Johnny Isakson: “I come to the floor with a labor of love before the U.S. Senate. We are talking about confirmations of people for…”

“I come to the floor with a labor of love before the U.S. Senate. We are talking about confirmations of people for Secretary positions on the Cabinet of the new President. We are talking about all kinds of things. We are in a budget period of time. We are talking about this year having two budgets--one we are going to use early and one we are going to use late. The truth is, since 1980, we haven't passed all 12 appropriations bills in the year but twice. In other words, in the last 37 years, we have only twice done our job that we ought to do every year. So 2 years out of 37 we did it; 35 years we did not do it. I am joining with the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire, a great Governor of that State and now a great Member of the U.S. Senate, to propound for the third Congress in a row an idea that is so simple and so great that it works and it works for all the American people. It is called a biennial budget process. What it does is it embraces a discipline for how you budget to bring about the right solutions in terms of what you do budget. What the biennial budget process does is it says this. We would be far better off if we had more oversight of spending, more authorization projects, and more discipline in the way we spend money we are already spending before we start appropriating more.…”