On the recordNovember 17, 2011
I want to thank my good friend from Florida for a lively debate. The issue, though, that has sort of gotten muddled is about a balanced budget amendment, not about anything else that you've heard about on the floor. It is about a balanced budget amendment. But just to remind everybody, when we talk about jobs, we've passed over 21 jobs bills that are currently sitting idle in the Senate. So I don't know what else you can do, except it gets kind of frustrating that we send great pieces of legislation over to the Senate and nothing happens. We've heard a lot of debate here about a balanced budget amendment, pros and cons. You're going to hear 5 hours of debate in the very near future about the pros and cons of a balanced budget amendment. This Congress has done things that are amazing. We used emergency funding to fund the census. Now, I know the census probably snuck up on everybody around here, but I don't understand why you had to use emergency funding to do that. You know, we talk about the Clinton years. We talk about budget surpluses and how quickly they disappeared. But remember one thing: Part of the Clinton surpluses also hollowed out our force, which required us to put our servicemen and -women at risk for way too long. Some of them weren't allowed to retire through stop-loss, and others had to serve 15 months in combat positions because we had hollowed out our force.…
