Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the passage of a fiscal year 2013 Federal budget is of national importance.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I appreciate, as always, the opportunity to exchange views with my good friend from Wisconsin, the chair of the Budget Committee, with whom I've been pleased to work with on some items. Occasionally, rarely, we're opposed, but this is one of those areas where I do have some concerns.

When I hear my friend talk about empty rhetoric and broken promises, I am reminded of what the Republican agenda has been to this point in this Congress--debt, doubt, and decline. Debt, doubt, and decline. Well, I think that that's a pretty good assessment of what had been offered up by my good friends when they had an opportunity this last year to present their vision.

Now they attempt to lay this off somehow on the Senate. And we all have had our frustrations with the other body. But the fact is, the problem that we face in terms of being able to work regular order, is that there has been a decision by the minority leader in the other body.

The senior Senator from Kentucky, the Republican leader, has been very clear. His number one priority is not putting Americans back to work. It's not dealing with the challenges we face at home and abroad. It is to make sure that President Obama is not reelected. And when you start from that premise and radiate out, we have seen the Senate, which has never been, shall we say, nimble, has slowed to a crawl. We have seen an unprecedented effort to make even the most modest and mundane efforts over there require a supermajority.

It's unprecedented. It is sad. The American people deserve better. But it is Republican obstruction that has twisted the rules of the Senate to make it nonfunctional.

Debt, doubt, and decline. The Republican budget, notwithstanding all the pyrotechnics and the effort to spread doubt about whether or not the United States would honor its commitment, paying the national debt for debt that is already incurred, which occupied too much time this summer, an absolutely manufactured crisis, the Republican budget authored by my good friend from Wisconsin, itself, would have required increasing the debt ceiling.

And when you talk about decline, my Republican friends have failed to move forward with meaningful job creation. We've had, languishing, a reauthorization for the Surface Transportation Act, which we've had to extend eight times. And, in fact, the Republican budget actions to this date are cutting back on investment in water, in transportation, things that would put Americans to work all across America.

And as for bureaucratic rationing of health care, I'm surprised my good friend can say that with a straight face because, remember, his budget takes the half trillion dollars and accepts it. He doesn't unwind it. He doesn't change it. He accepts it. They count on it because they know that, in fact, there are opportunities for us to strengthen Medicare without ending the guarantee that two generations of senior citizens have relied upon to be able to have the Medicare payments when they need them.

We have the opportunity to refine and reform Medicare, to provide better service for our seniors and eliminate unnecessary expenditures. There was a time when those agenda items, not the rhetoric, not vouchering this and slashing that, but what was required to move forward to actually reform Medicare, that has been bipartisan. It's been agreed to. It's being practiced by health care systems in Wisconsin, in Oregon. We know what to do. We have the opportunity to do it. Unfortunately, the Republican approach to this point has been to assume that it's too expensive, that we can't do it. It's too expensive for the Federal Government, so we're going to transfer the risk to the next generation of senior citizens but taking advantage of the savings under the Affordable Care Act.

Now, Mr. Speaker, we're going through an exercise today that is largely beside the point. What we should be doing is dealing with pieces of legislation that would have bipartisan support, moving forward, accelerating health care reform, rebuilding and renewing America, taking things like the work that I've done with my good friend from Wisconsin in terms of reforming the agricultural system that wastes too much money on the wrong people, doing the wrong things. We could be moving forward on a constructive agenda that the Occupy Wall Street people and the Tea Party folks could actually get behind.

Unfortunately, today, this H. Res. 516 is another sidetrack that gets us away from doing what we should do.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich).

I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).

I yield myself 2 minutes.

It's interesting to watch my friend's attempt to reframe the issue away from proposals that they have offered and the inartful budgetary fiscal activities of this last year. It was, after all, a Republican choice to halt the operation of the other body, essentially shutting down the Senate, by requiring supermajorities on everything.

We started the year with the threat of government shutdown. You recall we went to just minutes away from having to shut down the Federal Government over a basically theological argument on the part of my friends on the other side of the aisle over things like Planned Parenthood and Big Bird.

Then this summer we had cast doubt for the first time in history about whether we were actually going to honor the requirement to pay the debt for obligations we'd already incurred. This summer the Republicans were willing to leave town, and we actually shot the hostage when it came to the FAA: 70,000 people were idled on construction projects for aviation; 4,000 employees laid off.

