Joe Barton: “we are here this evening not on an historic occasion, but on an important occasion. I had hoped that I would be a part…”

“we are here this evening not on an historic occasion, but on an important occasion. I had hoped that I would be a part of the affirmative process to try to improve the agreement that was reached with the President and the leadership of the House and Senate. I have worked in a bipartisan fashion since that agreement was announced in principle to come up with some mechanisms to actually make the goal of a balanced budget a reality. With the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Minge] and the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Stenholm] and others of the Blue Dog Coalition, I helped put together a group of conservative Congressmen who wanted to actually put some enforcement mechanisms into this agreement. What we did was come up with the radical idea that we would take the budget agreement that came out of the Committee on the Budget and add to that some structural reforms like entitlement caps. The discretionary spending caps that were part of the 1991 agreement have actually worked. Since entitlements are 53 percent of this year's budget and are growing to be approximately 60 percent of the budget in the year 2002, we thought, let us extend that principle of capping not just to discretionary spending but to entitlement spending. We looked at the sequestration process that was used in Gramm-Rudman and decided to modify it so we had sequestration by program.”