Floor Statements

I thank the majority leader, and I appreciate his courtesy, as always, in so many issues that come before the Senate.

I wish to say a couple of things. One is fundamental, and that is that the crisis we face--and I think my Senate colleague from Tennessee would agree--is not the debt limit, it is the debt. It is the surging debt. The debt limit is Congress's power, and it says to the administration: You can't borrow any more money. We only authorize so much money to be borrowed. Like a 102-degree mark in our thermometer, it is not the thermometer that is the problem. It is the underlying fever that the thermometer indicates. So reaching the debt limit so soon after we raised it is an indication we have something unhealthy in our system that needs to be dealt with.

Senator Reid has very difficult challenges before him. It is not easy. But as I like to remind him, he asked for the job and, hopefully, he can make progress at this point in time.

But to raise the debt ceiling, the majority leader knows a couple of things must be done. He knows, one, the Republican Congress and the American people want to see changes in our spending. It is on a reckless path. We cannot continue on this path. So the idea is, shouldn't we change what we are doing that has put us in a situation in which 40 cents of every $1 we spend today is borrowed?

This year we will pay $240 billion in interest on our national debt. Under the budget the President submitted to us--which was voted down, I will acknowledge, 97 to 0 in the Senate; but it indicates the debt path we are on--it would cause in the tenth year interest to be paid in 1 year of $940 billion--a stunning figure. The Federal road program is about $40 billion. Federal aid to education is about $100 billion. We would be surging from $240 billion to $940 billion in interest on this rising debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office, our experts.

I would note also that President Bush's last year was an extraordinary deficit of $450 billion--but President Obama's deficits have been $1,200 billion, $1,300 billion, and it is expected this year to be $1.5 trillion--$1,500 billion--in 1 year. These are the 3 years.

In the first 2 years of President Obama's administration, his nondefense discretionary spending surged 24 percent. This does not count the stimulus of almost $900 billion that we sent out the door that was supposed to stimulate the economy.

Speaker Boehner, and I think with the support of the American people, has said: Well, we can do a long time. We can do a fairly large increase in our debt ceiling to allow the country to continue to borrow or we can do a short one, but we in the House, in the Republican House, believe we have to confront our problems. So I would propose, and he has stated, that the House would vote to raise the debt ceiling but only to the extent to which spending has been reduced an equal amount.

If you reduce spending enough over 10 years, you get an immediate increase in the debt ceiling of an equal amount now. If you reduce spending over 10 years a larger amount, you could increase the debt limit a larger amount. It has become a vehicle, an opportunity for the American people to understand how we are spiraling out of control, and how it is Congress that needs to figure out a way to rein this in. It is unsustainable, the path we are on. So this $1 increase in the debt ceiling for $1 reduction in spending kind of caught on. People seem to be going along with that. It seems to be fairly reasonable.

Senator Reid claims he has a plan that would reduce spending $2.7 trillion over 10 years and this would allow him to raise the debt ceiling about that amount, and this would allow us to, in effect, raise it enough that we would not have to talk about this again for almost 2 years--about 22 months.

Well, OK. That sort of seemed to meet what Speaker Boehner had suggested. But I am the ranking member

of the Budget Committee. I have been a real critic of what has been going on. I have been predicting we were going to end up at the last minute and a bill was going to be thrown on the floor, and I was concerned it was going to be filled with gimmicks. It was not going to be honest, and we were going to be told if we do not pass it, the Republic is going to fall, and no matter what is in it, we have to pass it. And do not worry about it, trust us on these numbers.

Unfortunately, that is where we are getting. Senator Reid, in his $2.7 trillion in claimed deficit reduction--about $1.2 trillion of that is savings from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, that has not ever been projected to stay at the current level of $158 billion a year for 10 years.

Speaker Boehner, when he proposes to reduce spending for a shorter term, does not count savings from the declining war expenditure because that is not a baseline expenditure and we have never extended and planned to do that. We never planned to spend $158 billion a year in the next 10 years. This is inevitably going to drop. Some say it could go to zero, some say to $50 billion, saving $100 billion or a little more a year for the next decade. So the Budget Committee Republican staff calculates this is over $1 trillion in inaccurate estimations of spending reductions. It just is. It should not be counted. Speaker Boehner does not count it in his numbers.

Senator Reid also claims $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction from spending caps by capping discretionary spending. Well, those caps are counted from a baseline that ignores the savings that were enacted in the full year CR that we did the year we are in.

What happened was, we had a higher level of spending. There was an election last fall. A new Republican House was elected--huge numbers of people who were elected who said: We have to do something about spending. So we had a fuss over what our spending levels should be this year because we were operating not under authorization of appropriations bills but a continuing resolution, and that number was reduced. So the spending level for this year now is not the same as it was when the year began. The current level of spending is the number we ought to be talking about when we say we are going to save money. Correct? It should not be the number that was higher but has been abandoned and been reduced. That reduces the amount of legitimate claims in discretionary savings to less than $800 billion. Then he claims $100 billion in mandatory savings. But it is likely--from our staff looking at them--it would amount to no more than $60 billion.

The bottom line is, we have looked at this a lot of different ways. I believe the numbers I am going to repeat to you today will be sustained in any competitive argument about it. I believe these are honest and true numbers. The bottom line is that the total real savings that are proposed by the Reid plan are not $2.7 trillion but $1 trillion. If you do $1 trillion in savings, and you raise the debt limit by $1 trillion, then that would extend to 6 or 8 months or so into early next year, which is, I suggest, where we ought to be. Because this amount of savings--$1 trillion--is nowhere near what we need to do to get off the debt course we are on.

As Senator Corker indicated, most of the financial experts tell us we need at least $4 trillion in savings, not $1 trillion. So if we are just going to get $1 trillion so we can vote in this crisis period to raise the debt limit before August 2 so the checks can go out and everybody can be paid and the government can operate--and I hope we can do that; we need to do that--but if all we are going to get is $1 trillion, this is just an interim step. This is not a real fix at all, but it is an interim step. If so, we need to be right back on this issue soon. That gives us an opportunity to do so early next year or late this year because we have not solved the problem.

Mr. President, $1 trillion is not enough. Madam President, $4 trillion is not enough. Depending on how you calculate the debt that has been projected to accrue over the next 10 years, it is somewhere between $9 and $13 trillion. So $1 trillion is not going to do anything to change the disastrous debt course we are on.

By the way, the President--I want to say this because he was pretty tough last night blaming Republicans for all kinds of problems. Let me say, the Republican House passed--and I voted for in the Senate--a budget for 10 years that changes the debt course of this Republic. It puts us on a sound financial path. It reduced spending by as much as $6 trillion over 10 years. It even reduced taxes to create more economic growth and make us more competitive in the world marketplace. It was a thoughtful, long-term, serious budget that would do real, positive things for America.

The Senate has not passed a budget, not had one marked up in the Budget Committee. The leadership here in the Senate refused to allow it to happen. Senator Reid said it would be foolish to pass a budget. We have gone now over 2 years without a budget. It is unthinkable in the debt course we are on--how disastrous it is, how unsustainable it is, how unlike anything that has ever happened in our history--to have this kind of debt path and we do not have a budget.

The President said a few weeks ago: Well, I have a plan that cuts $3 trillion. Is it like Senator Reid's $2.7 trillion plan? It was never made public. It was never spelled out. If he has a $3 trillion plan to cut spending, well, let's see it. Maybe we could extend the debt limit more, if he is going to cut $3 trillion in honest numbers. If he has those numbers, as he says he has--in between attacking Republicans for causing all the problems--let's see them. Maybe that would be a basis for something.

But I suspect it is no more accurate than this plan because when the President proposed his budget, as the law required him to do, early in the year, he said: My budget calls on us as Americans to live within our means and to not increase the debt, when according to the Congressional Budget Office, the lowest single budget deficit that would occur under his 10-year budget would be $750 billion--nowhere close to a balanced budget--and in the out years that deficit would be going up. So I will challenge the President, if he has a $3 trillion plan, let's see it.

Some people say we need to raise the debt limit for a longer period of time and we cannot afford to have a short term increase. They say this is somehow a wrong thing to do, and so forth. I would point out to my colleagues, it is not unusual at all. A $2.7 trillion increase in the debt--if that were to occur--would be very high. It would be a 19- percent increase in the current debt limit, putting the debt limit 50- percent higher than when President Obama took office. It would be the largest debt increase in history, the fourth debt limit increase during President Obama's tenure in office, the fourth time it has been raised. So this is not unusual.