Then this fall and into the winter, we had the spectacle of what should be a relatively routine effort, and has been a routine effort for Republicans and Democrats alike, dealing with things

like the extension of unemployment insurance and avoiding a draconian impact with the sustainable growth rate, the SGR, the doc fix. We watched our Republican friends in the House and Senate unable to communicate, and we ended up having a situation where they just basically turned their backs on the American people and were going to insist it was their way or the highway again.

I yield myself 1 additional minute.

It took days for, finally, reason to settle in when even the Republicans in the Senate had to say, no, well, this is the deal that we had. There appears to be a lack of accord on behalf of the new majority in the House, we're still spinning around.

And all the time we're dealing with things like this that are a sideshow when the majority of what really makes the difference, how we spend the money, these appropriation bills, the majority of which haven't even come out of the Republican-controlled committee to the Republican-controlled House to be passed, when we actually should be working on the next fiscal year.

So we'll endure the sideshow. This will pass. It will not really do anything other than sort of trying to be the pivot point in trying to spin the issue. But it would be nice at some point to stop the spin and the things that are beside the point, and maybe encourage the Republicans to agree amongst themselves, come into accord between the House and the Senate, and maybe get some of these appropriations bills to the floor so we can see where we're going.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I agree with the goal of my good friend from Wisconsin about making sure that we deal with our long-term problems of budget deficits and national debt, and certainly look forward to working together moving down a path to prosperity. But we have slightly different ways of going about this, and it is unfortunate because I think if we really had full and open debate on the floor of the House, if we hadn't accepted draconian rules that make it very hard to be able to discuss on the floor the opportunity to have a balanced approach that would include, for example, eliminating unnecessary tax breaks for industries that no longer need them, or adjusting the Tax Code so we wouldn't have the anomaly of where people worth hundreds of millions of dollars--the most recent example of Mr. Romney releasing his tax returns, where he is paying less than 15 percent due to the use of carried interest long after he left his former employer. These are things that we could do that the American public agrees with and that would help have a balanced approach that ultimately would make a difference.

I am, as I mentioned, a little bit perplexed that we are going to continue to beat up on the Senate, although that's always fun, to whack around the other body, but the point is that the dysfunction of the Senate is a Republican choice to shut it down, require extraordinary majorities for the most routine of items. We see it with judicial appointments that have been cleared out of committee, that have bipartisan support, that the minority in the other body, the Republican Party, won't even allow to move forward when we have a serious crisis in a number of the areas of our judiciary.

We have watched where there's long on rhetoric, but when it comes time to just getting the budgets done for this year, there are six major appropriations bills for this year, and we're now 5 months into the fiscal year, that are languishing, that have not passed out of the Republican committee to the Republican-controlled House to at least start the process going.

Now, today in the Budget Committee we had a fascinating intellectual exercise. There were four bills that were considered. We're moving these items to the House floor, each and every one of which was an interesting intellectual exercise, but in the name of transparency and simplicity and giving the American public a fuller picture, every one of them clouds the budget picture, whether it's so-called dynamic scoring that won't deal with important investments like infrastructure and give the people a great picture, but it will muddy the waters in terms of the impact on legislation coming forward.

Biennial budgets, when we can't move forward now with appropriations on an annual basis, will institutionalize the sideshow. We'll do it twice; we'll require the bureaucracy to generate more information over a longer timeframe that will be more inaccurate. It flies in the face of what is happening in the States--which have been referred to as the laboratories of democracy--which used to have biennial budgets, and the majority are moving away because it doesn't work, it is inaccurate, and it requires extra work. This is part of the Republican approach, to move in this direction.

Freezing baseline budgets will make long-term budgeting less accurate and make it harder to really assess what the budgetary costs and consequences are going to be.

And then there's a little thing that deals with risk adjustment that would require the current process, where there is an absolute accurate appraisal of what will happen with Federal loans and their performance, but because it doesn't deal with their academic

model, will require a risk adjustment premium and further budget balancing. And I defy any Member of the House to explain to any of their constituency, even pretty sophisticated people, why this is an improvement for greater transparency and accuracy.

