Providing for Further Consideration of House Concurrent Resolution 393, Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2005

Floor Speech

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.
Mr. Speaker, budgets are about priorities, and I believe that the priorities outlined in the Republican budget plan are not the priorities of the people of this country.

This Republican budget is a blueprint to protect tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of everything else. I disagree very strongly with the approach being taken by the Republican leadership. This budget plan is bad for America. It is bad for our most vulnerable citizens. It is bad for our economy. It is bad for our war on terrorism, and it is bad for our future. The Republican budget resolution will inflict terrible damage on American families.

This budget cuts $358 million from health programs in the year 2005. It cuts environmental protection programs by $6.4 billion over 5 years. It fails to provide needed funding for veterans' health care. It underfunds homeland security programs. It fails to include the promised funding for No Child Left Behind. It makes college more expensive for our families by freezing the maximum Pell grant and cutting funding for Perkins loans.

I am also dismayed that this budget fails to provide adequate funding for our food aid programs around the world. Winning the war on terrorism will take more than dropping bombs on people. Food aid is one of the best things we can do to boost the image of the United States in other countries. It is a way to win friends and to demonstrate to the world what we are for. This budget goes in exactly the opposite direction, and it is wrong.

And it is outrageous that the Republican leadership refuses to talk straight with the American people about the issue of the budget deficit. For better or worse, the budget resolutions presented in this House have become partisan documents. As I said, perhaps better than anything else, these budgets reflect the priorities of the two parties.

I understand that, for the most part, the Republican leadership believes that every problem can be solved by throwing bigger and bigger tax cuts at the wealthiest Americans and corporations. But it used to be that the Republican Party also stood for fiscal responsibility.

I am a liberal Democrat, but I must say that I learned a lot during the debates of the 1980s and early 1990s. I learned that controlling the deficit is not only important to a strong economy, it is essential. And I give a lot of credit to some of the people on the other side of the aisle and especially to the Blue Dog Democrats, who were among the first to bang the drum of deficit reduction.

What happened to the Republican Party? Where have all those people gone who used to care about the deficit? This Republican budget resolution will increase the deficit by $247 billion over the next 5 years. I have to believe that whether one is a liberal or a moderate or a conservative, they will find this budget fiscally irresponsible.

And it has huge consequences, not only for future generations, but also for the most important task of this generation: winning the global war on terrorism. It becomes harder and harder to take the offensive against terrorism when we are mired in debt, and the Committee on the Budget refuses to include any budget process reform like the so-called pay-as-you-go rules to deal with the problem.

Now we are told that how we pay for things is a separate discussion, and we will have a debate on pay-as-you-go mechanisms next week or the week after or a month later or whenever. Well, that makes no sense. Imagine if you said, I want to buy a $1 million house today, but I will figure out how to pay for it next month; the bank would throw you out on the street. But that is the way the Republican leadership has chosen to operate.

By contrast, the Democratic budget proposal offers real budget enforcement rules. In fact, all of the alternative proposals do so: restoring pay-as-you-go rules to both spending and tax cuts. We provide for a strong defense in homeland security, including putting our troops first. We keep our commitment on No Child Left Behind, fund veterans health programs, health care, environmental protection, and housing; and Democrats target our tax relief to people who need it the most, those in the middle, including extending the child tax credit and marriage penalty relief.

Mr. Speaker, as I said, budgets are about priorities, and the Republican budget proposal before us has the wrong priorities for America. It is that simple. I urge my colleagues to defeat the Republican budget and to support a more thoughtful and realistic approach, and I would also urge my colleagues to vote "no" on the rule.

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