I warned from the beginning that if we skirted the legislative process in favor of closed-door White House meetings and so forth, we would find ourselves in the eleventh hour with gimmick-filled legislation being rushed through a panic-driven Senate. This is not responsible governance from our leadership here in the Senate.

As I feared and as I have just described, the majority leader's bill has not achieved close to the promised savings he says it would. From the $2.7 trillion in cuts claimed, the troop-spending cuts in the proposal are closer to $1 trillion over 10 years--less than a third of what was advertised--while he is asking for a nearly $3 trillion increase in the debt limit. Spending cuts next year would be only $3 billion less than the enacted amount for 2011. This falls short of the idea that a dollar in cuts should accompany a dollar in debt limit increase. Senator Reid's proposal is structured in a way that is clearly designed to further degrade and undermine the budgetary process of the Senate, and it allows the majority not to have to come forward and produce a budget plan.

Given the late hour, rather than rush through legislation to the President--the largest debt ceiling increase in history--we should pursue a more responsible approach, a short-term extension with real cuts through the immediate time period the extension covers, not 10 years down the road. Then, using the extra time we have, Congress should pursue a binding framework, such as the cut, cap, and balance plan, to bring these gimmicks to an end and to alter

our debt course. We should try the one thing we refused to do from the beginning: open hearings, regular order, and a real legislative process and public participation.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I know we have talked about having an opportunity to digest and analyze and score any kind of proposal. I understand this afternoon the majority leader, Senator Reid, said he would propose legislation tonight and file cloture tonight, and that would, according to the rules of the Senate, move this vote up to early Wednesday morning. That would give us only tomorrow, 1 day, to digest a bill that would impact our spending trajectory for the next decade. I would ask my experienced colleague, who was a distinguished Member of the House and now in the Senate, does that cause him concern?

I thank the Senator. I appreciate that. The point the Senator made is tremendously important. All year we have conducted Senate business, with regard to the financial future of our country, in the most troubling way. It is unlike anything we have done in our history. I would say from a structural, systemic circumstance, this Nation has never had a more serious debt problem. We are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend. Yes, we do have a war going on that is costing $150 billion this year. But the deficit this year will be $1.5 trillion. It is not the war. That is only about 10 percent of our deficit, unfortunately.

Back in World War II, we could see our way out of the war and into our victory, and we saw great growth in the future. But the deficits we are now accruing every day, every week, every month are significant because they are going to be hard to change. We are spending more than we take in and we have got to change. We can change. If we do change we will get this country back on a growth path.

I have repeatedly warned against avoiding the normal budget process this year, a process required by law but that this Senate under the Democratic leadership explicitly refused to do--the majority leader said it would be foolish to produce a budget. We are now about 820 days or so without a budget. For over 2 years we have not had a budget for the United States of America, and they never even attempted to move a budget even though a law says we should pass one by April 15. Well, it doesn't put anybody in jail. Maybe that is what it should have done. Maybe a bunch of people would be in jail today. Maybe we would have a budget if we had some teeth in the axe. It is the statute of the United States that requires we have a budget and we do not have one.

Then we begin to hear the warnings 6 months ago that we would reach a point where we would need to raise the debt limit, the debt ceiling we have. Congress has said: Mr. President, you can borrow money, but only so much. You cannot borrow more than the amount, $14-some-odd trillion, that is all. If you need to borrow more, Congress will have to approve it. We have the power of the purse under the Constitution.

This has been brewing for some time. I have been warning about this, since we have not done our job, since the Budget Committee has not met about these issues, the Appropriations Committee has not met about these issues, the Finance Committee has not met about the tax and mandatory entitlement programs that are under their jurisdiction. No work has been done all year. None. We are told not to worry, our leaders are going to meet a few times in secret. This little group failed, and this group with the Vice President met and that didn't work. Then they are going to meet with the President, and that didn't work. Finally, last night, as Senator Wicker said, it did appear an agreement was reached between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership on a bill that at least would get us past this debt crisis. They had the leadership agreement. I have not read it. I do not know what is in it. I am going to know what is in the bill. I have a constitutional responsibility, as do the other 99 Senators here, to make a good judgment on it.

It is odd that after all of that a bipartisan agreement was reached, and the President walked away from it. Now he is going to blame Speaker Boehner, who produced a budget. The Republican House produced a far- reaching, historic budget that would actually change the debt trajectory of our country and put us on the right path, the path to restoring prosperity and the creation of jobs. This debt is so large it is a wet blanket, as Speaker Boehner said. I called it an anchor, a weight that is pulling down the economy, as expert economists have told us. Not just me. Experts tell us that when you have this much debt, you lose 1 million jobs a year that would otherwise be created.

We have a serious problem, and I am not pleased about it. I felt all along that this is exactly what was going to happen. Somewhere in the back of the minds of the President or the leaders or somebody was the idea that they would bring up a plan at the eleventh hour, fiftieth minute, bring it to the floor of the Senate, and say: If you don't vote it, Members of the Senate, if you don't vote for it, Members of the House, we are going to have a debt crisis and it will all be your fault. Well, I am not interested in that. I am not going to vote for any kind of significant legislation, as this is, until I have had a chance to read it and think about it. Majority Leader Reid told us of his plan this afternoon and he told us not to worry, he has a 1-page summary. Trust us. He is going to introduce legislation tonight and we will vote

Wednesday morning, and it will be good for America. Just do what I tell you and go along and mind your manners and we will get this thing taken care of. Trust me.

Well, the American people have been trusting Washington too long. The American people know there is no justification whatsoever in this country for spending so much money that 40 percent of every dollar we spend has to be borrowed. They know better. They know we have no business spending $3,700 billion when we take in only $2,200 billion. That is what happened in this last election. They said: Oh, these tea party people, they are not good Americans. They are angry. They are mad. That is not good. You are bad people. Well, give me a break. Why shouldn't they be? If we had a recall election, we all ought to be voted out of office, I suppose. There is no way we should ever have been in this situation.

Now under the pressure of the American people and fear of the next election, why did the President reject this bipartisan agreement? Well, it would require us to meet again next year. We will need to talk about more cuts because the cuts they are talking about are clearly insufficient to meet the challenge we are facing today--clearly insufficient. We have to do more.

So if a person runs up their credit card too much and they hit the limit and they want the limit raised, the person who is loaning the money--the American people--would like to know, have you changed your habits? Are you going to do better? Let's see a plan--a budget--a plan that gets us out of this fix. That has been steadfastly rejected by the leadership in this Senate all year, and we knew we were heading to this date. So Senator Reid is throwing something out there. Let's talk a little bit about what appears to be in it.

The President has had a friendly press on most of the things he has proposed. He proposed a budget--the Democratic Senate never produced one, but by law the President has to produce one. Every President has to produce one every year. So the President produced one this year. The lowest annual deficit in that budget would be $740 billion. The highest deficit President Bush ever had was $450 billion, and he was criticized for that. The lowest he would have in 10 years was $750 billion, and in the 10th year it was back over $1 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of his budget. So that is where we are heading. That is the kind of thing the President has submitted to us.

Do my colleagues know what he said about it? He said: I am proud of my budget. It will have America living within its means.

Can we believe the President of the United States said that--that a budget with a lowest annual deficit of over $700 billion was living within our means?

He also said, ``It would add no more to our debt.'' And his budget director, Mr. Jack Lew, said the same thing. He actually testified to that effect before the Budget Committee. It was breathtaking.

So forgive me if I am not buying into a proposal based on one page. It was produced this afternoon. It said we are going to reduce the deficit by $2.7 trillion. Forgive me if I am not buying into that until I see it and it has been scored. That is what I think ought to happen here today.

By the way, we have heard the debates--and Speaker Boehner used this phrase and others have used it: we want to have dollar for dollar spending reduction to debt limit increase. What that means is that if we increase the debt ceiling and allow the government to borrow another $1 trillion, we should cut spending by $1 trillion. That is just a rough idea. I don't know how they came up with that. That is what they came up with.

Remember, the debt is still going up every year because we are still spending more than we take in. This is like Wimpy in the old ``Popeye'' cartoon. Wimpy said: Give me a hamburger today, and I will pay you tomorrow. So we are going to get the immediate ability to borrow $1 trillion, $2 trillion more, raising the debt limit that much, on a promise that we will reduce spending by that amount over 10 years--not 1 year but 10 years.

