John Spratt: “I have seen it all. When it comes to the deficit, I have seen this House duck, and I have seen this House dodge; but…”

“I have seen it all. When it comes to the deficit, I have seen this House duck, and I have seen this House dodge; but this rule takes the cake. They pull out at a must-pass bill, Defense appropriations, and deep within the rule they bury some vague language on our national debt. Later, when the doors are shut, the conference is started, the cigars are lit, this language will be transformed into a $690 billion increase in the ceiling of our national debt. No audit trail, no fingerprints, no responsibility. Our Republican friends cut taxes, they raise spending, they run up the debt; and if that were not bad enough, now they want to escape responsibility for the actions they have taken. Let me say to our children and grandchildren, when they ask who left us with this mountainous debt, on President Clinton's watch in the years 1998, 1999 and 2000, we ran a surplus in 1998 of $236 billion, a surplus in each of those years and we paid off debt. We paid off $362 billion of debt on his watch. In 2001, when President Bush came to office, he inherited a budget in surplus; and he predicted that under his policies there would be no need for a debt ceiling increase, that was the President's prediction, until 2008.”