Richard Gephardt: “members of the committee, I would rise to ask Members to vote against this motion, and I do it for the reason that we…”

“members of the committee, I would rise to ask Members to vote against this motion, and I do it for the reason that we are now at a stage in our budget process where we have made important decisions. We have decided what the spending level will be last year, and we put into place caps, hard caps, with a hard freeze through the leadership of many people on our budget committees that we have convinced the financial markets are meaningful, and they are. To now come in with a motion to instruct that in essence says no, we did not mean what we passed in the budget, we want to do something different, is really trying to pass another budget. For the life of me, I cannot understand why we would want to make this what is allegedly called a small change. The problem with it is once again it is in the general. It is not in the specific. There is not a one of us that would answer the question, do you think we ought to cut spending, who would not say yes, in general. But then when it comes to the specific, whether it is defense, whether it is highway program, or whether it is some other part of the budget, that is when it gets tough. That is when getting the consensus together gets much more difficult. If we were not prepared in the budget to say where it would be, how are we prepared to say where it will be? Finally, all of us know that if we are going to make significant reductions in the budget, it is going to have to come in the area of entitlement growth.”