Martin Hoke: “the events yesterday and in the past several days in the other body have compelled me to come to the well to, if nothing…”

“the events yesterday and in the past several days in the other body have compelled me to come to the well to, if nothing else, at least vent a little bit to you and to the American people regarding the disgrace and hypocrisy that we have seen come out of the other side of this building unfortunately. It is just stunning that we stood on the brink, right on the brink of actually enacting at least from our Congress a balanced budget amendment that would then go to the States and the State legislatures could make their own decisions on these things, that we stood on the very brink of that, and now we have been completely--we are not able to find out even what the States want to do in this area. The truth is that there was hypocrisy, there was deceit, there was deception, and there was lying on the other side of this building, in the other body, with respect to promises that were made and promises that certainly were not kept. Let's go back to what this amendment is all about. Really to find out what it is all about you have to go back to the year 1789, when Thomas Jefferson wrote: I fear there is only one thing that we have kept out of the Constitution of the United States. It has one flaw, and that is that we have not restricted the Federal Government's ability to borrow money.”