Tom Coburn: “it is a simple amendment. We are going to find out what your Senator believes with this amendment. We offered this…”

“it is a simple amendment. We are going to find out what your Senator believes with this amendment. We offered this amendment on the last bill. We had some inside baseball excuses why they would not vote for it. This is a sense-of-the-Senate amendment. It does not carry any force of law or anything. All it says is the Senate agrees that before we spend new money, we ought to get rid of the wasteful programs, we ought to get rid of the ones that are not working well, or we ought to make them better before we spend another $60 billion to $80 billion on another set of programs. That last amendment got 59 votes against it. Only 38 people in the Senate thought we ought to do that. I will tell you, I think the vast majority--greater than 95 percent--of the American public thinks we ought to do that. So this is a simple amendment. The catch with the amendment is, if you vote for the amendment and then do not change this bill to do what needs to be done to eliminate the other programs, you are going to have a tough time explaining that you agreed to this and then did something else when you voted for the passage of this bill. There is a day coming when we will not have the luxury to wait around. The financial markets will tell us what we will do. We will not have the freedom within the Senate to make those choices. We will do it under the duress of extreme financial conditions that will affect our country. So this is a simple amendment, very similar to the last one.”