Don Nickles: “I want my colleagues to know we keep tally and keep measures of how much some of these amendments cost. This is an…”

“I want my colleagues to know we keep tally and keep measures of how much some of these amendments cost. This is an accurate portrayal. We had amendments that would increase taxes and spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. Those are now entered in the Record. I also heard some comments on pay-go. I might mention for our colleagues, last week Senator Murray had an amendment. I raised a point of order on it that most all of our colleagues on the Democrat side said, let's waive pay-go. Let's spend an extra $18 billion. We have a tax credit, but basically it was to spend more money, $18 billion. We didn't waive it, but most of our colleagues on the Democrat side who profess belief in pay-go voted to waive pay-go--for a bill, incidentally, that had never had a hearing before the Finance Committee, never been vetted. It is just proposed on the floor. I happen to be a supporter of pay-go. Incidentally, people act like we have not had pay-go for the last year. That is false. The budget we passed last year had pay-go for anything that wasn't assumed in the budget resolution, period. We used pay-go and other points of order, some of which are redundant. You can make a budget point of order because a committee exceeds its allocation, or you can make a pay-go point of order. I used both. We made 61 or 62 budget points of order, on most of which we prevailed, which saved over $800 billion in new spending.”