[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 18545-18546]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                 PAYGO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Maffei). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) is recognized for 
5 minutes.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I find that our colleagues on the other side 
of the aisle are going a bit through revisionist history again. We hear 
them talk over and over again about the things that have happened, what 
was happening about gas prices last year. They never mentioned that the 
Democrats were in charge of the Congress when a lot of these things 
that they talk about were happening, but I think it's important that we 
always point that out.
  A rule was just reported in by my colleague from the Rules Committee, 
and I've just come from the Rules Committee myself where we reported 
out a rule for a bill that's going to be heard on the floor tomorrow 
called the Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2009, and I thought it might be 
important to talk a little bit about that rule and that bill tonight 
because I know this is going to create some confusion in the minds of 
the American people as to why in the world are we passing something 
called Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2009 here just before the August recess.
  It's also a confusing thing I think to people because they don't 
understand why we have to pass legislation that says you should pay for 
things as you go. Most people in this country do that. That's what they 
expect us to do in the Congress, but that isn't what's going to happen 
and there's several things going on with that bill that I think need to 
be explained. Some will be explained tomorrow.
  But first of all, that bill did not go to the committee, the Budget 
Committee, from which it is coming. And when I asked the chairman of 
the Budget Committee today, he said there just wasn't time to do it. 
We're dealing with the appropriations bills, we're dealing with the 
health care bill, and there simply wasn't time to do that. But just 
like the American public expects us to read bills before we vote on 
them, I think they expect our bills to go through committee and go 
through the process of legislating. That's what we're here for.
  But, no, there's no time to do that. We keep hearing that from the 
majority party: there's no time to do what we're sent here to do. But 
we know that this is just another diversion on their part, and I think 
I have an appreciation for why that's happening.
  Today, the headline in Politico: ``Poll, Public Starts to Lose Trust 
in Obama; Health Timeline on Life Support; Obama Good for K Street; 
Energy, Health Care and Finance Agenda a Boon to Lobbying.''
  I think what the majority wants to do is sort of take some of the 
attention away from some of the headlines that are coming out. One of 
the interesting things about this bill that's going to be dealt with 
tomorrow, which is it's supposed to be PAYGO, you pay-as-you-go. 
However, it exempts 40 percent of our budget. So 40 percent of the 
budget is not going to be included in PAYGO, and yet they are 
increasing spending on that 40 percent of the budget at least 8 percent 
a year.
  So how in the world are they going to control spending if 40 percent 
of the budget is exempt and you're allowing it to increase 40 percent a 
year? You simply ignore that. It's as though the family sits down--
they're always comparing what we do here with what the family does. 
It's like you sit down at the family table to talk about your budget 
and you say, well, we're only going to deal with 60 percent of the 
budget; we're going to put 40 percent over here and just going to 
ignore it, and we're going to spend whatever we want to on that side of 
the budget. That's exactly what they are doing with this, and it just 
seems really ridiculous, and I think the American public needs to 
understand that a little bit.

[[Page 18546]]

  Now, what they say is, well, this was all instituted in the past; 
we're exempting things Republicans exempted. But the very first PAYGO 
bill was passed under Democrats in 1990, a bipartisan effort to try to 
rein in spending. But what's happened since then is they've ignored it. 
They even had a PAYGO rule in the rules that the Democrats passed when 
they took over the Congress in 2007, but the rule is not strong enough 
for them so now they want to put it in statute.
  I think it's simply to divert attention from the headlines. The 
President's approval ratings are going down. The health care bill is 
creating many, many problems. We asked today 134 times on this floor 
where are the jobs that were promised. The economy is going south, and 
what do the Democrats want to do? They want to divert the American 
public's attention away from all of those things and say but we passed 
a law that says we have to pay for these things as we go along. Passing 
this law is going to make no difference to them than their rule does.
  You know, I find it just so interesting that when you say you're 
going to do something you don't do it, but that's normally the way the 
Democrats do it.

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