Charles W. Stenholm: “I have already mentioned one tonight. We are prepared, in fact, we have indicated our support for the House budget…”

“I have already mentioned one tonight. We are prepared, in fact, we have indicated our support for the House budget spending levels as indicated in the budget, those numbers we tried to offer in our own budget this year, but once again we are denied even having an opportunity to have an alternative budget. But the spending levels are fine. We need to recognize that strong budget enforcement rules are important. The provisions of the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 expire this year and one of the things we have learned over the last 10 years is that meaningful caps on discretionary spending which tell our appropriators this is how much you can spend and if you spend more, you must offset it, it has worked. The appropriators have been responsible when the caps were there and when they were meaningful. But the 1997 Budget Act got off, a little bit off of what would be considered meaningful caps, particularly in the area of health care and rural health care and what has happened when you put unrealistic caps on without doing the policy changes.”