On the recordApril 8, 2014
I am immensely grateful to my friend Rob Woodall. Madam Speaker, it was back in the 1990s when I heard what apparently was a loveable, old fuzzball who turned out to be Rush Limbaugh. He was talking about the absurdity of the United States Government doing something that no person, no family, no business, no charity in all of America could do. With due respect to my friend who just spoke, Mr. Van Hollen says businesses would go out of business. I would challenge anybody in this room to show me a business, to show me a family, to show me an individual, to show me a charity that has an automatic increase in every year's budget, because America can't do that. I was shocked that this was going on. I mean, in the Army, I helped with the budget. In the private sector, I prepared budgets. As a district judge, I prepared a budget. It had to be approved. We never got an automatic increase. You had to justify any change in anything. If you needed an increase, you had to show why that was important. I got to Congress, never dreaming that that would not have been taken care of when Republicans took the majority, but in my freshman term in 2005 and 2006, the Republican chair of the Budget Committee said we have to do the automatic increases. I said, Why? He said, Because it is the law. I was shocked. We make the law. We can change the law.…
