Bob Inglis: “I rise in strong support of the Stenholm-Smith balanced budget amendment. I believe that the amendment is needed for two…”

“I rise in strong support of the Stenholm-Smith balanced budget amendment. I believe that the amendment is needed for two reasons: First of all, we need it for the necessary discipline to cause this House to do what we cannot seem to do on our own in the ordinary budget process. We need the discipline of a constitutional requirement of balancing the Federal Government's budget. That is the first reason. The second reason is that we need, frankly, to create a crisis by the passage of the balanced budget amendment. Make no mistake about it. As a member of the Committee on the Budget, I am well aware that passing the balanced budget amendment will create a crisis in our budgetary process, because it will mean that all of us will have to come to the table to figure out how to balance a budget that is terribly, terribly out of balance. That will require, that crisis will create an environment where we will come together, I believe, just as this country has come together before with other crises, where we have been faced with an outside threat. We will forget Republican and Democrat differences. We will come together at a table where we can figure out together how to balance the budget and do what we all know we need to do.”