Proposing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution

Floor Speech

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Mr. NEAL. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, earlier this week Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan adviser, who recently testified before the Ways and Means Committee, commented about the Republicans' balanced budget amendment. He stated:

``The proposal that Republican leaders plan to bring up is, frankly, nuts. The truth is that Republicans don't care one whit about actually balancing the budget. They prefer to delude voters with the pie-in-the-sky promises that amending the Constitution will painlessly solve our budget problems.''

Mr. Speaker, the mystical date here is January 19, 2001. Bill Clinton says goodbye and leaves a surplus not subject, by the way, to opinion today but subject to fact of $5.7 trillion. So the decision is made to cut taxes in 2001 by a trillion dollars. The decision is made in 2003 to cut taxes by $1.3 trillion, and then subsequently to engage in a war in Iraq based upon the faulty premise of weapons of mass destruction.

Now, our Republican friends often come to the microphone and say things like, well, we all spent too much money. No, I didn't spend too much money. I voted against the war in Iraq. I voted against the Bush tax cuts. I voted against their prescription benefit proposal.

Our friend from New Jersey a moment ago said the math is clear. But for Republicans, why is the math only clear when Bill Clinton is President and Barack Obama is President? They ran these deficits through the roof. There is no escaping that conclusion.

The budget has been balanced five times since the end of World War II, four of those times during the Clinton Presidency. Twenty-two million jobs were created during those years. This is the equivalent of using a Luger to clean the wax out of our ears.

This proposal is beyond the pale. They ran across the country for the last 2 years with the Tea Party-types saying, Have you read the bill? Yes, we've read the bill, and we've come to the conclusion this is a reckless pursuit of defying our constitutional responsibility when we've already demonstrated that we can accomplish these ends without disturbing the Constitution that they attempted during the campaign cycle to merit.

Let's honor the Constitution, the Tea Party said. And today what do they propose? Disturbing the Constitution after their financial malfeasance for 8 years.

This argument they bring to the floor today is a political gimmick. George Bush, Sr., lobbied me on the amendment many years ago when it failed, and respectfully I pointed out to him that it was nothing more than political theater. When President Bush, Jr., invited me to the White House to discuss his tax cut proposal in 2001 a matter of days after his assumption of the Presidency, he said this is the people's money. And he's right.

But guess what? It's the people's responsibility to honor those veterans hospitals for 35,000 men and women who have served us honorably in Iraq and Afghanistan who are going to need our care for decades to come. It's the people's responsibility on Social Security, the greatest antipoverty program in history. It's the people's responsibility on Medicare, which has added years to life and life to years.

This proposal today overdoes it. There are enough men and women of goodwill in this institution to assemble for the purpose of getting on to a balanced budget without taking this pursuit of dishonoring our Constitution when we should be doing this on our own right now as the law has prescribed.

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