Rick Hill: “There is no doubt that the census is not an emergency. If my colleagues believe in the integrity of the budget process…”

“There is no doubt that the census is not an emergency. If my colleagues believe in the integrity of the budget process and if my colleagues believe in the integrity of the lockbox, if my colleagues believe that we should spend Social Security taxes only on Social Security, then my colleagues, too, have to support this amendment. Procedurally, this is the only way for us to deal with this issue. If we pass the Coburn amendment, we can send this bill to the Senate without a provision for the census. We can then pass the motion to instruct the conferees to accede to the Senate position, which would be to not declare the census an emergency. There will be a census. Everybody in this chamber knows this. Everybody in America knows there will be a census when we get done. The reason that this has been declared an emergency is so that we can exceed the spending caps in the balanced budget agreement of 1997. I think the gentleman from Texas, when he attacked the whip, was talking about truth and honesty in budgeting. I would agree that it is not honest budgeting to declare this census an emergency, but I can tell my colleagues this, too, it is hard to find a lot of honesty in the budget process on this floor tonight.”