Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012
Floor Speech
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Mr. JOHNSON of Wisconsin. I thank the Senator. First of all, I thank the Senator for his leadership on this issue. I share your concern about the dysfunction of not only this body, our Budget Committee, but Washington in general. I mean, Washington is broken.
We are currently
conducting business as usual here in Washington, and it is bankrupting our Nation.
Certainly having spent 34 years as a manufacturer, I recognize you have to have a good process if you are going to have a good product. And because our process here is so broken, that is one of the reasons we are bankrupting this Nation--because we don't have a good process. It is, to me, unbelievable that in the Senate we haven't passed a budget now in--what is it--805 or 806 days? Over 2 years we have not passed a budget yet in this body. As an accountant--that is my background--I had to produce a budget on time for a wide variety of sizes of businesses, and it is simply unbelievable to me when I know how hard individuals and businesses work to produce a budget. And, by the way, they generally present those budgets on time. They don't miss the budget dates. But they actually produce a budget, and there is an awful lot of work that goes into those budgets.
I come here after 34 years in business, and I come here to the Senate understanding, again, not because I want to be a Senator but because I realize we are bankrupting this Nation, that America is in peril. I get here, and I hope to get on the Budget Committee so I can actually start solving this problem. I get on the Budget Committee, and I am ready to roll up my shirt sleeves and start working on the problem. What did we hold? I think we had six hearings on the President's budget, a budget that was so unserious that it lost in this body 0 to 97. Not one Member of the President's own party thought it was serious enough or maybe it didn't spend quite enough for them. Maybe it didn't tax enough for them. But, for whatever reason, not one member of the President's own party decided to vote for that budget. I think that is a stunning repudiation.
It is very disappointing, quite honestly, because right now, as our country faces bankruptcy, we are hungry for leadership and we are not getting any. The fact is if the President were serious about addressing this issue, if he were serious about attacking this problem, he would have been coming to us months ago to negotiate in good faith to prevent the bankrupting of America, but that hasn't happened.
So what is happening now? For the last few weeks we have been holding some secret meetings, far from the view of the American public. I am not sure, is that how we are going to solve the financial future of America? I came here to work. I came here to be engaged in debate. I was hoping we would have a very open process under general order, but that is not what is happening. What I am afraid is we are going to end up with a deal that is going to be dropped in our laps with a couple of days to go, like with the health care law, like Dodd-Frank. All of a sudden we get these thousand-page bills dumped in our laps with no time to review, and then you start to see the unintended consequences. That is a real shame.
I just came from a press conference where every Member of the freshman class--we had a meeting this morning--and we were talking about, what can we do? I mean, we all came here in a very sincere desire to actually solve the problem. One of the things we talked about is how President Obama, rather than being serious about this, rather than tackling the problem, is willing to scare seniors and members of our military. We thought that was over the line. So we sent a letter to the President today asking: Please, step to the plate. Seriously address the problem. Stop scaring our seniors. Work with us. We want to help you solve the problem.
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