This is a dangerous process. This is the kind of rhetoric that has put us in the position we are in today, which is that 40 cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed. It is what is threatening the financial future of our country, this kind of thinking in Washington, and we have to change that. We have to be honest about our numbers. As the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, I feel an obligation. And our staff is eager to see the legislative language, not a one-page outline, about what will actually happen with our spending. We want to be sure the promises made with this bill are more accurate than the ones President Obama made when he said his budget would call for us to live within our means when it plainly does not.

I will mention a couple of things at this point that jump out at me from the one-page outline we have seen.

Majority Leader Reid says his plan would produce savings of $2.7 trillion, but really it appears to represent a $1.2 trillion or so reduction in discretionary spending, and the rest of it is accrued in other ways. Speaker Boehner's proposal has discretionary spending reductions of about the same, but what is obvious is that Speaker Boehner's commission would reduce spending more and has a target, a goal to reach an additional $1.8 trillion. The one produced by Senator Reid, on the other hand, mentions a commission, but has no reduction in spending as a requirement of that commission. They don't have any obligation to produce a reduction in spending.

What else is in there? Another factor is that we are now drawing down the cost of our military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last year, we spent a little over $150 billion. This year, we will spend a little over $100 billion. The plan is to at least be down to $50 billion in 2 or 3 years. So over the 10-year period, there will be about 8 years, nearly, at $50 billion or so spent on the war instead of $150 billion. That is part of the plan we have been operating on for a long time. So $150 billion for the war is not a baseline projection of the United States. It was never projected to continue at that level. So hopefully we can bring it below $50 billion. Maybe we won't get to $50 billion; I don't know. But what is the reasonable estimate? I think the House Republicans and the President said it would drop to $50 billion, so that should be the baseline projection for the rest of the time. That is $1 trillion total. So if we take $1 trillion out of the $2.7 trillion in savings, we are down to $1.7 trillion in savings.

Another thing is that since the $1 trillion is war-related spending, as Mr. Reid wants it, it is not a real reduction from baseline spending. It is always considered to be extra, war-related emergency spending. And he claims interest savings on this money as another $200 billion. So now we have about $1.2 trillion right there, overstating his cuts through the elimination of the war. Speaker Boehner does not do that. His numbers are far more accurate and honest and realistic.

I also would like to point out that when we talk about spending and how we measure it, we have to know what the baseline is. One reason this country is broke and is in financial crisis is because we claim we are cutting spending when we are actually increasing spending.

The way it works is the Congressional Budget Office produces an assumption that we will increase spending at the rate of inflation or some other rate over a period of years. Then, if we reduce that rate of spending increase a little bit, politicians claim they have produced savings, that they have cut spending. But spending is not really reduced. Spending is still going up. There are various baselines out there that are used to calculate this, and it is very significant over 10 years and even more so over 20 years. So we hear people saying: We are cutting spending under this plan. So for Speaker Boehner or Senator Reid, either one of those plans, I am confident will show we are spending a good bit more money in the 10th year than we are spending today.

This is confusing to the American people. I am really convinced the only way we can honestly compare the plans is to go back to basics--the way families do it: Do you increase your spending or not, based on what you spent last year? You take a flat level, and how much do you increase it over the next year, 2 years, 10 years? How much does it go up? That is the way to do it. Then we can compare plans. Then we

can see what Speaker Boehner has, what Congressman Ryan has in his budget plan for 10 years. Senator Toomey proposed a very thoughtful 10- year budget plan that balanced our budget in 10 years. That was not easy to do, but he did it. We need to be thinking like that and get away from this confusing mishmash, which we use to claim that we are saving $1 trillion when really nobody plans for us to be spending $150- plus billion on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan for the next 10 years. That money has never been projected to be spent in that fashion.

So we are in a situation where it is important for the country to reach an agreement and we need to pass something that raises the debt ceiling for America. I hate to say that, but it is a fact. It would be too disruptive not to do that. But, in exchange for that, as a part of that process, we truly need to start bringing our house into financial order. We are in disarray and discord, but if we were to do that, we could leave this a better country for our children and grandchildren.

I know some just want to increase spending and then raise taxes to pay for it. The Defense Department last year got about a 2-percent increase, a 3-percent increase. Next year, there is projected to be a 2-percent increase in some of the budget numbers. It might not happen because we don't have even that much money.

But we know how much nondefense discretionary spending increased during this time of record deficits under President Obama's leadership, not counting the almost $900 billion in stimulus money. Baseline, nondefense discretionary spending increased 24 percent between 2008 and 2010, and now we are seeing the biggest deficits ever. President Bush never had any increases in baseline spending like that--never. It is just stunning.

There was a huge Democratic majority in the Senate and in the House, and the President wanted his investments, and he got these huge increases, and now they want to raise taxes to pay for it and keep it up there and maintain it. We can't afford to maintain that level. We have to bring it back down to 2009, 2008, 2007 levels. The country is not going to go bankrupt--broke--and people are not going to be thrown into the streets if we return to those levels of spending. If we make some tough choices, the same way cities and counties and families are doing all over America, we can get this house in order. That is what we are going to have to do.

I look forward to studying plans put forward by the majority leader and to studying the plan put forward by Speaker Boehner. The American people need time to know what is in them and what they mean to us in terms of taxing and spending, deficits, and interest payments. And then Congress needs to have time to vote on it.

Again, I repeat my deep frustration that we have not conducted this in open, public debate for months now, utilizing the established Senate procedure of regular order. Instead, we have attempted to solve this big problem in secret, behind closed doors, with just a few people. I believe that is contrary to the historical understanding of the role of Congress, and I am not happy about it. I oppose it, I object to it, and I expect to have an appropriate amount of time to consider whatever plan comes forward.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, one of the things that frustrates the American people about Washington is how hard it is to get reliable information and straightforward answers. We in the Senate and Congress have that same difficulty. It is hard to know sometimes what numbers and statements and plans mean and what they will cost. Politicians offer a budget proposal and they say it cuts taxes even though taxes go up. They even come up with new names to disguise tax hikes, like revenue enhancements or reduced spending in the Tax Code. It doesn't mean eliminating the earned income tax credit; it usually means some deductions somebody is allowed to take, and that has been renamed as spending.

We hear people come to the floor and blame our massive deficit on anything and everything but our out-of-control spending, whether it is the war in Iraq or it is a tax cut passed a decade ago, or it is special preferences for private yachts or Lear jets. We can't have an honest budget if we can't talk honestly and factually about it, and I hope to be able to contribute in some way to clarifying the issues. I will do my best today to plainly state some of the things I think are plainly true.

First, I wish to address the myth that the President has a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan. Some believe that the President has a plan to reduce spending by $4 trillion, but the only plan the President has put on paper and allowed anybody to see is his February budget, which doubles the national debt. The President has never put a single spending cut plan on paper that actually reduces spending, and he has no program that would substantially reduce the deficit. If he does, it is a closely guarded secret.

His budget, which he submitted earlier this year, increases taxes significantly but has greater increases in spending. By the Congressional Budget Office analysis, it would increase the deficit more over the next 10 years than if the budget were not passed at all. Indeed, it would increase the gross debt of the United States by $13 trillion, doubling the entire debt of the United States again in the next 10 years.

If there is a secret plan that does exist somewhere, it should be made public this afternoon. Let's see it. I would like to. I think millions of Americans would feel the same way. Summaries don't work.

The President summarized his budget, which I just described, as calling on Americans to live within our means and will not add more to the debt. That sounds pretty good, because this year our deficit is projected to be $1,500 billion. So we want to be living within our means again and we do not want to add more to the debt. But even by the President's own analysis, the plan didn't do this. The Congressional Budget Office, Congress's independent agency, analyzed the President's budget and found that in 10 years, the lowest single annual deficit that would occur would be $740 billion. The highest budget deficit under President Bush was $450 billion. But under the President's budget, the lowest deficit that would be accrued would be $740 billion. It goes up in the outyears until it goes over $1 trillion, over $1,000 billion in the tenth year of his budget.

How can that be living within your means? It will not add more to the debt? Every single year would be adding to the debt. So we can't deal with summaries and spin statements about a plan until that plan has been put in legislative language and scored.

We also have received no plan from our Senate Democratic colleagues. For a time there a couple of months ago, the Democrats were on the path of producing a budget in the Budget Committee as required by statutory law. I, as ranking Republican, was very anxious to see it. We were told we would get it the morning of the hearing, not a bit sooner. I grumbled about that. I wanted to have a little more time to see it. But we never received a budget. I think the majority leader and the Democratic leadership, not our committee chairman, decided they didn't want to have a budget. One of the committee folks said it would put a target on your back. Senator Reid said it would be foolish to have a budget. Why would it be foolish to have a budget? Well, you can't say your budget calls on you to live within your means if you actually put it out there. People can score it and find out whether it is true.

