[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 11572]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     SEQUESTRATION TRANSPARENCY ACT

  (Mr. WELCH asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. WELCH. Madam Speaker, this afternoon the House is going to take 
up the Sequestration Transparency Act. It's harmless enough, but it 
doesn't do anything. What is it? A year ago, Mr. Boehner and Mr. 
McConnell took this country to the brink of debt default. They demanded 
that we cut spending by $1.2 trillion to offset the increase in the 
debt limit. Now, their plan was to have the supercommittee get the job 
done any way they wanted to balance the cuts and revenues. But if that 
failed, they had a backup. The backup was automatic cuts that would be 
half Pentagon and half discretionary.
  Now the day arrives. January 1, 2013, those cuts go into effect, but 
they don't want the cuts to go into effect. So this legislation tells 
the Congressional Budget Office to look at the law we passed and tell 
us what did we do, why did we do it, what will happen if what we order 
to be done is allowed to be done. This is a ``Comedy Central'' joke. We 
have to have a balanced approach to a serious problem, but that means 
making decisions today about a balanced approach that includes 
revenues, includes the Pentagon, and includes domestic discretionary.

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