The Public Record
I see the merit in having some sort of conscious, affirmative periodic review of the huge morass of agencies we have in the Federal Government; but I have some concern here that if a President disagreed with the Congress, you could have…
we have sat here for 3 or 4 years and watched tax cuts erode away the surplus and then, after the surplus was gone, watched tax cuts add to the budget deficit. We have asked ourselves where are we headed? What is the point of all of this…
this is called the Spending Control Act of 2004. The last time I looked, the Republicans control the House, Republicans control the Senate, and Republicans control the White House. So it begs the question, why can they not control…
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…
I rise in favor of H. Con. Res. 417, the Tuskegee Airmen Recognition Resolution. Books and movies both document the historic achievements of the Tuskegee Airmen. Today, I urge my colleagues to pass this resolution confirming the renown of…
I have served in the House for more than half of the 40 years that Charlie Johnson has served as Parliamentarian. As a matter of fact, I had just become a Member of the House with no more than 3 weeks of experience when I wandered onto the…
I remember when John Sullivan was first appointed and moved from the House Committee on Armed Services. The day after he took his office as the Deputy Parliamentarian, the staff on the House Committee on Armed Services concocted a…
The Department of Energy requested $350 million for accelerated clean-up of defense sites, old nuclear weapons production sites, where some of the world's most radioactive nuclear waste is stored. The chairman's mark authorizes 250 of the…
We have got thousands of nuclear weapons in order to achieve deterrence. This weapon is not necessary. It is not only unnecessary, it is counterproductive at a time when we are trying to get countries like Iran and North Korea and…
first of all, I commend my good friend, the chairman. We do not agree about everything; nevertheless, I hope that is not a sign of what is about to come. He does a wonderful job of chairing the committee, and he has brought to the floor a…
I humbly suggest that if we want to make the poppy in our lapels more than a mere gesture, we should vote ``no'' on the previous question on the rule that will make in order the defense authorization bill. Because by voting ``no,'' we will…
I have served here for 22 years and served all those years on the House Committee on Armed Services, and today I am the recognize second ranking Democrat on that committee; and if there is any comity left in this institution, surely I…
At 6:20 a.m. this morning, this budget resolution, the conference report, so-called, was filed. At 7:15 a.m., it was before the Committee on Rules. No one outside the actual drafters of the legislation had had any time to look at its…
let me just make Members painfully aware of what this rule will entail, since they have only had minutes to even acquaint themselves with the fact that it was coming before them today. If Members vote for this rule, they will vote to make…
there is nothing we hold in trust more sacred than the good name of America, and the good name of our great country is at stake. We have been defiled, maligned, if not damaged irreparably in some parts of the world; and we cannot diminish…
as we meet tonight, this country, our government, is headed towards a deficit of $521 billion. That is not my estimate, that is the estimate of the Office of Management and Budget, the President's own budget shop. We have watched the…
Everybody promised. Both parties, both the White House and the Congress, promised that never again, now that we were finally in this position, would we borrow from Social Security and spend the proceeds again. But that is the inevitable…
It turns out it was not. Now they have recanted and said it was probably overstated by 55 percent.
one beneficial result of our fiscal policies in the 1990s was that we brought down the national debt by $400 billion between 1998 and 2001. We also, because the government was not borrowing money, but actually putting money into the pool…
the gentleman has been here for some time, and he knows that during the late 1990s and in the early years of this century, we all took solemn vows out here, different forms. We had something called the ``lockbox,'' corny title, serious…
we do indeed. I was just looking for the chart that is most applicable. This is one right here. And what we have done here on the bottom line is we have taken, first of all, the baseline projection of the Congressional Budget Office; and…
$5.6 trillion was the estimate of the surplus by his own budget shop, the Office of Management and Budget, $5.6 trillion between 2002 and 2011.
no question about it. This year for the second year in 3 years, we will have a mammoth increase in the debt. Last year alone we had a 1-year increase of $900 billion in the debt. We will have to increase that debt limit again before we…
Basically what this shows is in the red line at the top is a course of outlays from the 1980s through the current period, 2004. What Members see here is when President Clinton came to office in 1992-1993, spending was at 22.5 percent of…
Politicians like John Spratt
