Cut, Cap, and Balance Act of 2011-Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I echo the comments of my colleagues from Nebraska and Indiana who have expressed their support for the cut, cap, and balance approach to dealing with our debt crisis. It had 234 votes in the House, and it is the only plan out there.

As my colleague from Indiana said, the Democratic leadership in the Senate has yet to produce a plan that will meaningfully deal with the greatest crisis our country has faced in my service in the Congress; that is, this massive, out-of-control debt the Senator from Nebraska pointed out which could lead to much higher interest rates along the lines of what we are seeing in some of the European countries, which would absolutely crush this economy.

If we are serious about growing the economy and creating jobs, we have to get Federal spending under control. We need a smaller Federal economy and a larger private economy. What has been happening since this President took office is that we continue to grow government. We have added 35 percent to the debt. Spending has increased by 24 percent--non-national security discretionary spending--at a time when inflation was 2 percent. Federal spending has been growing at 10 times the rate of inflation. The number of people receiving food stamps has gone up by 40 percent. The unemployment rate is up by 18 percent, and 2.1 million more people are unemployed today than when this President took office.

The policies of this administration are not working when it comes to getting people back to work and getting spending and debt under control.

I was listening to my colleague from North Dakota with great interest when he was here earlier denouncing the whole idea of a balanced budget amendment--like it was coming from some foreign planet. He talked about how ill-conceived and ill-considered and stupid this approach is--cut, cap, and balance.

Well, my observation about that is, the failure of the Democrats to produce a budget in over 800 days is exhibit No. 1 for why we need a balanced budget amendment. We ought to be embarrassed in Washington, DC; we are not doing the people's work; we have not passed a budget in over 800 days. Yet the other side comes down here and denounces the idea of a balanced budget amendment, which all 49 States have some form of, that requires them to balance their budgets every single year.

My colleague from North Dakota knows that. His State has it and my State of South Dakota has it. It is a very straightforward concept that the people of this country clearly understand.

Now, he takes issue with the way this particular balanced budget amendment is written. Fine. Come up with your
own proposal. But don't suggest that having a constitutional amendment that requires this place to do something that it hasn't been doing for the last 25 or 30 years is literally a bad idea. What we have today is dysfunctional. It is broken. It doesn't work for the American people. It is an embarrassment. That is why we need to put something on the books that will impose a discipline on this Congress to get spending and debt back under control and help us do something about the runaway debt that is putting a crushing burden on future generations of Americans.

If you don't like this balanced budget amendment and think the cut, cap, and balance proposal is not prescriptive about this particular balanced budget amendment that many of us are cosponsors of, then come up with another one. But let's put something in place that enshrines a responsibility and obligation and a requirement for us to live within our means every single year.

We cannot continue to spend money we don't have. We have demonstrated year after year around here that we continue to add more and more and more to this debt. Under the President's budget proposal, that debt would have doubled in the next decade. That is why I think when his budget proposal was put on the floor of the Senate it got zero votes. Not a single Democrat or Republican voted in favor of what this President put forward in his budget submission earlier this year.

Since that time there has been an absolute lack of leadership out of the White House. The President has been completely missing in action. The Democratic leadership has put forward no plan of their own. We have in front of us something that achieved majority support in the House a few nights ago when 234 Members of the House voted for this proposal. It is a serious, meaningful effort to cut spending now, cap it in future years, and put in place a balanced budget amendment which is long overdue and, frankly, if it had passed 15 years ago in the Senate, we would not be in the position we are today. It failed by a single vote--one vote--in the Senate in 1997.

I cannot help but think how much better off we would be today in terms of the spending situation had we gotten the necessary two-thirds vote in 1997. But it is never too late to do the right thing. We have an opportunity to do that today.

To hear our colleagues on the other side get up and belittle the effort that has been made by a lot of people who are trying to do something about a problem that will wreck this country if we don't fix it is not befitting of this institution.

This is going to be a tabling motion instead of a debate on cut, cap, and balance because my colleagues have decided this isn't worthy of consideration on the floor of the Senate. I think it is a terrible reflection on this institution, when something is brought forward in good faith--a serious, meaningful effort to address spending and debt and to put this country back on a sustainable fiscal course--and we are not even going to debate it. We are going to have a tabling motion in a few minutes.

I hope my colleagues will defeat that motion and allow us to continue to debate this proposal and get an up-or-down vote on what will meaningfully address the problems this country faces.

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