John Spratt: “last Friday morning, the House passed the Republican budget resolution by all of four votes. Today, the Republican…”

“last Friday morning, the House passed the Republican budget resolution by all of four votes. Today, the Republican leadership would override it because if this rule passes, the House will take up and probably pass a supplemental appropriations bill that, with amendments, will put spending $4 billion above the level assumed in the budget resolution we passed just days ago. And since the extra costs will not be offset, the budget surplus for 2000 will drop and so will the budget surplus for 2001. Indeed, by our calculation, this supplemental, together with other activities, actions already or likely to be passed will reduce the surplus, the on-budget surplus for this year from $26.5 billion to $5.1 billion. Last week when the House debated the budget resolution, we predicted that over 10 years the Republican resolution which passed would spend all of the non-Social Security surplus and $68 billion of the Social Security surplus. We pointed out that the resolution assumed discretionary spending cuts of $117 billion over 5 years which we seriously doubted Congress would ever make; and if those cuts were not made, we predicted that you would have to dig even deeper into Social Security. We were convinced that eventually this resolution would be overridden as it was in 1999 and again in 1998, but we never thought you would do it in less than a week. Now, I readily agree that this bill contains funds for national defense and domestic priorities that are important.…”