David Skaggs: “I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me Mr. Chairman, from time to time, under the duties and obligations the…”

“I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me Mr. Chairman, from time to time, under the duties and obligations the Constitution gives us, we revisit one of the abiding questions of this democracy, that is, whether the Constitution itself, a document conceived in another time and under fundamentally different circumstances, is still capable of doing the job it was intended to so. The Federal deficit, which has more than quadrupled since 1980, continues to act as drag on the Nation's economy, compromising our efforts to deal with our fiscal problems and indenturing our children, and their children, for decades to come. I'm deeply concerned--all of us are--about this problem. It has brought us to this point, where we consider exercising one of our most solemn powers, the power to amend the Constitution itself. No attempt to amend the Constitution has succeeded in more than 20 years. The founders intended it to be a difficult process, so that it would also be a well-considered process. And rightly so. Put simply, we have to be absolutely certain, when we take the extraordinary step of an amendment to the Constitution, that the amendment would actually achieve its purpose. More than that, we need to be extraordinarily confident that any amendment not lead to unforeseen consequences that would make things even worse; confident that the remedy will really work. While the intent of the Stenholm amendment deserves our praise, it fails this critical test in several respects.…”