The point is it's continuing a side show instead of working together on what the American public wants. They want a balanced solution. And if we didn't have the vast majority of the people in the House and the Senate pledging their fealty to an unelected lobbyist, pledging never to increase taxes, we could have moved with the supercommittee and moved forward and done something.

It is time for us to stop the gimmicks, maybe work together doing what the American public wants so that we can deal with avoiding a debt crisis and get us launched on a path to prosperity that the American public would agree with.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 516) expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the passage of a fiscal year 2013 Federal budget is of national importance.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H. Res. 516 currently under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes at this time.

We welcome the President to the House Chamber tonight, where he will address the American people to assess the state of the Union. This presents another opportunity for the President to chart a new course. I hope the President takes this opportunity to stop offering empty rhetoric and broken promises, to stop pushing policies that have proven to make matters worse, and to stop dividing Americans for political gain. I hope the President takes this opportunity to start working with us to get America back on track.

Yet the administration has, time and again, turned hope into disappointment. The President and his party's leaders continue to duck from the most pressing fiscal and economic challenges facing our Nation. Exhibit A of this failure is the fact that today marks 1,000 days without Senate Democrats passing a budget.

Having failed to put forward a credible plan in 1,000 days, the President's party is committing America to a future of debt, doubt, and decline. Instead of dealing honestly with our biggest fiscal challenges and providing certainty to job creators, Senate Democrats have refused to meet their legal and moral obligations to propose and pass a budget.

The President and his party's leaders refuse to account for their reckless spending spree. The lack of credible budget plans from the President and his party leaders raises the question: What are they hiding? Is it threats to economic security, health security, and national security that would result from their policy agenda? the job- destroying tax hikes that they continue to insist upon? the bureaucratic rationing and denial of vital care for seniors that would result from their health care law? or the deep cuts to the military that would hollow out our national defense?

Mr. Speaker, their policy preferences call for ever higher levels of government spending, higher taxes, a board of bureaucrats to cut Medicare, and a smaller military. It's understandable why they'd be afraid to try and fit that agenda on a spreadsheet, but that is no excuse for giving up on budgeting.

This failure to budget stands in stark contrast to our efforts here in the House. As the law requires, we proposed and passed a budget resolution last spring. We honestly confronted our Nation's most difficult challenges, putting the budget on a path to balance and the country back on to a path to prosperity.

We will keep working together to advance solutions this year, and we call upon our friends in the Senate to get serious about their duty to those they serve: Propose a budget; engage in debates; advance solutions.

I thank Congressman Nugent for his leadership on this resolution, which expresses the sense of House that passage of a budget is of national importance.

I yield myself 15 seconds to say we must recommit ourselves to the American idea. We must apply our Nation's timely principles to the challenges of the day, and we will continue to advance bipartisan solutions and the principled reforms necessary to get our country back on track.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, as I yield time to the gentleman from Texas, I will simply say I'm sure my colleague, my friend from Oregon, knows that you cannot filibuster a budget resolution in the Senate. I would just state that for the Record.

At this time, I would like to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas, a member of the Budget Committee, Mr. Flores.

At this time, Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Long).

I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time remains between the two sides?

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Nunnelee).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Huelskamp).

I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes.

Here's the deal, Mr. Speaker. We're going to have a debt crisis in this country if we don't watch it. What is going to happen if that happens is everybody's going to get hurt in this country. Europe is in the middle of austerity. What that means is they're cranking up taxes on all of their countrymen, slowing down their economy. And they're pulling the rug out from under their seniors who have already retired and organized their lives around these programs. We want to prevent that from happening. We want to preempt a debt crisis. We want to get America on a path to prosperity and deal with this debt issue, and we can't grow the economy and create jobs unless we do that. The only way to fix this problem, to prevent seniors from getting harmed, to grow this economy, is to have a budget.

And it's been 1,000 days since the Senate bothered even trying to pass a budget. It's the epitome of irresponsibility that the other body has neglected this most basic function of governing. We've got to save this country. And in order to do that, we have to budget and prioritize because that's what our constituents elected us to do.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, for the purposes of closing, I yield the remainder of my time to the gentleman from Florida, the author of this House resolution, Mr. Nugent.

