Luke Messer: “With all due respect to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, their arguments seem to be summarized this way…”

“With all due respect to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, their arguments seem to be summarized this way: that somehow if we just would all go bury our head in the sand that we would be better off. I mean, the reality is this: our Nation does have a $19 trillion debt. The reality is that every time this Congress had set a debt limit for our spending, we have breached that debt limit and had to raise another one. The reality is, as we have approached these debt limits in recent years, the Department of the Treasury has taken what they call extraordinary measures, doing it under the law to try to lengthen the amount of time until we hit that debt limit. This amendment is really a very modest one. All the amendment says is, if the Department of the Treasury is going to take extraordinary measures to avoid the limit on debt that has been set by Congress, that they ought to tell us all what they are doing. They ought to define what it is. They ought to define how much time we are going to buy with these extraordinary measures, and they ought to tell us what it costs as we juggle all this money around. Because when you start juggling money around, as everybody knows in their own life and in their own bills they have to pay, it costs money. That is all this amendment does. {time} 1530 That is all this amendment does.…”