Lindsey Graham: “this story chronicles the crumbling of our wall of fiscal resolve in the face of a behemoth of appropriations bills. The…”

“this story chronicles the crumbling of our wall of fiscal resolve in the face of a behemoth of appropriations bills. The bill we have before us, the foreign operations bill, carries a $14.9 billion price tag. It has been stated that this bill is actually lower than the bill that we passed last year. If I am in error--and it is very difficult to respond since we have only in the last few hours gotten a copy of a multipage bill, but as I read through the bill, it is my analysis that in calculating last year's $15.5 billion expenditure, we have included an almost $2 billion item, the Wye Plantation commitments for the Middle Eastern peace, which are nonrecurring. So if you are comparing apples to apples, those things that we spent money on last year and those things we are going to spend money on this year, actually last year's comparable appropriation for foreign operations was closer to $13.5 billion. So instead of the $14.9 billion being a reduction, it actually represents approximately a 10-percent increase over the spending that we had on this same account last year, a 10-percent increase, while we are operating under the rule that we are only supposed to spend the rate of inflation, which is 3.5 percent, as an increase from 1 year's budget to the next. But that is not what is the true monster in this bill.…”