Mark Pryor: “The Pryor amendment freezes all discretionary spending caps at the level proposed by President Obama in the year 2011.…”

“The Pryor amendment freezes all discretionary spending caps at the level proposed by President Obama in the year 2011. So it does have a discretionary freeze. It freezes all discretionary spending caps for fiscal years 2012 and 2013 at 40 percent of the difference between President Obama's budget proposal and last year's budget proposal. The reason we are doing that is because Senator Sessions and Senator McCaskill have worked very hard on their amendment--in fact, I voted for their amendment a couple of times in its previous forms--but they used some different numbers. I thought in order to be fair we need to split the difference with their numbers, and these two freezes we are talking about will reduce discretionary spending by at least $77 billion over 15 years. That is major. That is a big chunk out of discretionary spending. Where we make up the difference is then we ask the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to find at least--at least--an additional $77 billion of deficit reductions over the next 3 years to close the gap between projected revenues and entitlement spending.”