Sylvester Turner: “I know that all of us feel very strongly that this issue of the statutory debt ceiling deserves a full and open debate…”

“I know that all of us feel very strongly that this issue of the statutory debt ceiling deserves a full and open debate of this House. And with the national debt rising, with deficit spending back upon us, somebody has to put on the brakes. Somebody has to say that we need to control spending. Somebody needs to say that we ought to do the same thing in Congress that we all have to do at our own households, and that is we have to pay the bills. And as the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) suggested, I have been very concerned about the fact that we are asking young men and women to fight the war against terrorism, and yet we are doing it on borrowed money, which means that when they get back home and they are in their better income-earning years, they will be the ones that will have to pay for the war that they fought. So it seems to me that the right thing to do in Washington is the same thing that we all try to do in our own households, and that is, we pay our bills. We meet our obligations. We do not say that we are going to incur debt without having a plan for repaying that debt.”