The Public Record
Having that higher vote threshold makes it much more difficult for Congress to defeat its own budgets. Having a legally-binding budget, which automatically kicks in spending cuts across the board, forces Congress to act. And if Congress…
There is more money coming into the Federal Government because more people are working and paying taxes.
I apologize, Madam Chair. I simply wanted to recognize the fact that we have a group of Special Operations Forces in the gallery that just came back from Iraq. And I simply want to say to those, and I realize we have rules, that we are…
That is right. I also think it is very important to recognize that a lot of Members have worked on this issue. It is one thing to pass a budget under the current rules and talk about the great accomplishments we have in it; they are good…
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…
What we believe is we should go back to zero-based budgeting, and we can go back to not baseline budgeting, but a zero-based budgeting whereby a dollar extra for a program the next year is an increase in spending. We do not want to have a…
That is right. I applaud that. One of the things that we have to keep in mind is that the demographics of America are changing. And as the baby boomers begin to retire, we have to take into account the fact that we have 40 million retirees…
If my colleague recalls, the line-item veto was knocked down by the Supreme Court a few years ago, for good reason, which was it is anticonstitutional, it was unconstitutional for Congress to delegate its lawmaking power to the executive…
Only if all of us work together to bring real reform to the budget process can we actually achieve that. The problem with this entire process is, once Congress sets a budget, Congress does not have to stick to that budget. That is a big…
on February 1, 2003, the tragic accident of the Space Shuttle Columbia took the lives of seven of our finest Americans. One year later, this sad event remains fresh in our minds, and we continue to share in the sorrow of those who lost…
The reason that costs much more money is because we make those tax cuts permanent throughout the decade, and we do not yank them back at the end of the election. We actually put these tax cuts, like repealing the marriage penalty and the…
Nevertheless, I get a great sense of deja vu right now. But all joking aside, Mr. Speaker, one thing that the speakers who just spoke failed to mention was that on June 12 of this year, the House did pass legislation making the child tax…
Mr. Speaker, this is a dire issue for America. I come from Wisconsin, which arguably has the most manufacturing jobs lost per capita to any other State in the country. There is a fact that the economic recovery that is under way in America…
I simply want to lend my support and echo the sentiments of the gentleman from Maryland and the gentleman from Ohio on the fact that more does need to be done than what we are just doing here today. Few times have I had the opportunity to…
This bill has been called an abomination, frivolous. Let us quickly examine what a partial-birth abortion is. In a partial-birth abortion, the abortionist pulls a living baby, feet first, out of the womb and into the birth canal as we can…
I thank gentleman for his leadership. I urge all of my colleagues, Democrat and Republican, to vote for this and to save lives.
I want to quickly address some of the inaccuracies dealing with the collegiate housing issue. The claim is the collegiate housing issue only helps sororities and fraternities. Let me tell Members exactly what this does and does not do…
Under the definition on the other side of privatization, under their definition Medicare is already privatized then, because Medicare right now is private providers providing care for our seniors. All the doctors in your country do not…
is the gentlewoman saying that the fallback plan according to the Congressional Budget Office will lead to higher drug prices for seniors to the tune of 8 to $12 billion?
the only point I was making was I was not saying the current Medicare program is privatized. Under my colleague's logic, under my colleague's definition of privatization, Medicare is certainly privatized, which is not the case. That is why…
Because, Mr. Speaker, if we take a look at Medicare, the actuaries, I am not talking about the Congressional Budget Office even, but the actuaries are telling us, Medicare has a $13.2 trillion liability today. Today's Medicare program is…
the actuaries will not certify that it will extend the solvency of Medicare by any certain number of days.
I want to calm down a little bit. There has been a lot of shouting around here, a lot of heated rhetoric, a lot of hyperbole. Let us just look at a couple of facts. It is a fact that the Medicare actuaries are telling us that Medicare is…
Mr. Speaker, I just heard the ranking member say this is not a health bill, that this is a tax shelter. I beg to differ. Number one, what we are talking about here is really novel and revolutionary. We are saying that employers and…
Mr. Speaker, to respond to a couple of comments from the last speaker, I would say, number one, we are going to keep hearing this rhetoric, that this undermines or destroys employer-sponsored health care. Actually, it is far from that. It…
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