We haven't had a budget this Senate in 813 days. As of now, there is only one debt limit plan on paper, only one plan available for public scrutiny and review, and that is the one we are considering today, cut, cap, and balance. It cuts spending immediately, it caps it so it won't go up, and it requires the passage of a balanced budget amendment to ensure that Washington ends deficit spending once and for all.

The American people do not support a Washington plan to pass some grand deal with tax hikes that never go away and with spending cuts that are talked about but never materialize. They are wise to the gimmicks and accounting of Washington. They are not happy with us.

At this very moment the people's Representatives in Congress preside over a country that borrows 40 percent of every dollar its government spends.

People in the Tea Party are angry. And why shouldn't they be angry when this kind of leadership has occurred in the Congress of the United States of America? It is utterly, totally indefensible. It should never, ever have happened. Yet, it has. It threatens our financial future. It threatens our economy and our economic growth. So the American people are not happy about it.

That is why I introduced a piece of legislation that would require 7 days to review any bill that would increase the debt limit, because this is going to be complex. People want to bring it up at the 11th hour under a panic mode. Some warn that if we don't pass it tomorrow, the world markets are going to be destabilized, interest could go up. I don't know, some of those things could happen. So we absolutely should do something. But we ought to not wait until the last minute and have plopped down in the Senate some big complex bill that has got to be passed before the sun rises the next day and nobody has time to analyze it or score it to find out what it means.

But our Democratic colleagues here in Washington are resisting the cut, cap, and balance bill because there is no gimmick in it. There is no accounting trick to get around if this becomes law. They know it will work. And for the big spenders, the only thing you don't want to pass is a piece of legislation that will work to contain spending. You see, they want to spend more. They think if they continue to spend more, then they can go and demand you raise taxes to pay for it.

Washington is going to have to end this spending spree. These kinds of difficult choices are the responsible choices families, cities, States, and county commissions are making every day, every year.

In Alabama, Governor Robert Bentley oversaw an across-the-board cut of 15 percent from the general fund in the

current year because of the constitutional prohibition on deficit spending. Alabama is not going to run up debt. For next year, he has taken a cautious approach. Hopefully we will have more revenue, but he is cautiously approaching next year and he has proposed cuts of up to 45 percent for some agencies that he felt would be appropriate places to reduce spending. Those are tough choices. But unlike Alabama, the Federal Government is not required to live within its means.

Another myth I wish to address is the idea that our current budget crisis is the result of two wars and a tax cut. We have heard that over and over again. The wars cost money, a good bit of money. Over the entire decade, the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is about $1.3 trillion. That is a lot of money. Again, that is over 10 years, over a decade. This year alone, the deficit is expected to be $1,400 billion, or $1.4 trillion. The deficit this year will be larger than the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over 10 years. So the driving force behind our deficit is not the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not. War costs represent only 4 percent of total outlays over the last 10 years. The total amount of money spent since President Obama took office is $8.5 trillion. By the end of his first 3 years in office, we will have added $5 trillion to our gross Federal debt. These are stunning numbers.

As I said, President Bush had a widely criticized--in many ways rightly criticized--$450 billion deficit. Since President Obama has been in office, the deficits have been 1.2, 1.3, looks like this year it will be $1.4 trillion, each year, more than double the deficit under President Bush.

We are borrowing close to half of what we are spending every single day. In 2 years, nondefense discretionary spending increased 24 percent, 12 percent a year on average. This is our discretionary spending. This isn't Social Security and Medicare, which increase more than that. The stimulus package alone added into law the largest expenditure bill in the history of the American Republic. It cost more than the entire war in Iraq has cost. In a single day in 2009 we passed it on this floor, over my objection, and every penny of it was borrowed. We were in debt, but they said: The economy needs to be stimulated so we are going to spend 850 or so billion dollars.

The spending when President Bush took office was less than $2 trillion. Today, it is almost $4 trillion. It will be almost $6 trillion by the end of the decade. There is only one honest answer to the question of why our debt is rising so fast, and that is out-of- control domestic spending.

Another myth that is circulating, which I wish to address, concerns the outline from our colleagues and friends who participated and worked hard on the Gang of 6 proposal. I give them a lot of credit and respect for the hard work they put into it. I wish it had been produced a month ago so we could have actually had legislative language and know what it would mean today.

The authors of the summary, though, that they just produced for us, claimed the approach would reduce the deficit by $3.7 trillion over 10 years. That is a little over one-third or so of the deficit we projected to see in the next 10 years. But my staff on the Budget Committee, taking the summary pages they produced for us, can only find $1.2 trillion in reduced spending in that outline, along with what is a very clear $1 trillion tax increase.

Where does the other $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction claimed in the outline come from? Chairman Conrad, one of the members of the Gang of 6 and our chairman on the Budget Committee, a man I respect and have enjoyed working with, even said the outline has a $1.5 trillion tax cut. But this is compared--this is how these numbers get bandied about--it is compared against a baseline which assumes more than $3.5 trillion in tax increases would occur. So they are only going to increase taxes, I guess, by $2 trillion, and you can get savings by not having them go up as much. But based on the current tax rates that are in existence in America today, as we read their outline--and I think they would agree--it increases taxes by $1 trillion over 10 years. That is a large amount.

The real cost of the tax changes, some who have looked at these numbers say, is not $1 trillion but $2 trillion. That remains to be seen. Hopefully we will get the legislative language that can actually be analyzed, and we would know how much our taxes would actually go up.

The last myth I would like to address is perhaps the most important of all, and this is the myth that we only need about $2 trillion in actual spending cuts over the next 10 years. That has basically been what our colleagues are saying. They float the idea of $4 trillion in savings. What they mean is that you save $2 trillion by reducing spending and you increase taxes $2 trillion and you have saved $4 billion over 10 years. I am not sure that is what the American people are expecting of us when we say we are saving money. By taking it from them? It is not saving the American people more. It is not saving the private economy more, to take another $2 trillion from them. There is no free lunch. Somebody pays.

Our Democratic colleagues have said, although no plan has ever been made public to this effect, that they could get behind the budget deal that reduces the deficit $4 trillion over the next 10 years, half of it composed of spending cuts. This is not even close, frankly, to what is needed to ultimately balance our budget. We are projected to spend $46 trillion over the next 10 years. A $2 trillion reduction is only about a 4-percent reduction in spending, and that is set to increase by almost 60 percent.

Remember, we will say we are reducing spending. We are not reducing spending, we are reducing the rate of growth in spending by $2 trillion on a $46 trillion plan. Think about it. We are not talking about reducing spending. This budget would have the expenditures go up significantly in the next 10 years to $46 trillion. The $2 trillion means we are just reducing the growth of spending by $2 trillion. The $2 trillion in tax increases would mean we would still spend the same $46 trillion, but we just would borrow $2 trillion less because we have extracted more from the American people.

In just a little over 2 months, our debt will reach 100 percent of our economy--100 percent of GDP. That is the gross debt. That would match the size of our economy. It costs us 1 million jobs or more a year when gross debt reaches this level.

We have the Rogoff-Reinhart study that shows that when a country's gross debt climbs as high as ours has, it starts pulling down economic growth. Secretary Geithner said it is an excellent study. He said in some ways it understates the problem we have. Secretary Geithner knows this debt is a real problem for America.

We expected 3 percent growth the first quarter. It came in at 1.8 percent. Could that be because we have crossed the 90-percent debt-to- GDP threshold, and that debt is now a burden on the economy that is reducing growth? The experts have also downgraded the projected growth for the third and fourth quarters of this calendar year. It is very serious.

Christina Romer, who used to be in President Obama's White House on economic matters, said 1 percent growth means you will add 1 million jobs. So if our economy grows at 2 percent instead of 3 percent we will fail to add 1 million jobs we could have added. And I truly believe the debt is the reason we are having surprisingly low growth rates, below projected rates. Maybe I am wrong, but we certainly have a study that seems to say that exactly, and it has been widely praised by economists all over the country.

The honest truth is that this President and his Democratic Senate are not going to agree to the level of spending cuts in a debt deal that is necessary to put our country on a sound path. I think that is a fact. We have been negotiating and talking all year. The House laid out a budget plan. The Senate has refused--813 days without a budget. They are determined not to reduce spending after increasing domestic spending, nondefense, by 24 percent. They say they will freeze spending--freeze spending at levels that have jumped 24 percent? We do not have the money. We are borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar we spend.

