[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12330-12331]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




           DO THE RIGHT THING FOR AMERICA: BALANCE THE BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Gohmert) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, there's no question this Congress for many 
years has had a problem with spending.
  The Democratic Congress developed a bigger and bigger appetite for 
spending for 40 years, as it held the majority for years and years.
  Then Republicans took the House in 1995, and they forced a balanced 
budget

[[Page 12331]]

on President Clinton. They had friction between the President and the 
Congress, and that allowed this country to have a balanced budget.
  Who would have ever thought--I certainly wouldn't. I know I have got 
some Democratic friends who would have thought it, but I wouldn't--but 
when we got a Republican President and we had Republican majorities in 
the House and Senate, we began to spend again. There wasn't the 
friction there to hold spending down, and Republicans, I would submit, 
lost their way and began spending too much money.
  My first year in Congress, in 2005 and 2006, we shouldn't have spent 
the money we did. And I can recall being here on the floor and having 
Democratic friends beating us up, rightfully so, because in 2006 we 
spent $160 billion more than we had coming in. We didn't have to do 
that. We shouldn't have done that.
  I would never have dreamed that 5 short years later that with the 
Democratic majority the spending would have exploded once they had no 
friction between a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress, and 
that we would go from the $160 billion in deficit spending in 2006 that 
Republicans got beat up for to $1.6 trillion in deficit spending--10 
times more--and people still thinking that's somehow okay.
  It wasn't okay for Republicans to overspend by $160 billion, and it's 
not okay for this Democratic Senate and President to continue to push 
to spend $1.6 trillion more than the $2.2 trillion we supposedly will 
have coming in.
  Now we're told today we're going to have a vote on a Republican bill. 
A little surprising to some of us Republicans. We passed a bill, Cut, 
Cap, and Balance. It wasn't what I wanted. I liked the balanced budget 
amendment with a percentage of GDP cap on spending to help rein 
Congress in, and that was negotiable on the percentage. But it also had 
$111 billion out of $1.6 trillion that would have been cut from 
spending. That just wasn't enough. But the balanced budget amendment, 
if it had been passed and become part of the law, was enough of a game 
changer it was worth voting for.
  Then the Senate sits back and says, We're not going to go for that. 
We're not going to pass anything, so pass something else. And now our 
leadership has heard the call of Leader Reid down the hall and is going 
to bring another bill.
  And I know the intentions of both sides of the aisle want the best 
for the country. I get that. I understand that. We have different ideas 
on how that can be done. And I know that there are people in my party 
that want to keep beating up on me because I can't vote for a bill that 
only cuts $1 trillion out of $15 trillion to $16 trillion that will be 
deficit spending over the next 10 years. Because it's easy to do the 
math: We cut $1 trillion out of $15 trillion, $16 trillion over the 
next 10 years, and if we can keep doing that, and there are no 
assurances we can, every 10 years cut another trillion, then when I 
have my 207th birthday, we can celebrate that year a balanced budget, 
and we will have only added $120 trillion to the $14.3 trillion deficit 
now. I can't vote for that.
  Politically we're told, this is the political thing to do. You've got 
to do the political thing. If you don't vote for the Boehner bill, 
you're voting for Obama. That's not true. If the Senate will pass 
anything--anything--then we could drive this to a conference committee 
and get a compromise. The Senate has to pass something.
  Well, think about this scenario very quickly: We pass this, say, 
hypothetically. The Senate says, Oh, well, you pushed us to the edge of 
the cliff; we didn't want to vote for this. Then they pass it just like 
we did, and the President says, I was going to veto but we're on the 
edge of the cliff. A 100 percent Republican bill; they wouldn't 
compromise. And now they say, Well, gee, Republicans inherited the 
economy.
  It's not right practically; it's not right politically. Let's do the 
right thing for America.

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