Chris Van Hollen

98 percent of our Republican colleagues in the House have signed a pledge that says they will not close a single corporate tax loophole for the purpose of deficit reduction.

Unfortunately our Republican colleagues continue to oppose the balanced approach.

I do hope that the Senate will take up the bill we passed over here in a bipartisan basis with respect to expedited rescission and legislative line item veto.

I was glad to hear that last colloquy, because this Republican proposal cut the Food and Nutrition programs in the Ag Committee's jurisdiction and then didn't ask for one penny from the ag subsidies. If our Democratic substitute had been…

We're still waiting for this House to take up the President's jobs bill that was submitted last September. We've seen 25 consecutive months of positive private sector job growth. It was a whole lot better than where we were in January when…

I thank the gentleman from Maryland. It is now my privilege to yield 3 minutes to another great Member of Congress from the State of Maryland (Mr. Cummings), the ranking member on the Government Reform Committee.

It is serious, and the Democratic substitute proposal would have prevented those cuts from going across the board in defense, as well as the non-defense part of the budget. Unfortunately, our Republican colleagues don't think it is serious…

I just would like to respond to the chairman of the Budget Committee in terms of the ratio of cuts to revenue. I think the gentleman will recall that one of the recommendations that the bipartisan commission made was the trillion dollars…

Thank you. The Democrats have a substitute amendment that would replace the sequester in a different way. It would prevent the across-the-board cuts from happening to defense and the non-defense programs. So there's an agreement that that…

A majority in this body, Mr. Chairman, on the Budget Control Act, voted to make sure that the programs like food and nutrition programs for the most vulnerable were not subject to these deep cuts.

But that is not what the Ag Committee chose to do. What they chose to do was to cut food nutrition programs that will cut food assistance immediately to every single household receiving those food nutrition programs.

I hope we are not going to be driven to a government shutdown by our Republican colleagues.

You leave defense exposed for the remaining 9 years.

Now, that is not a balanced approach. Not one penny from big agribusiness, not one penny from ag subsidies.

Why would you enter into an agreement where our Republican colleagues can come back and say well, hey, we can spend $1 billion on all the operations of the U.S. Government?

What we are seeing out of this process is a totally unbalanced approach.

The President has put forward a plan to get rid of that over 10 years and replace it with a balanced approach.

I don't see how you can't also take the position that 50 percent of that spending has to come from defense.

Unfortunately, our Republican colleagues decided it was more important to protect some of those special interest tax loopholes than it was to protect the defense portion of the spending.

The reality is that they put up something that didn't contain any of the backup that the President provided.

I think we all agree that that meat-axe, indiscriminate approach is the wrong way to go.

Our Republican colleagues continue to take the position that we are not going to take one penny of revenue for the purpose of deficit reduction.

It is very clear that it is deficit reduction.

The cuts would be both too deep and too arbitrary.

The sequester was included in the legislation as a last resort to encourage, to pressure the Congress to develop a bipartisan alternative.