On the recordJuly 21, 2011
I would hardly call it weak. Quite to the contrary. Calls for legislation such as this date back a couple of hundred years. Thomas Jefferson was arguably the first one to suggest this kind of proposal. He called for it again and again, and those calls have continued throughout most of our history, but they have accelerated in recent decades. They have accelerated because this body has refused to balance its budget, and it has abused its borrowing power to the point we are spending more than $1.5 trillion a year more than we bring in. It is bankrupting our country. We are burying our children under a mountain of debt. We are killing jobs, we are spending money we don't have, and that is wrong. I would hardly call legislation designed to deal with that in a permanent binding way senseless, and I am insulted that the majority leader would suggest that this is somehow senseless just because he doesn't like it because it will make him less powerful.
