Xavier Becerra: “It seems to me that for the last month and a half we have been talking about how open this new Congress will be and how…”

“It seems to me that for the last month and a half we have been talking about how open this new Congress will be and how important it is to give the people of America a chance to really understand the workings of the House of Representatives and of the Senate. Yet it seems to me the first thing we are doing with this balanced budget amendment is closing doors to openness to the American public. We are not giving them any idea about how we are going to pay for anything in the balanced budget amendment. As the gentlewoman from Connecticut pointed out, we are talking about cutting $1,200,000,000,000 over the next 5 to 7 years, and the American people should know what that means. It is to me somewhat disconcerting to find that in the Judiciary Committee today the only way we could try to extract anything from the Republican majority on how they intend to pay for this is to propose amendments to find out if they would include those amendments to protect certain programs, for example, Social Security.”