Unfortunately, we're in a battle over the vision for the future of America. It is a big-government vision a lot of our Members have, and they are going to work as hard as they possibly can to preserve that vision, preserve that spending. After running up this huge

debt by a 24-percent baseline increase--that does not count the stimulus package of almost $900 billion that is thrown on top of that-- now they want to go to the American people and say: We are not going to cut spending; you have to pay more in taxes. I don't think that is what the American people want, so we have a national debate here.

This is the great debate of our time. It is not going to be settled in 2 weeks. A few people are not going to meet in secret and work out some grand and glorious deal. I wish they could, but I don't think they will. I would be pleased if they do.

I am confident that the good sense and wisdom of the American people will ultimately prevail. I am confident we will eventually get our spending under control. We will restore the American principles of limited government and build a better, freer future for our children. We will raise the debt limit, but we will also put this country on a sound path. If we get our debt under control, I think our economic growth will rise quickly, and I believe we will see the progress we have always seen in this great, productive, dynamic country.

I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I thank the Senator from Utah. I am just a bit taken aback by the majority leader's decision to alter the course that I thought we were on that would allow for debate and work on a bill to deal with the budget, the debt ceiling, and our budget deficit tomorrow. In some of his comments he made today after he changed his mind yesterday, he said:

I'm committed to allowing a fair and full debate on this

bill. I want the proponents and opponents to have time to air

their views.

And so forth. Then he says:

I think this piece of legislation is about as weak and

senseless as anything that has ever come before the Senate. I

am not going to waste the Senate's time day after day on this

piece of legislation which I think is an anathema to what our

country is about.

And he goes on to say:

The American people should understand this is a bad piece

of legislation, perhaps the worst legislation in the history

of this country.

That is what the majority leader said just a few hours ago. Well, let me ask Senator Lee--he is newly elected from the State of Utah. He has traveled all over the State.

Did the Senator share with his people at various times in his efforts that he thought a constitutional amendment, like so many States have to contain spending, is good and sound policy? Did they hold that against the Senator or does he think his election was an affirmation of the cry of the American people that we take some action that would actually constrain spending?

I am flabbergasted by the majority leader's comments. He said:

I think this piece of legislation is about as weak and

senseless as anything that has ever come up on the Senate

floor.

Well, wouldn't the Senator say that compared to all the other legislation we are talking about passing--and some of it has some teeth to it, I acknowledge--but compared to all of that, a constitutional amendment that requires us to live within our means is certainly not a weak piece of legislation.

Well, I think that is getting to the nub of the matter. I think it is a sense in which--now for a constitutional amendment to pass, it has to have a two-thirds vote in the Congress, both Houses, and three-fourths of the States. Once passed, no majority leader could come in next year and say: Well, I know I have been in favor of balanced budgets, but I don't want to do it this year. I have more spending I want to occur.

It would, indeed, curb the power of the majority leader and actually some newly constituted Senate to spend more money than the government takes in, would it not?

I couldn't agree more. I think the American people rightly have concluded that our Congress of the United States that borrows 40 percent of the amount of money it spends--because it is spending more money than it takes in--is acting irresponsibly.

As I have noted earlier, somebody said: Oh, you know, the tea party is angry. Well, why shouldn't they be angry? We have completely mismanaged the American people's business. We are elected to be responsible leaders. Nobody, I believe, would come to the floor of this Senate--I would like to see if it happens--and defend what we are doing, borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend no matter what it is on. And the President proposed his budget for next year that would include a 10-percent increase for education, 10-percent increase for energy, 10-percent increase for the State Department, and we are spending money that we don't have.

So I think a constitutional amendment would require a major participation by the American people and all the States of America would discuss it. If the American people decide they believe Congress needs to be restrained and pass that constitutional amendment, what is wrong with that? Isn't that a legitimate way for the American people to have their voices expressed according to the Constitution?

Well, I agree with that, and it is just odd to me--and contrary to the heritage of the Senate--for the majority leader to assume as much power as is being assumed now. I am ranking member on the Budget Committee, and essentially the Democratic leadership told the Budget Committee not to even mark up a budget this year even though the statutes of the United States in the United States Code require Congress to have a budget.

I know the Senator is a skilled lawyer. His father was Solicitor General of the United States. It is probably the most prestigious position a lawyer can have in America, in my opinion. To be able to stand before the U.S. Supreme Court and to represent the U.S. Government in court is an honor that is very high. So he is a student of the law, and I know he is familiar with the statutes of the United States that require a budget. It doesn't say you go to jail if you don't, I will admit, but it says we should have a budget.

Does the Senator think the people in Utah--and I think the people in Alabama--would think we should have a budget because it is the right thing to do, No. 1, and, No. 2, we should do it because it is the law?

The House of Representatives passed this bill. They passed it by more than a few votes to spare and sent it here. I believe if the American people knew what was in it, they would favor it. The people in my State would favor it. I think the American people would favor it. How does the Senator think the good people in the House, the good people of America, who overwhelmingly favor a restraint in spending and balancing our budget, would feel about the leader curtailing our debate on this important subject and saying:

I think this piece of legislation is about as weak and

senseless as anything that has ever come on this Senate

floor. I'm not going to waste the Senate's time.

I have to say I think we are having a problem in the Senate. I consider the majority leader a friend. I know it is a very difficult job. I have said that many times. I wouldn't want it. Trent Lott said it is like herding cats or it is like pushing a wheelbarrow with frogs; you put one in and two jump out. It is a tough job, but he asked for it.

The Senate is a great institution. I don't know what Robert Byrd, the late Senator from West Virginia, would say if he were here. I think I know. I think he would be very uneasy about the process we have gone through this year when, through the power of the Chair, the majority leader has blocked legislation after legislation, has blocked us moving forward with a budget, refusing to allow the committees to move forward, and refused to allow the budget even to come up last year.

We are now I think 812 days without a budget in the Senate, running the largest deficits the Nation has ever run, and those deficits are not transient. They are not going to turn around when the economy picks up a little bit. It is a systemic, deep, structural problem, and we are endangering our future. We are being blocked from even being able to discuss it while people meet in secret over at the White House with the Vice President, with the President, and a few others meet with a group of Senators. Nobody elected them, but they are good people. If they want to meet, that is fine. We need to be seeing legislation, actual bills we can take to committee and score and see how much they cost.

Being the student of American law and the Constitution as the Senator from Utah is, and being knowledgeable about common people, does the Senator think the American people think there is something wrong with this process, where we have gone all year long and not done anything of significance to deal with the most significant issue facing our Nation maybe in the next decade, and that is the size of our debt?

Mr. President, I think what the Senator has said is sadly too truthful. I do believe this is a corruption of the process. I believe it has been happening over a period of time since I have been here. I have seen it happen more and more. Both parties have done a lot of this, but I do believe it has reached a new height this year.

I think Senator Reid believes in the Senate. I think he respects the Senate. I do. But I think he is under constant pressure, and they have decided that--some of his Members, I guess, didn't want to stay here this weekend. They wanted to go home. They had a speech they wanted to give or a party they wanted to attend or a fundraising event they wanted to go to, so they don't want to stay here this weekend. Just yesterday, I think it was, Senator Reid was complaining about the House going home this weekend, and promising we would stay here and we would work. Now, all of a sudden, anybody who stays here and wants to vote on a bill that passed by a substantial majority in the House of Representatives, he says is acting--he says the bill is anathema to the Senate, and senseless, and not worth our time to talk about. How does he get to decide this?

It is an important issue, I think. I really do. I wish to make this point: There is only one bill that has passed and been advocated, that is actually on the floor of the Senate, that raises the debt ceiling and changes our debt course in America, and that is the bill the Senator from Utah has brought up--the cut, cap, and balance bill--the bill he has been so articulately describing and advocating. That is the only bill.

They say this is senseless. Well, do you have anything that raises the debt ceiling and does something about the debt of America? Does anybody else in the Senate? Or, if they bring it up, will they be blocked from bringing it up? I don't see it. The only legislation is this legislation. It is not senseless. It is very significant.

When I came to the Senate the first year in 1997, we voted on an amendment to balance the budget, a constitutional amendment. We thought the votes were there to pass it, taking all the people who voted for it and when they said they were going to vote, there were enough votes to pass it, it appeared, and at the last moment several Senators changed their vote and it only got 66 votes. Had it had 67, it would have gone to the States. I am convinced that balanced budget amendment would have passed. Had it passed, we wouldn't be in the financial crisis we are in today. Now that is a fact, I believe.

