Tom Coburn: “the claim of Senator Bingaman that a point of order will lie against this is wrong. Paragraph 7, rule XVI only requires…”

“the claim of Senator Bingaman that a point of order will lie against this is wrong. Paragraph 7, rule XVI only requires the Appropriations Committee to list the unauthorized programs. He made my point: 20 percent of our appropriations are unauthorized from expired or sunsetted programs. It won't stop anything if it is a good program. I contend with Senator Domenici that he thinks this is a great bill, but the only way we are going to know is the results of the bill. So based on what we think, not on what we know, is the reason this bill should be sunsetted so that it forces us to go back and look at what we might think we know today but didn't know and change it. It is about putting discipline into our body. It is about forcing us to do the work the people told us they wanted done when we came here. It requires us to not be fortune tellers, to not be seance dwellers, but to, in fact, look at the facts after 3 years, see what it has accomplished, and forces us to make the changes. The Senator knows quite well that on most of the programs we haven't done that. That is one of the reasons we had a $350 billion deficit. That is one of the reasons we had $200 billion that we spent on wasteful, duplicated, or fraudulent programs last year out of the $1 trillion we spent in the discretionary budget. What I am trying to do is force us to do the hard work of relooking. I agree, does that make it hard? Yes. Nobody said it was going to be easy.”