On the recordJanuary 24, 2011
I thank my colleague. Here we go again. As my colleague said, if this were a serious proposal on the budget, you would have a budget number in this document. There is no number in this document. Look, on opening day our Republican colleagues passed a measure that immediately gutted the pay-as-you-go rule that we have in this body and did an end run around the pay-as-you-go law. A few days later, we figured out why they did that, because they added $230 billion to the deficit over 10 years and $1.4 trillion over 20 years. Those aren't my numbers, those are the numbers of the independent, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office with respect to the impact of their effort to repeal health care reform instead of doing what we should be doing, which is focusing on jobs. That measure on opening day also did another thing. It gave the chairman of the Budget Committee unprecedented power to unilaterally pick the budget ceilings, the spending ceilings for this entire Congress. No input from anybody else, no debate, no vote. So all of us thought when this new measure was coming up maybe now we're going to have some accountability. Maybe this body will have an opportunity to vote on the very important spending ceilings for the United States Congress and for the government. But lo and behold hold, when you look at the resolution, there's no number. Where's the beef? And I have to say to my colleagues that, if you want transparency, why are you hiding the ball?