I don't think this is a senseless process. I believe people--if they don't agree with this legislation, if they don't agree with it, let's hear why. But to come down and trash it--trash the Members of the House who voted for it, trash the American people----

I thank the Chair and ask unanimous consent to have 1 additional minute.

To inquire, was there a time limit on this?

I thank the Presiding Officer for his courtesy. I would say, forgive me if I am a little bit offended. I don't think it is wrong to be offended when the majority leader walks in here and says a piece of legislation that is critical, I believe, to the future of America is senseless, not worth discussing. He changes his mind entirely and is going to file a motion. I guess he figures he will have the majority Members of his party who will stick with him and kill off the legislation tomorrow morning. I think it is a very valid piece of legislation, an important piece of legislation, and the only piece of legislation in the Senate that would raise the debt ceiling. I think it is worthy of respect, it is worthy of full debate, and ought not to be demeaned in the way it has.

I respect my friend, the majority leader. I am sure it is a frustrating job and every now and then you kind of say things maybe you wish you hadn't, but I don't think this is a senseless piece of legislation. I think it is important and worthy of the greatest consideration in the Senate.

I thank Senator Lee for his efforts to promote it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Hatch and I be allowed to participate in a colloquy.

Mr. President, many of our good colleagues like to suggest our Nation has historic deficits because the American people are not taxed enough. Some claim the so-called Bush tax cuts are the culprit, but the numbers tell a different story. In fact, these tax cuts were fully implemented in 2003. Annual revenues have increased steadily from $1.782 trillion to $2.524 trillion in 2008, and they increase every year, for an increase of more than 40 percent. That is double the rate of inflation after the tax cuts took effect.

In fact, since the recession of 2008 and the weakest economic recovery in modern history, revenue has now declined. That makes sense. With high unemployment there are fewer taxpayers and, naturally, revenue declines.

Going forward, however, the CBO projects revenue as a share of the GDP will rise to 18.4 percentage points of GDP by 2021. That is assuming extension, not elimination, of the 2001 and 2003 tax reductions. Revenue is therefore projected to return to its historic 18.4 percent average.

It would seem, then, that the American people are already taxed enough to finance a government whose spending has grown wildly out of control. The real problem is, while revenue will return to its historic average, if nothing is done to slow spending, annual outlays will increase from $3.7 trillion today to $5.7 trillion by 2021, for an increase of more than 50 percent. As a share of GDP, spending will remain, on average, above 23 percent of GDP. That is nearly 3 percentage points above the historic average.

Our friends on the other side of the aisle are almost exclusively focused on hitting up the taxpayer for more revenue.

Well, we use this turn of phrase all the time, but I am afraid it is worth discussing how politicians use it.

How many days of debt reduction over that 10-year period would a $3 billion savings or increase in taxes amount to?

Well, let me say I appreciate the work of the ranking member of the Finance Committee, a long-time member of that committee. It seems to me pretty clear that the President's budget he submitted earlier this year--which I have to say was voted down 97 to 0 in the Senate--would have increased the deficit over 10 years by $13 trillion. He has also suggested his plan to increase taxes on corporate jets by $3 billion would somehow make a difference in that. I think Senator Hatch is right, that is not accurate.

How about other proposals we hear from the Democratic side, such as cutting back mortgage interest deduction for yachts used for second homes?

It is shocking to see how small those numbers are, and we aren't hearing that in the press and in the national discussions. From the talk we have heard about these proposals, you would think they would yield more than 2 days of debt reduction over 10 years.

Well, with $13 trillion--that is 13 thousand billion-- $21 billion won't amount to much.

The Senator has served on the Finance Committee for a number of years and is now the senior ranking Republican there. If you listen to our friends on the other side of the aisle, it would appear that all fiscal problems could be resolved by taxing millionaires. Is that an argument that the Senator is familiar with?

Well, not many, is my answer to that. But as often as the President talks about taxing the rich or spreading the wealth around as a cure for our fiscal problems, you would think it would balance the budget. But would he get us there?

Going back to the other chart on taxation and spending under the Obama budget, I would note President Obama's budget raised taxes significantly, increased spending even more, and as a result, over 10 years, created more debt projected than if he had made no budget at all.

That is a stunning thing. You can talk about raising taxes on American workers, on families, on small businesses and on the wealthy and investors all you want, but this talk is easy. It ignores the root causes of the deficit and debt problem here in Washington: out-of- control spending.

It may sound like a cliche to the American people that Republicans are always talking about out-of-control spending. We wish it were a joke, but sadly, it is true.

Let's take another look at the definition of red herring on the chart. It says: The name of this fallacy comes from the sport of fox hunting in which a dried, smoked herring, which is red in color, is dragged across the trail of the fox to throw the hounds off the scent. Thus, a ``red herring'' argument is one which distracts the audience from the issue in question through the introduction of some irrelevancy.

Our friends on the other side, using White House talking points, sophisticatedly prepared, appear to have resorted to red herrings with their deficit reduction proposals. They want the American people to think a few easy tax increases on the rich or yacht owners or corporate jet users or oil companies--the people behind the tree--can solve our debt crisis without spending reforms. They hope these red herrings will hide a serious Democratic vulnerability. If they are not going to address spending in a serious way, then massive tax increases on the middle class will be a necessity.

These red herrings are designed to throw those citizens who care deeply about reducing the $13 trillion debt that the President's budget will incur off the trail.

The trail of deficit reduction leads to one of two places: restraining out-of-control spending; or crushing tax relief increases on middle-class families.

Restraining spending is not a red herring. It cuts to the heart of our fiscal problems. It goes to the root of the problem.

The President and his allies need to come clean with the American people. The President so far has refused to present a deficit reduction plan in these negotiations that are going on. He says he has one, but we never see it so it can be scored and analyzed. The White House seems content to produce cheap talking points justifying these red herrings, rather than meaningfully addressing our debt crisis. As I have said before, and will again, this shows a disrespect for the American people.

Our people deserve better. They need honest, fair analyses of the problems we face. I expect they will reward those who talk straight with them and offer serious grown-up efforts to reduce our debt with their support; and I think they will be unhappy once it is realized how little these proposals would impact the huge debt crisis we are now facing.

Madam President, I thank my colleagues for their excellent presentation. They are excellent Senators. And, from all that appears, they produced a piece of legislation that will be positive for our country. But the pending measure, H.R. 2055, An Act Making Appropriations for Military Construction, the Department of Veterans Affairs and related Agencies, offered by the Senators, would appropriate Federal funds for the year 2012. However, the Senate has not yet adopted a concurrent budget resolution for 2012, and there is no 302(a) allocation in place for that fiscal year.

Section 303(c) of the Congressional Budget Act prohibits consideration of any appropriation bill until a concurrent resolution on the budget has been agreed to and an allocation has been made to the Committee on Appropriations for fiscal year 2012, or any subsequent year.

Therefore, I raise a point of order against this measure pursuant to section 303 of the Congressional Budget Act.

Madam President, I object and would debate the issue.

I make this motion for a very important reason, not directly related to the quality of the work of Senator Johnson and Senator Kirk in producing this bill, but a very important question concerning the budget of the United States.

We have in the United States Code a budget act. The budget act says you shouldn't be bringing forth appropriating bills until you have a budget. That is pretty simple, that is pretty commonsensical, and it is the correct way to do business. We haven't had a budget for 806 days now. The reason we are spending this country into bankruptcy is we have had no budget. This year, the majority has not even sought to bring one to committee, and certainly not brought one on the floor.

The Democratic leadership said it would be foolish to pass a budget. Well, I don't think it is foolish to pass a budget. I think our lack of budget is the reason we have gotten out of control in what we are doing. So that is the reason why I made the objection.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be able to enter into a colloquy with my Republican colleagues.

Madam President, I would say this is a very important matter, and I don't like to have to take this action, but I believe it is the right action.

I see on the floor Senator Corker from Tennessee. He was mayor of the city of Chattanooga and as mayor he produced budgets and actually did one of the greatest jobs of any mayor of the United States, the truth be known, in making that city the fabulous place it is today. He is a businessman also.

I ask Senator Corker, what are his thoughts at this point in time about the state of the financial management of the taxpayers' money being handled by the Senate?

Before recognizing other Senators, I briefly ask Senator Corker, having been a businessman and a mayor and having observed the political scene in the country, is the Senator aware of any government entity--city, county or State--that systemically, almost structural, is borrowing 40 cents out of every $1 they spend? Can he remember any time in Tennessee, in any city or State, that ever ran such a deficit?

