Paul Ryan: “Our bill is what we call The Family Budget Protection Act. Number one, our bill does change the rules of the House so…”

“Our bill is what we call The Family Budget Protection Act. Number one, our bill does change the rules of the House so that you cannot waive these budget points of order, meaning you cannot just break the spending caps and not even have a vote on whether we did that or not on the floor of Congress. First, we make a binding budget so it is signed into law by the President. Second, if Congress is going to break the budget, it takes a two-thirds vote in order to break that budget. If we do not vote that two-thirds, then we have an obligation to reduce spending to bring it back into conformity with the budget. If we do not do that, an across-the-board spending cut comes into play. But also the games that are played in the appropriations process, putting nongermane spending items in the bills where they should not be, we tighten up what we call the germaneness standards so we cannot put those kinds of things in appropriations bills. It is important that we are honest with the American people in how we spend their money.”