I would like to thank the chairman, Mr. Ryan, for allowing me to speak and allowing me to close. And I heard this is a sideshow. I don't think the American people see it as that.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to offer a resolution expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the passage of a fiscal year 2013 Federal budget is of national importance. You've heard it over and over again that this is the 1,000th day, 1,000 days, Mr. Speaker, since the Senate has not fulfilled its obligation. Think about all the things Americans have done and been able to accomplish in the last 1,000 days, and yet the Senate has failed to achieve this basic responsibility under the Budget Act of 1974.

It's astonishing. I've had two sons graduate from college, two sons go to war and come home again. Another son got married in that time period. And in that time, the citizens of Florida's Fifth Congressional District sent me to Washington to do this job to work for the American people.

That work undoubtedly includes passing a budget, as this House did on April 15 based on the leadership of Chairman Ryan. The Senate, on the other hand, hasn't produced a budget since 2009--I believe it's April of 2009--and didn't even bother to propose a budget this last year. The last time the Senate passed the budget, the CBO predicted that the deficit for 2011 would be $693 billion. In reality, it was twice, almost twice that, $1.3 trillion.

When I'm at home talking with people in my district, they're astounded that the Senate has not passed a budget in almost 3 years. They can't fathom how we can operate without a budget. In truth, Mr. Speaker, you've heard the other side even say that we haven't been operating smoothly. When I first got here, we had to do a CR. That's because we haven't done what we're supposed to do in the Senate and the House. The American people know that, and that's reflected in our approval ratings.

You see, in the real world, Americans routinely set budgets for themselves, their families, and their businesses. I had to set one when I was a sheriff. Unfortunately, the Senate doesn't operate in the real world. Rather, it has become a legislative graveyard, even for bills passed with bipartisan support.

The House, however, has acted. We've passed 27 bipartisan jobs bills that have been lost to the black hole that is the Senate. Some of those bills received an overwhelming majority of support. For instance, H.R. 1070, the Small Company Capital Formation Act, would allow small businesses to capture more capital in the early stages of their formation, and that passed in this House with 421 votes for and one opposed. That's a perfect example of legislation that should be public law, and it isn't because it's died in the Senate.

Now, I understand the Senate may not agree with everything in our bills that we pass, and that's fine. That's how the Founding Fathers envisioned it. But if you have objections, then put forth your own proposals and allow the normal process to work. Do not simply sit on the sidelines and decry every idea that comes out of the House of Representatives--ideas that we put forward.

In my opinion, there couldn't be a better example of putting politics before country than the Senate's refusal to pass a budget. Even those on the other side have said, it's a plan, we have to have a direction. That's what we ask. We don't have to agree on that direction; but at the end of the day, we have to have something to set our appropriators free to work with within the confines.

Rather than show Americans what priorities are, rather than show what they're willing to spend, where they want to cut and how much they want to increase taxes, and whether they believe our colossal debt is even an issue, the Senate has instead insisted on punting this issue entirely. This is not only a disservice to the American people; but, frankly, it's irresponsible. And when you hear them say the Republicans in the Senate are blocking a budget, you can't filibuster a budget in the Senate. The rules do not allow for it. So they could, if they wanted to, do their job and assist the American people in figuring out where they stand on issues of great national importance. Once again, we talked about spending, taxes, and how we move forward.

The Senate Democrats had the supermajority in the Senate, control of the House and the White House and still didn't pass a budget. I don't think it's too much to ask the Senate to produce a budget. I know Americans don't think so either.

I thank the gentleman.

As a long-time member of the Budget Committee, I certainly think that having a budget resolution is a good idea. I think it is a matter of national importance. I don't see how anyone can really disagree with the resolution, although it seems to have been offered primarily to establish a setting for the Republican response to the State of the Union Address that we all look forward to hearing tonight.

It is important to understand what the budget resolution is and what it is not, and what difference it really makes if one hasn't been passed for 1,000 days, 3 or 4 years, or 3 or 4 weeks. The budget resolution is not the appropriations act. It is a statement of our values and of our priorities, and I think that it is important to try to get one passed every year.

But the most important practical consequence of passing a budget resolution is to establish the level of discretionary spending, that is, to establish the level of expenditures that can be made by the various Appropriations committees and by this Congress. It provides us a good opportunity to look at what the consequences of that spending are, to try to match it up to revenues, and not to engage in endless deficit spending.

