On the recordOctober 28, 2015
I will say to the chairman from Kentucky that I am absolutely sympathetic in the way that he and others in the leadership are really caught between a rock and a hard place. If you think about 100 members of the defense community saying, ``Wait a minute. We won't vote for it unless we get more there''; folks in the AG community saying, ``We don't like this particular provision''; advocates of Medicare saying, ``We have got to have a bit more here,'' the realities of a debt ceiling, a President who said, ``A clean ceiling or nothing at all,'' I mean, they really have been between a rock and a hard place. But that having been said, we are still left at the end of the day with a $1.5 trillion problem that has grown on top of an $18 trillion problem; and I, therefore, believe that the simple notion is the key to getting out of a hole is to quit digging. Fundamentally, I believe that this bill does more digging than not. And I say that from three different points: One, there is a process question. In fairness to the chairman and others, in some ways, this was handed to them, and I think that there are serious questions that any of us should have with regard to process. Two, it does remove the caps. As draconian as they are, they represent the only piece of financial restraint in Washington, D.C., that has encumbered this entity. That, I think, has a lot to do with the fiscal restraint that we have seen on domestic discretionary spending.…
