John Spratt: “early last Friday, the House passed the Republican budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2001 by all of 4 votes. Today, the…”

“early last Friday, the House passed the Republican budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2001 by all of 4 votes. Today, the Republican leadership overrides it. If this rule passes, the House will take up a supplemental appropriations bill that, with likely amendments, is $4 billion above the spending level assumed in the budget resolution the House just passed. Since the extra cost will not be offset, the budget surplus for 200 will drop and so will the surplus for 2001. In fact, by our calculation, this supplemental, along with other actions already taken or likely to be taken, will reduce the on-budget surplus this year from $26.5 billion to $4.9 billion. Last week, when the House debated the budget resolution, we predicted that over ten years, the Republican budget would spend all of the non-Social Security surplus and $68 billion of the Social Security surplus. We pointed out how the Republican resolution assumed spending cuts of $117 billion over five years, cuts we doubted Congress would make. And if those unrealistic cuts weren't made, we warned that you would dig even more into the Social Security surplus. We were convinced that this resolution would be overridden by more spending, as were the budget resolutions in 1999 and 1998, but we never thought you would do it in less than a week. I readily agree that this bill contains funds for national defense and domestic priorities that are important. I am not contesting the validity of most of these items.…”