But the practical effect of the resolution itself is to say to the Appropriations Committee here in the House and in the Senate how much discretionary spending will the Congress approve this year. So what happens when there is not a budget resolution? The Congress finds other ways to do the very same thing.

So, in fact, the Congress did not pass a budget resolution for fiscal year 2003, for fiscal year 2005, for fiscal year 2007; but that did not stop President Bush from signing appropriation bills that added billions of dollars to our national debt--along with his tax cuts for those at the top that also added immensely to our national debt. He signed those appropriation bills.

I don't know whether we went a thousand days or a year or two then without a budget resolution. It would have been better if we could have adopted one, but the budget resolution tends to be confused by some people with the appropriations that keep the Federal Government going. This is not the act that Republicans from time to time have threatened to shut down the government.

You can't threaten to shut down the government over the passage of a budget resolution. That has happened with some of our appropriation bills. It almost happened with the ceiling on debt for the Federal Government. It is also inaccurate, not only confusing, to mix the two; and it is inaccurate to say that this Congress has not acted to establish some discretionary spending limits, even though a budget resolution, as good as it would be to have one, has not been formally adopted.

We did, in fact, adopt last year the Budget Control Act. The Budget Control Act proposes to set discretionary expenditure limits, what this Congress will spend, not just for this year but for a 10-year period in an effort to try to get spending under control and bring us closer to getting our fiscal house in order, which is something we very much need to do.

I see today's resolution as restating the obvious, that a budget resolution is a good idea, but not adding really much to our attempt to achieve some balance in our budget. Indeed, the last debate here on the floor about instructing conferees and trying to move forward on the issues of unemployment, the job creation, and the payroll tax extension are much more on target than a resolution of this nature.

We do have some serious challenges and deadlines. We still have almost 5 million Americans that would lose their unemployment benefits this year if we don't have an extension. I'd focus on those and working with the President, rather than a resolution that accomplishes little.

I rise today to address a thousand days. Now, I can try to impress you with my knowledge of a thousand days and tell you things like Mark Zuckerberg could have invented Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard 71.3 times in a thousand days, but I don't think that's going to get us anywhere. I could tell you that you could build 2.4 Empire State buildings in a thousand days, but that really doesn't mean anything. Those are the things you could do in a thousand days. What I'd like to address is what you cannot do in a thousand days.

What can we not do in a thousand days? The Senate cannot pass a budget. I was with one of the 87 freshmen that got here last year. I've been here 365-plus days. So what happened to that first 600-and-some days, if we could address that, when the Democrats controlled all three bodies, the House, the Senate, and the White House? They didn't produce a budget in that time.

This is an election year. I don't think we're really going to see a budget this year. We can talk about it all we want and ask them to produce one, but it's not politically correct to budget in this country anymore. And to me, Mr. Speaker, that's appalling.

When you do come forth with a budget, as we did last year, a couple days later you're going to get an ad of somebody throwing a lady off a cliff in a wheelchair, because that's what happens in this country when you put your plan down in writing, and that's appalling.

Eighty-seven freshmen came here last year--doctors, nurses. I was one of two auctioneers. Pizza parlor owner, roofing contractor. Just like the Founding Fathers envisioned. Car dealers, people off the street, people that have run businesses, small business people.

We got here and we were told the first vote we needed to take was for what? Speaker of the House. We voted for John Boehner, Speaker of the House, because the public sent us up here with a 25-seat majority.

What was our second vote? A CR, a continuing resolution. We looked at each other. Continuing resolution? Oh, yeah. We've got to keep the government open for 2 more full weeks, 14 days, because that's how we operate here in Washington, D.C. And if that's not appalling, too--we were sent here to change the way Washington does business.

Now, you can have your three Ds--doubt, despair, decline--and I think on ``Hee Haw'' they used to say ``in agony''--but we can also be optimistic in this country.

You can deal from a position of defeat and doubt and decline like our colleagues across the aisle like to, but I wish I would have stepped 14 steps down the hall to my good friend from Oregon's office--that's how far our offices are apart--and I could have studied on how the first term of George W. Bush they worked night and day how to figure out how to get him reelected, because apparently Mr. McConnell is doing something wrong in the Senate.