Jack Kingston: “let me respond on a few points that the previous speaker made. And I wanted to say that, as the gentleman knows, the…”

“let me respond on a few points that the previous speaker made. And I wanted to say that, as the gentleman knows, the passage of laws is not always perfect, and it is not always neat, particularly when we are in the majority and have to make some decisions and keep the train moving. My preference on the budget, incidentally, was the one introduced by the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey), H. Con. Res. 95, which actually balanced the budget in 4 years and reduced spending far more than the Republican budget that passed and far more than the Blue Dog budget that passed. And I would point out to my colleague that if we are bringing up past votes, there was not one Democrat who voted for that budget, which was the model in fiscal restraint. So rather than stand here and just point fingers, I want to talk about some of the realities that we are faced with. I note the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Boyd) is here from the Committee on Appropriations. I think there are six things that help get spending out of control in the House that hurts all of us. One of it is that we do not go to zero-based budgeting. Every year appropriations starts out where they left off last year. This has been the case for many years in the Congress no matter which party is in charge, and I would love to see us go back to zero base when these agencies come in to justify their budgets and ask do they really need it? One of the examples is the western forest fires.…”