Robert Berry: “when I came here in 1997, we passed the first balanced Budget Act in 30 years. That was a result of the work of a lot of…”

“when I came here in 1997, we passed the first balanced Budget Act in 30 years. That was a result of the work of a lot of people. I do not take credit for making that happen. But then after having a balanced budget and running a surplus until the year 2001, beginning in January of that year, when we turned over this great country to the Bush administration and a Republican majority in the House and the Senate, and let us be very clear about that. The Republicans have controlled the House, the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court for all of this time. And we have turned over a $5 trillion surplus to these people. Now, as we just saw a few minutes ago from one of our conscientious Blue Dogs, they have turned that $5 trillion surplus into an $8 trillion debt. And just last week when the budget was passed that I voted against and most of the Democrats voted against, as far as I know all of them did, they raised the debt ceiling again to $9 trillion. We are having to raise the debt ceiling almost $1 trillion a year to keep up with the total mismanagement of the people's affairs by the Republicans. It would be hard to imagine a greater fiscal disaster than the Bush administration has led us to. Over and over and over again, we tried to reach out and we tried to say, let us reestablish the budget rules that got us to a surplus back in the 90s. Let us admit that we have got a problem. Let us require a balanced budget. Let us require pay-as-you-go.…”