I thank Senator Corker. I just would say the spasm that is occurring in the Senate, the frustration that is boiling up, is not for light or transient reasons. It is a big deal when the U.S. Government has been for months and will continue to be borrowing about 40 percent of every $1 we spend, running up the largest deficits the Nation has ever seen. The law says, the United States Code says you should have a budget.

When you set a budget, you take all the bills that are out there and tell them how much money they have to spend so the total amount of money at the end does not exceed a dangerous level for the country. That is what a budget does.

We are going to seek and repeatedly call to the attention of this Senate that we have the cart before the horse. We are spending money without a budget and we are going to have to have a budget or else we are not in control of our spending. Once you have a budget, it takes 60 votes to violate the budget. You can stick to it if you make up your mind to do so. We do not have to violate it and burst the budget. That is what we are talking about today. It is a matter of great seriousness. I am pleased my colleague, Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky, who was elected last fall to this body, is here. I know he talked about the State of the American economy and our debt during that campaign.

I ask the Senator, what are his thoughts as we approach this moment?

The Budget Act.

It absolutely will. It sets forth precisely the language. It requires this. It is pretty clear. I don't think there is any doubt about it: Until the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year has been agreed to and an allocation has been made to the Committee on Appropriations of the Senate under section 302(a) for that year, it shall not be in order for the Senate to consider any appropriations bill.

That is pretty clear. I am pleased to see the Senator is a doctor, not a lawyer, but I believe almost anybody could understand that point.

That is correct. I am sure in 1974 they were concerned about the process in the Senate. They decided to try to bring order to it. They decided to require the budget be passed which sends a message over to the Appropriations Committee. This is a subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee producing their MILCON proposal.

They then give them numbers which they are supposed to stay within. If

they do not, it requires a 60-vote total to proceed above the budget number. It is a way to bring integrity to the system.

I thank the Senator. I cannot think of a more important time in history for us to return to the tried and true budgetary process than at a time in which we are spending to a degree that is irresponsible, above anything we have ever done before. It is threatening the American economy. It is not a light, little problem. It is a serious problem. We are going now 805, 806 days without a budget. That is part of the problem.

We are going to continue to work to insist that we proceed in the regular order under a budget. The House has passed a budget. The Republican House passed one by April 15, as the law requires. We have not even had a markup in the Budget Committee because the Democratic leadership has decided it is not fun to vote on a budget. You have to show your cards. You have to show where you are going to raise taxes, where you are going to cut spending, and how much the deficit is going to be after it is all over.

President Obama's budget received such a poor reception because it was so unbalanced and irresponsible that, I guess, maybe they decided it would be foolish, as the leader said, for the Senate to even produce one. That is not a good reason.

I know it might be appropriate that we yield at this point to our colleagues and let them share any remarks they have.

I don't believe we are, but I have to give this subcommittee credit. I am told that the appropriations bill now before the Senate is the first stand-alone appropriations bill brought to the floor of the Senate since 2008.

When I came here, we would try to pass all our appropriations bills, at least a number of them, before the August recess and all by September 30. When we did not, we were embarrassed. In the last several years, everything has been cobbled into one big continuing resolution and moved in a block.

I guess I say to my colleagues as I yield the floor, thank you for proceeding at a pace to get a bill forward. It is not your fault that we have not had a budget at this point in time.

I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of the time.

I see Senator Lee from Utah. Senator Lee is a new Senator. He campaigned throughout his State and talked about the kind of issues we are dealing with today. I would yield to him at this time.

I thank Senator Lee for his leadership on this cut, cap, and balance plan. I think it would change the debt trajectory of our country and put us on a path to prosperity rather than a path to decline and deficit and maybe financial crisis.

Indeed, Mr. Erskine Bowles and Mr. Alan Simpson, the co-chairmen of the debt deficit commission appointed by President Obama, told us earlier this year in the Budget Committee that this Nation has never faced a more predictable economic crisis. What he is saying was the spending course we are on is so out of sync with reality, it is inevitable we will pay a price economically for that. So part of the reason we are where is because we have not had a budget in over 2 years. If you don't have a budget, it makes it harder for the American people to ascertain whether you are spending more than you ought to be spending, and the whole process is able to be pursued without public knowledge and full disclosure when you don't have a budget.

Every President is required by the same Budget Act to submit a budget. I think there is no President who has failed to comply with the Budget Act and does not require that you go to jail if you violate it. It would probably be better off if that had been the case. But the President submitted a budget earlier this year in February. It was, I believe, the most irresponsible budget ever presented to Congress at a time when systemic, structural deficits of trillions of dollars, the likes of which we have never, ever had before--at a time when we needed to confront that and discuss it as a people, as a nation,

he submitted a budget that increased taxes significantly, increased spending even more, and increased the deficit, not reduced it.

Eventually it came up for a vote. I brought it up for a vote since my colleagues wanted to vote down the House budget that was a responsible budget. It would actually change our debt course, reduce spending by $6 trillion. They brought that up and it got 40 or so votes, but it did not pass. I then brought up President Obama's budget, in a Senate with a majority of Democratic Members, and it failed 0 to 97. Mr. President, 97 to 0, because it didn't deserve a single vote, but it had one characteristic about it that was important. It actually had numbers in it. I guess the budget staff--they always produced a budget--before the spin doctors at the White House realized it, they sent out a budget projecting the President's future plans for America. For example, at a time when we are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar, the President proposed next year to increase the Education Department. Ninety percent of our education funds are from the States, and they always take care of that, and we provide certain Federal funds that can be an asset to them sometimes. Sometimes it is a liability, frankly. But at any rate, he asked for a 10.5-percent increase in Education, a 9.5-percent increase to the Energy Department, which spends most of its time blocking the production of energy rather than producing more lower cost, cleaner energy for the country. It proposed a 10.5-percent increase in the State Department budget, and it proposed--hold your hats--a 60-percent increase in transportation. Much of that was for high-speed rail so everybody can walk--80 percent of Americans, apparently, can walk to a train station and travel on the high-speed rail. We don't have the money for that. States are rejecting the money. They run the numbers. They know it is not going to be feasible and that it is just an overreach.

I guess what I am saying is that somebody in this country does not get it. I thought the American people sent a message loud and clear last year when they sent a lot of new Members to Congress, such as Senator Paul and Senator Lee, who were shocked at it and talked to their constituents and came to Congress to do something about it.

We haven't even brought up a budget. Why didn't Senator Reid and the Democratic leadership decide to bring up a budget? Well, if they bring a budget, then they have to show what they believe. They have to propose a solution to the problem. Well, what was their plan? Because they called up the House budget and voted it down--every Democrat voted it down--and they never produced one of their own. When I brought up President Obama's budget, they voted it down. So we have not seen one real solution.

They have been talking about, oh, they will do this and that. Senator Durbin said we can change Social Security some--we can do something about Medicare. Let's see your plan. Let's see it. The chairman of the Budget Committee says he has a budget. He has a budget, and he leaks out portions of it, but nobody sees the real budget. There are certain numbers and visions and ideas, and he claims they have a budget. But if a person is unwilling to produce the budget and have a hearing in the Budget Committee, then I think they don't have one. It is not a budget. I don't know what it is, but it is not a budget.

I see my colleague, Senator Cornyn, who has been a member of the Budget Committee. I know he is knowledgeable about these issues, and I am pleased to yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Texas. This is very serious business we are engaged in. The strength of his comments, the method of delivery, and the content are indicative of the serious challenges we are facing.

For example, under the budget that was submitted to us, the only budget we have seen so far from the President, the interest on our debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office--that used their 10- Year budget and calculated we are paying about $214 billion in interest today on our debt--in the 10th year of President Obama's budget, as Senator Cornyn said, the interest would crowd out other things. It would be $940 billion--1 year's interest.

When we borrow money, we pay interest just like individuals do when they borrow money. We are borrowing so much money that we are doubling the debt again in our country in 10 years. The interest on it will crowd out other things. For example, it would be more than Social Security, more than our Medicare, more than our Defense Department spending in that year.

So I thank the Senator for sharing that.

I see Senator Johnson, and I would be pleased to yield at this time.

Mr. President, I will just wrap up and close at 2 o'clock. I understand under our agreement that 2 o'clock will start the time allocated for the Democratic speakers as they may appear, and there would be time at 3 o'clock under my control for Republican speakers.

Very good.

So I will wrap up and ask unanimous consent that there be 30 minutes under my control at 3 p.m.

I thank the Chair.

