Proposing an Amendment to the Constitution Relative to Requiring a Balanced Budget--S.J. Res. 24

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, yesterday and today my Republican colleagues here in the Senate have been coming to the floor one after another to deliver a simple, urgent message, one that I hear every time I am home in Kentucky: Washington simply must change course. The spending spree must end. We must put our Nation's fiscal house in order before it is too late.

This is not a partisan message. Everyone recognizes that both parties played a role in getting us to this point. But let's be clear, Republicans are the only ones in Congress right now who are attempting to do something meaningful about fiscal restraint. The only way we will actually achieve it is by acting together on serious legislation such as the balanced budget amendment Republicans are voting on today--not through thinly veiled cover votes such as the one Democrats plan to hold alongside this morning.

For nearly 3 years now, Republicans have stood up to the fiscal recklessness of this administration and pleaded with the President and Democrats in Congress to stop the spending spree--stop it--and work with us on a serious plan to put our Nation's fiscal house in order.

For nearly 3 years we have met nothing but resistance. I even read this week that some Democrats in Congress actually view our insistence on fiscal responsibility as a good political issue for them. They say Americans have moved on, that they do not want to hear about fiscal restraint anymore. Apparently these Democrats are content to let this crisis continue to build and build until it pops up in the polls again.

What Republicans have been saying this week is that we do not have that luxury. We cannot wait for a European-style calamity to happen right here to finally do something about our fiscal problems, nor should we want to. After all, we were not elected to get reelected. We were elected to recognize the Nation's problems and to face up to them with foresight and with courage.

That is why Republicans have kept up our call for a serious and effective balanced budget amendment. We have seen all the statistics--that Congress now borrows more than 40 cents for every dollar it spends; that interest payments on the debt alone will soon crowd out spending on things such as education and defense; that annual deficits under this President routinely double and triple the previous record.

We know where it has gotten us. Under this President, the national debt has rocketed from $10.1 trillion all the way up to 15.1 trillion, more than a 40-percent increase in the national debt under this President in a record time of less than 3 years, a run of fiscal mismanagement only matched in its recklessness by total unwillingness to correct it.

The President's most recent budget was so irresponsible that not a single Member of the Senate voted for it, not one. The President's budget was voted down unanimously here in the Senate.

What about the first ever downgrade of U.S. debt, did that prompt action? Not in this White House. It prompted a round of ``shoot the messenger'' instead. This President's entire approach to our Nation's fiscal problems has been to sit back and blame somebody else, even as he continues to make all of these problems worse.

There was a time when President Obama claimed to believe in the importance of paying our debts. As a Senator he stood on this very floor and chastised his predecessor for even asking the Congress to raise the Nation's debt limit. He called it a failure of leadership. Yet earlier this year, as President he demanded that Congress approve the single largest debt limit increase ever requested by a U.S. President--without any plan at all to cover the cost. It was this kind of fiscal recklessness that roused Republicans to recommit ourselves to the idea that, if we are going to preserve the American dream for our children, Congress has to stop spending more than it takes in, and it was the Democrats' resistance to that idea that convinced us the only way to make sure it happens is through a constitutional amendment that actually requires it.

For too long, the politics of the moment or of the next election have been put ahead of Congress's responsibility to balance the books. Too many promises have been made that cannot possibly ever be kept, and now the time for serious action has come; we must prevent what is happening in Europe from happening here.

That is what our balanced budget amendment would do. By permanently limiting Congressional spending to the historical norm of 18 percent of gross national product, and through a new three-fifths supermajority of both Houses of Congress to raise the debt limit, the balanced budget amendment Republicans are proposing today would go a long way in preventing that day of reckoning from happening right here in America. Every single Senator should support it.

Democrats here in Washington know the American people want Congress to get its fiscal house in order. That is why they proposed a balanced budget amendment of their own. Unfortunately, they have no real intention of passing it. If they did, they would join us in supporting a bill that we know would lead to the kind of fiscal restraint the American people are asking for.

I ask my friends on the other side to join us. It is not too late. We are only going to solve this problem together. Republicans are doing our part. We need them to do theirs. The American people are asking us to act. Let's do it. If this President will not take America's fiscal problems seriously, Congress should do it for him.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source