[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 9 (Thursday, January 24, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S242-S243]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               THE BUDGET

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk a little about the bill that 
is coming over from the House that would require the Senate to--
surprise--have a budget. I know the law already requires the Senate to 
have a budget, but apparently that law wasn't good enough for us to 
have a budget for the last 3 years. So I am supportive of the House 
decision to do that. In fact, I am supportive of almost any discussion 
that requires us to talk about what we are going to do about spending.
  You know, if you have been living outside your means, if you can't 
pay your bills and you go to a credit counselor, the credit counselor 
is highly unlikely to say: Your problem is you need another credit 
card. The credit counselor is going to say: You need to figure out how 
you are going to pay your bills, and that includes things such as 
having a budget, it includes things such as figuring out what you are 
spending money on that you can stop spending money on. That is what we 
need to do, and it is what we need to do with a budget.
  Somehow in the face of unprecedented spending and record Federal 
debt, the President and even Senate Democrats for a few years now have 
been saying that in Washington all we need to do is get another credit 
card. Our problem, I hear, is not a spending problem, it is a health 
care problem or it is a whatever kind of problem it is. It is clearly a 
spending problem.
  There is no doubt that Washington is living outside its means. The 
Federal debt has skyrocketed to a record $16.5 trillion. President 
Obama's first term added almost $6 trillion to that total. There is no 
reason to believe we have done anything to slow down the spending and 
debt path we have been on. Meanwhile, it has been 1,360 days since the 
majority in the Senate and the Senate itself has managed to pass a 
budget. In fact, I think during that 1,316 days we haven't even had the 
Budget Committee report a budget out for the Senate to vote on.
  Last summer Vice President Biden said: Show me your budget and I will 
tell you what you value. Well, let's find out what we value. Let's find 
out what the majority in the Senate values. When the Vice President 
talked about showing the budget, he was talking about the Republican 
budget, because there actually was one. The Republican House had passed 
a budget. In fact, the Senate and the House both passed a budget every 
single year from the passage of the Budget Control Act in the mid-1970s 
until 2010. In 2010, both the House and the Senate--the House with 
Speaker Pelosi and the Senate with the current majority--said: We don't 
care what the law says, we are not going to pass a budget. That lasted 
1 year in the House, but it has lasted now 3 years in the Senate. In 
2011 and 2012 the House came back and passed a budget.
  The Republicans have voted for serious budgets that make tough 
choices, and even those choices were choices that made us go out and 
explain what we were for. And, of course, that is exactly what the Vice 
President was talking about when he said: Show me your budget, I will 
show you your values. There was only one side that had a budget. So 
that was a pretty harmless position, from the point of view of the Vice 
President, because he was saying: Let's look at the budget the other 
guys have put on the table because we don't have one on the table; we 
have not said what we are for.
  The Senate Democrats have ignored the law, ignored their legal 
obligation to pass a budget, while House Republicans have now said the 
Senate should either pass a budget or not be paid, and I agree with 
that. It is a fundamental step toward planning.
  The second step is to vote on appropriations bills. We haven't voted 
on a single appropriations bill in the Senate in over a year. We don't 
have a budget, so there is no plan to try to get spending under 
control; and then we don't vote on how we are going to spend the money 
in any way other than some big continuing resolution, which basically 
is a bill that says we are going to continue spending money as we have 
been spending money, and here are the two or three exceptions. But we 
are not going to have the debate I think the Senate needs to have. 
Frankly, I believe our new Appropriations chairman, Barbara Mikulski, 
is going to be insisting we bring appropriations bills to the floor, 
and I think that is a good thing.
  The failure to have a Senate budget has too often been described as a 
minor procedural matter. Senator Schumer said recently: Well, the 
Democrats didn't have a budget because there was a budget that came out 
of the sequester agreement in mid-2011. Never mind the Senate hadn't 
had a budget that spring or the spring before that or that the 
Parliamentarian said the sequester deal wasn't a budget, somehow coming 
up with one number was supposedly good enough to come up with a budget.
  That is like sitting around the kitchen table to decide how you are 
going to spend your money, and here is how the discussion would go: OK, 
I think we ought to spend X amount of money. That is the meeting. We 
have just decided that is what we are going to do. And somehow that is 
the budget? Particularly when X amount of money didn't relate at all to 
the amount of money coming into your family. Nobody believes that would 
make sense.
  We will see whether Senator Schumer's words this weekend will produce 
a budget. The House has acted. The President says he wants the debt 
ceiling increased. Hopefully, the majority has decided to pass a 
budget. The new budget chairman, Senator Murray, said yesterday that 
her committee will draft a budget. Now let's let the Senate produce a 
budget. Let's have a budget drawn up, let's have a budget debated, and 
let's figure out what our plans are.
  Budgets lay out plans. We will see if a budget that a majority in the 
Senate would vote for will pass the straight-face test with the 
American people. We will see if this is just another budget that says: 
OK, here is the amount of money we want to spend; it has no 
relationship to the amount of money we have, but let's let that be our 
budget.
  The people will no longer tolerate, I am convinced, the amount of 
debt and taxes that that type of spending plan would require. For them 
to think about that, they have to have a spending plan, and so I am 
grateful the House passed legislation that says we have to have that 
plan. When the majority in the Senate--Democrats in the Senate--have a 
budget, we will see how they feel about continuing to attack the budget 
the House has been willing to come up with for the last two Congresses. 
Right now they can talk about the cuts that Republicans in the House 
want because there are no Senate cuts. There is no Senate budget.

  So let's have an apples-to-apples comparison. Let's compare what 
Republicans in the House would do compared to what Democrats in the 
Senate would do and figure out what our plan needs to be. It is often 
said that when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Not having a budget 
is sort of the entry level of failing to plan. We have failed to do the 
first thing you would do if you were going to have a plan, if you were 
going to get your spending under control.
  My Republican colleagues and I in the Senate have--even though there 
wasn't a Budget Committee product--actually found ways to vote for and 
support the Republican-passed budget from the House and, of course, we 
paid the price for that. People were out there saying: Here is what you 
want to do about this program and here is what you want to do about 
that program. But we are going to move quickly from where, rather than 
just attacking one

[[Page S243]]

side that has a plan, we are talking about what the two plans are, and 
we will see what the American people want to do.
  President Obama and our friends in the Senate should work with 
Republicans in the Senate to cut spending and to pass a budget in a 
transparent way. Republicans have been willing to do that. Democrats 
may be willing to join in that. And if they are, the American people 
can begin to see more than a last-minute, back-room deal. I am tired of 
seeing this planned crisis, one right after another, and I have a 
feeling the people I work for are even more tired of it than I am.
  A divided government is a good opportunity to make tough choices. The 
President will never have more political capital than he has right now. 
Let's take those two things together and let's see what that formula 
would produce. A divided government--Republicans and Democrats both 
have to take responsibility--and a President with maximum political 
capital could equal a good and long-term result. I hope the President 
and the majority in the Senate get serious about working together and 
solving the problems we face as a country.
  I look forward to being part of that, and I am appreciative that the 
House of Representatives has passed legislation that appears to have 
forced the Senate to do its job on a budget for the first time in 4 
years.

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