[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 10575-10576]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              DEBT CRISIS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Georgia (Mr. Woodall) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. WOODALL. I came down to the floor today to talk about the fiscal 
crisis that we're having in America. There are those when I open the 
front page of the paper, Mr. Speaker, and I read the headline, it talks 
about having a debt limit vote crisis in this country. I went back, I 
looked, and apparently we've raised the debt limit over 70 times with a 
vote right here in this body. Apparently having a vote isn't 
particularly a complicated thing to do.
  What we're having is a debt crisis. I think that's an important 
distinction. I was talking to a freshman colleague of mine yesterday 
about that. Understand that we can have the vote, Mr. Speaker. It's 
within the House's authority to bring a vote to raise the debt limit 
tomorrow. In fact, we brought that vote to the House already: Should we 
raise the debt ceiling or should we not? Mr. Speaker, we defeated it. 
We defeated it by a wide margin here in this body.
  What we have is a debt crisis.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, if it were just existing debt, perhaps we could 
work out a way to finance that, but it's not. It's continued borrowing 
each and every day to the tune of 42 cents of every dollar that we 
spend. In other words, if we paid for Medicare, Medicaid, Social 
Security, interest on the national debt, those other mandatory spending 
programs, just those, Mr. Speaker, we've already spent every nickel in 
Federal revenue.
  That means every nickel that we spend for education, every nickel 
that we spend for transportation, every nickel that we spend on 
national defense, on homeland security, on the environment, on the 
courts, every other nickel we borrow, with absolutely no plan, Mr. 
Speaker, for changing that going forward.
  If the President were here today, Mr. Speaker, I would say we do not 
have a debt limit vote crisis. We have a debt crisis, and there is only 
one body in this town that has put together a budget that will address 
it. I am proud to say as a freshman in this Congress, as a freshman in 
this House, it was the U.S. House of Representatives that took on that 
responsibility, Mr. Speaker.
  It's been 799 days since the United States Senate last passed a 
budget. Hear that. Three years ago since the Senate last passed a 
budget. Not a balanced budget, mind you, Mr. Speaker, but a budget at 
all.
  These are serious challenges that require serious people to offer 
serious solutions, and the only one that has been offered in this town, 
Mr. Speaker, came from this body. I encourage the President to go back 
and take one more look at that, because when we come down to game day, 
come down to the crisis--understand what we're talking about when we 
talk about a crisis, we passed the debt limit back in May, Mr. Speaker, 
as you know. We've just been shuffling the books in this town because 
that's what Washington does so well: raiding this fund to pay that, 
raiding this fund to pay this, over and over and over again. Apparently 
the games just run out on August 2.
  Mr. Speaker, the games cannot continue. The games must stop, and they 
must stop here, and we must lead as we have always led in this body.
  We do not have a debt limit vote crisis. We have a debt crisis that 
is driven

[[Page 10576]]

by our addiction to borrowing and spending. The borrowing and spending 
stops here, Mr. Speaker, and I thank you for your leadership on that.

                          ____________________