Lloyd Bentsen: “after 6 years on the Committee on the Budget, I am amazed at the debate I have heard tonight. I did not realize just how…”

“after 6 years on the Committee on the Budget, I am amazed at the debate I have heard tonight. I did not realize just how powerful that committee is. In the 6 years I have been on that committee, I have seen Members of the other party in this body and the other body waive the pay-go rules, waive the spending cap rules to accomplish whatever goal they want. But tonight, tonight we hear, because we do not have a budget resolution of both bodies, we cannot bring appropriations bills to the House floor. Why is it that we can have an ongoing conference on the defense bill and the military construction bill but, somehow, we cannot even bring the Labor-HHS-Education bill to the floor, we cannot bring the science bill or the housing bill or any of those other bills, because the majority whip tells us, if we bring them to the floor, then we will have to go to conference and then the spending will go up? But we are already in conference on other bills. It seems rather illogical to this Member that if we can do it on some bills, why we cannot do it on other bills. What it is, Mr. Speaker, is that there is a small cadre in the House on the Republican side that are the last to realize that the economic program of this administration has been a failure, and rather than leaving us in surplus, we have wiped out over $5 trillion in surplus value, including that in the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. They are the last ones to realize it.”