[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 11121-11122]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               ALLOW DEMOCRACY ON THE FLOOR OF THE HOUSE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. ENGEL. Mr. Speaker, we have seen many Democrats here speaking out 
of a sense of frustration. The bill we voted on today is a bill of 
tremendous importance, and yet all we had was one hour to debate this 
bill. Many of us that wanted to come down and

[[Page 11122]]

participate in the debate could not even get one minute's time to 
debate this bill because the Republicans kept a closed rule, which said 
there will be one hour of debate, 30 minutes for each side, and no 
substitute allowed.
  I did a little calculation. There are 435 Members of the House of 
Representatives in this country, and if every one of us wanted to speak 
on this bill with only one minute total time, that would leave each of 
us a grand total of eight seconds each to speak on a bill worth 
billions and billions and trillions of dollars. Surely our Founding 
Fathers are rolling in their graves when they see how the Republican 
majority has turned this House into an undemocratic institution where 
the people who are elected by the people cannot even have the ability 
to speak their minds.
  We are fighting for democracy in Iraq, but we will not allow 
democracy on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. 
For shame.
  The average American is not stupid. In fact, the average American is 
very smart. The average American knows that when he or she has a budget 
they must live within their budget. They make a certain amount of 
money. They take home that money. They have to pay their bills with 
that money, and they know that they cannot week in and week out spend 
more than they take in. A person can do it for a while. They can charge 
everything on their credit card for a while. They can keep paying 
minimums on their credit card for a while, but sooner or later the 
bubble is going to burst. That is what we are doing here in the United 
States Congress.
  My Republican friends talk a good game about balancing the budget and 
a balanced budget amendment, and by the way, the balanced budget 
amendment passed here in the House several years ago, failed by one 
vote in the Senate, and the Republicans, despite having the majority in 
both Houses, have not brought it up again.
  The fact of the matter is that when Bill Clinton left office we had a 
surplus of $200 billion per year, and now in two short years we have a 
deficit of $400 billion per year, and these tax cuts, mainly for the 
wealthy, will dig us deeper and deeper and deeper in a hole.
  We are leaving our children and our grandchildren with a legacy of 
debt. We are having an orgy now of tax cuts and saying to our future 
generations, you pay the bill. We are going to walk away. We are going 
to do things that are easy. Everyone likes a tax cut. Of course, a 
majority of people favor the tax cuts. Everyone wants more money in 
their pockets, but what are we doing to our children and our 
grandchildren and the fiscal responsibility of this country?
  The Republican leadership, the Republican majority here wants to do 
this, in my estimation, deliberately. The ancillary benefits, giving 
their rich friends a tax cut, is only an ancillary benefit. They want 
to starve this government and make it impossible for there to be any 
kind of program, entitlement programs like Social Security or Medicare 
or Medicaid or education, for our children. They do not want it so a 
balanced budget goes out the window. Deficits and deficits.
  Let us take a quote from the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), the 
current majority leader. This is what he said in 1995, ``By the year 
2002, we can have a Federal Government with a balanced budget or we can 
continue down the present path toward total fiscal catastrophe.'' That 
was in 1995. I ask the majority leader and the people on the other side 
of the aisle, what was true in 1995 is certainly true in 2003. We 
cannot continue to run these deficits. We cannot continue to have this 
kind of fiscal irresponsibility. The borrow and spend Republicans 
cannot continue to lead this country down a path of fiscal 
irresponsibility.
  It is a disgrace that we now have to take to the floor of the House 
after the bill has been voted on because we could not get the time to 
talk before.

                          ____________________