lobbying.''
I think what the majority wants to do is sort of take some of the attention away from some of the headlines that are coming out. One of the interesting things about this bill that's going to be dealt with tomorrow, which is it's supposed to be PAYGO, you pay-as-you-go. However, it exempts 40 percent of our budget. So 40 percent of the budget is not going to be included in PAYGO, and yet they are increasing spending on that 40 percent of the budget at least 8 percent a year.
So how in the world are they going to control spending if 40 percent of the budget is exempt and you're allowing it to increase 40 percent a year? You simply ignore that. It's as though the family sits down--they're always comparing what we do here with what the family does. It's like you sit down at the family table to talk about your budget and you say, well, we're only going to deal with 60 percent of the budget; we're going to put 40 percent over here and just going to ignore it, and we're going to spend whatever we want to on that side of the budget. That's exactly what they are doing with this, and it just seems really ridiculous, and I think the American public needs to understand that a little bit.
Now, what they say is, well, this was all instituted in the past; we're exempting things Republicans exempted. But the very first PAYGO bill was passed under Democrats in 1990, a bipartisan effort to try to rein in spending. But what's happened since then is they've ignored it. They even had a PAYGO rule in the rules that the Democrats passed when they took over the Congress in 2007, but the rule is not strong enough for them so now they want to put it in statute.
I think it's simply to divert attention from the headlines. The President's approval ratings are going down. The health care bill is creating many, many problems. We asked today 134 times on this floor where are the jobs that were promised. The economy is going south, and what do the Democrats want to do? They want to divert the American public's attention away from all of those things and say but we passed a law that says we have to pay for these things as we go along. Passing this law is going to make no difference to them than their rule does.
You know, I find it just so interesting that when you say you're going to do something you don't do it, but that's normally the way the Democrats do it.
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