[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 28 (Wednesday, February 27, 2013)]
[House]
[Page H664]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  SEQUESTRATION: THE LAST TOOL WE HAVE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Madam Speaker, the decline and fall of the Roman 
Empire offers us a sobering warning of a great nation that became 
overextended and war-weary abroad while it became utterly profligate 
and decadent at home. Its economy in shambles and its treasury 
bankrupt, the mightiest military power on Earth fell prey for backward 
hordes that had previously existed only on the fringes of civilization.
  Now, 3 years ago Admiral Mike Mullen warned our Nation that our 
national debt is our biggest national security threat. Now, that was 3 
years ago when our debt stood at $13.5 trillion. Today we owe over 
$16.5 trillion. In other words, just since he issued this warning, 
we've added more to our country's debt than we did in our Nation's 
first 200 years of existence.
  No nation has ever taxed and borrowed and spent its way to 
prosperity, but many nations have taxed and borrowed and spent their 
way to economic ruin and bankruptcy, and history today is screaming 
this warning at us, that bankrupt nations aren't around very long 
because before you can provide for the common defense, you have to be 
able to pay for it, and the ability of our Nation to do so is now 
coming into grave question.

                              {time}  1010

  Now, just in the first 4 weeks of this year, Congress added more than 
a third of a trillion dollars of new spending to this already crushing 
burden. The fiscal cliff deal added $300 billion and the Hurricane 
Sandy bill another $50 billion, more than 90 percent of which had 
nothing to do with emergency relief for storm victims.
  Earlier this month, Congress simply did away with the debt limit 
altogether until mid-May. Two years ago, Congress passed the Budget 
Control Act that authorized the biggest single expansion of debt in our 
Nation's history; but Congress at least also agreed to reduce the 
projected deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, either 
through the supercommittee or, failing that, through automatic budget 
reductions called ``the sequester.''
  Now, the sequester doesn't actually cut spending in any conventional 
sense of the word. After a decade in which spending has grown 64 
percent, or nearly twice the rate of inflation and population growth, 
the sequester merely limits the increase next year to about one-half of 
one percent.
  I opposed that act, in part because the sequester was less than one-
third of what officials at Standard & Poor's warned was the minimum 
deficit reduction necessary to preserve our Nation's AAA credit rating. 
I also objected to across-the-board cuts that treat our highest 
priorities the same as our lowest priorities and to the 
disproportionate impact that it would have on our defense budget. Those 
warnings fell on deaf ears at the time.
  But since then, twice the House has tried to correct these 
shortcomings with legislation to replace the worst of the defense cuts 
with long-term entitlement reform. Ultimately, that's the only way 
we're going to bring our fiscal crisis and its spiraling debt under 
control.
  Both measures died in the Senate; and after the November election, 
the likelihood of entitlement reform over the next several years is 
exceedingly remote, which means that however imperfect the sequester 
may be, it is at this moment in our history the only tool currently 
available to us to begin to point our Nation back toward fiscal 
solvency and away from the perilous fiscal path that we are now upon.
  We need to give administrators, especially the military command, the 
flexibility to set priorities and manage our money accordingly; but the 
overall sequester reductions must be maintained.
  A few months ago, the chief of sovereign debt for Standard & Poor's 
made this point: that although the sequester was insufficient to 
justify maintaining our AAA credit rating, it was at least a step in 
the right direction. He said:

       The sequester was an agreement that Congress made with 
     itself, and we would view any step back from that agreement 
     very negatively.

  Madam Speaker, when the history of our era is written, let it not be 
said that ours was a generation of locusts that consumed not only the 
wealth we inherited from our fathers and mothers, but also stripped 
bare the futures of our sons and daughters. Let us instead begin a new 
direction for our Nation, stepping back from the fiscal precipice that 
threatens to destroy our Nation from within.

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