Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. I do appreciate the conversation about the balanced budgets in the past.

Yes, Bill Clinton was the President there. He did sign that budget. But as this House knows, above any other place, this House is very aware that budgets originate in the House of Representatives. So Republicans were leading the House of Representatives pulling that budget together.

We are proposing a similar thing again, that a Republican House can propose a budget, send it to a Democrat President, and we work together to start balancing the budget again.

So that formula that we just discussed, I believe, is a very good formula. We should initiate that again and say, once again, a Republican House, do a great budget, send it over to a Democrat President, and be able to work their way through it.

I would disagree with the cuts in defense. I think it is a very common statement that we can look and say there are issues with defense systems. There are issues with our acquisition process in defense.

Where I would disagree is we should then take our defense and where we find savings, then move it over to deficit reductions. I represent an area around Tinker Air Force Base in Midwest City. It is a great base that is strategic to us. Those planes that fly out of there are 50-plus years old. There are some airmen that are flying with the same tail number that their grandfather flew 50 years ago. This is a moment when we should not be robbing from defense and saying we are going to use that for deficit reduction that we need to be reinvesting.

Robert Gates, our Secretary of Defense, has said there's $178 billion that he can find, and $78 billion of that savings is applied to deficit reduction in the Republican plan, and $100 billion of it is reinvested back into the Defense Department. There are good ways to do this that leave America safe and that make strategic sense. We think we should do those things.

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