Well, the fundamental problem is that our Democratic leadership has decided it would be foolish to have a budget, even though it is required by law. They have refused to produce a budget now for 806 days--over 2 years. Last year, Senator Conrad produced a budget in committee, and it was voted on and brought to the floor, but the majority leader refused to even bring it up for debate and vote.

This year I suppose it was that the majority leader decided we would not even have one in committee. So we have not commenced any action to pass a budget. But now we are proceeding to spend money. We are proceeding to pass legislation that would expend taxpayers' money without a budget. That is not good policy by any standards, whether we have a law or not. But we actually have a law that requires us to have a budget first. That is why I found myself having to raise a budget point of order.

We were not elected to shut down the committees, to violate the congressional process of deciding how money should be spent, to cede our constitutional responsibility to some secret meeting somewhere so they can produce some sort of bill and drop it in the Senate on August 1, presumably, and then demand that we pay for it.

Because, look, you have to look behind the numbers. Just because the President says his budget does one thing, his plan does another thing, don't you think we ought to check it out?

One of the most stunning statements I have ever heard from a President and from the Budget Director was heard earlier this year after the President presented his budget. He and the Budget Director publicly--and the Budget Director in committee--said: Our budget will have us live within our means and pay down the debt.

They used those words. So anybody hearing that thinks: Gosh, I am glad the President prepared a budget that will have us live within our means and pay down our debt. We have been spending too much money.

What is the truth? The truth is, the lowest single annual deficit in 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office analysts, would be $740 billion.

The highest President Bush ever had was $450 billion. That was too high. This year it will be $1,500 billion, and I would point out that in the outyears $740 billion was about year 6. The 7, 8, 9, 10 numbers are going up again, and CBO says in the 10th year, the deficit under the President's budget will be $1.2 trillion. So this is not good. We need to get our house in order.

We are going to insist that we do it in the right way. That is why I have objected to proceeding to spending bills without a budget. It is time for the majority leader to bring us into session. Let's have a budget. Let's see where people stand. Let's make the tough decisions. Let's vote on it. Let's allow ourselves to be held accountable by the people who sent us here.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I appreciate Senator Barrasso and his leadership on so many issues in this Senate.

It is a sad event that we are now filing an objection to the movement of an appropriations bill because it violates the Budget Act contained in the United States Code. The Budget Act says you shall not move forward with an appropriations bill if you have not first passed the budget.

I ask my friend from Wyoming, as an accomplished orthopedic surgeon and physician and from his personal experience in the legislature in his State, does it strike him that when you are in the most serious debt crisis that perhaps the Nation has ever had from a structural, systemic point of view, that we ought to follow the law, we ought to first decide how much money we can afford to spend next year and then allocate that money to the various spending appropriations committees so they can produce a plan that would live within that budget? Is that the commonsense way we should proceed?

We appreciate our colleagues who worked on this bill, but there are more appropriations that should be done this year. How can they be continued without a budget? You say we spent within the President's numbers or the House numbers, but those have not been approved in the Senate. We have no votes in the Senate. It is not a binding number.

The truth is, what we need to do is what the House did, I believe. I ask Senator Barrasso, isn't it true that the Republican House, with a new leadership, came in, they faced up to the 10-year budget window we have, they laid out a plan for 10 years, and it cut spending by $6 trillion? It actually simplified our Tax Code substantially and reduced certain taxes, focusing on tax reductions that create growth so we could have more income generated. And, whether you agree with it or not, by April 15 they did all this, which is what this code says. Doesn't the Senator think they have done their duty? What would he say about the failure of the Senate to even attempt to present a budget?

The law is specific, and the need is there whether we had a law or not. The law doesn't require families to have budgets, but families who are smartly managing their money have budgets. Businesses have budgets. No law requires them to have budgets, but it is because it is the only way to manage your money. It is an unacceptable situation in which we find ourselves.

Let me ask the Senator, I want to try to boil it down to the nub, why we have not done it, why the majority in the Senate has not proceeded with a budget.

Let me just say that a budget is considered so important that, unlike other legislation, it can be passed with a simple majority. It cannot be filibustered. It has priority process to be moved rapidly on the floor. It cannot be blocked. The goal is that you could pass a budget. Even a party, if they wanted to do it on a straight party-line basis, with over 50 votes could pass a budget.

I am trying to focus on whether there is something broken about the Senate. Is there something broken that causes us not to be effective? Is there something broken in the way we operate that would have kept the Budget Committee from bringing a budget forward and voting on it in committee and passing it out of committee? They did that last year. Is there any reason the Senator can think of, of a substantive nature, that would have blocked that?

If the Senator will yield, unless you are unwilling to tell the American people where you stand, unwilling to put real numbers on paper--you prefer to say: American people, don't worry about it; we are meeting in secret over here. Don't worry about it; we have the Vice President, and he called some Senators together, and he is going to fix it. You guys who serve on committees and the Finance Committee where taxes have to be voted on, should be voted on are no longer relevant. The system is broken.

They are saying: We are not going to go along with this, and it is not because it will not work, it is because the budget presented by the President, the only budget we have seen here increased taxes substantially, it increased spending even more than that, and it increased the debt more than if we had done nothing over the 10 years.

I see our colleague, Senator Toomey, a new Senator but not new to the budget process because he was a member of the Budget Committee in the House.

What I am frustrated about, and I believe people should be frustrated about, is this policy decision by the leadership in the Senate that it was foolish to produce a budget. That is not a sign that the Senate is broken; it is a sign that the leadership is broken. It is a sign the leadership does not have the courage to actually stand before the American people and produce a plan, because it either would raise taxes too much, not cut spending enough, or

raise the debt too much. I think that is irresponsible, but I have to say, Senator Toomey, a new member of our Senate, has produced a budget. He laid it out right at our committee, and he was prepared, as a member of our committee, to produce his budget and advocate for it. You know what happened? We did not meet. I cannot call the committee into session. I am the ranking Republican. Senator Toomey cannot call the committee into session and have a vote. They decided not to meet, not to do their duty. They are going to meet in secret somewhere and have their little discussions about what they want to do, and the people who are elected to be accountable to the American people for what we do with their money are standing around wondering what is happening. Forgive me if I am not happy. I do not think it is right. I think it is weakening the Senate. I believe our constitutional responsibility is not being fulfilled if we end up with some big deal bill on August 1, and we are told it has to be passed by August 2, and you can find out what is in it after we pass it. I am not there. Count me out.

We had more people wanting to get on the Budget Committee this year. They were so excited. It was the most wanted committee to be on in the entire Senate, and we have not done anything. The Senator was selected to be on the committee, which is a tribute to his experience, and I guess I would ask, how does the Senator feel about where we are?

I thank the Senator from Pennsylvania. He has been such a fabulous addition to the committee, talented and experienced and worked so hard that he has actually laid out a budget himself. The President has 500 people. The Congress here has a lot of staffers. Senator Toomey has produced a budget. The House has produced a budget, but we have not seen one here.

I am pleased my colleague, another member of the Budget Committee, Senator Ron Johnson, is here. He is a business person who traveled his state and talked with his constituents about his concerns about the debt this country faces.

I am pleased to hear Senator Johnson's thoughts at this time.

I thank the Senator. I thank him for his great group of freshmen Senators who have added so much common sense to our problem. We were not elected to preside over the financial decline of America. We were not elected to skirt the law. We were not elected to shut down committees, to shut down debate, to cede our constitutional responsibility to secret meetings and closed-door proceedings. We were elected to do our duty, and there is no higher duty than to protect the American people from a clear and present danger. For that reason, I will oppose cloture on today's motion to waive section 303(c) of the Budget Act. I will vote to sustain the budgetary point of order, and I will encourage my colleagues to support my amendment raising that budget point of order to a threshold of 60 votes.

This is only the beginning of our fight. There will be more votes, more objections, more points of order working with my colleagues. I will give all that I have to help put this country on a sound, honest, financial path. Washington must recognize that America's strength does not lie in the size of our government, but in the scope of our freedoms and in the hearts of our people. The debt we have today is already pulling down our economic growth. Experts tell us we have lost 1 percent of economic growth because our debt exceeds 90 percent of our total economy--90 percent of GDP. It is 95 percent of GDP right now. We will reach 100 percent of GDP by the end of this year. That alone reduces growth, according to the experts. Secretary of the Treasury Geithner said he thought that was an excellent study that found that fact.

What does 1 percent growth mean? Well, instead of the first quarter having 1.8 or 2 percent growth, we would have had 3 percent growth. If we had 3 percent growth instead of 2 percent growth, 1 million more jobs would be added per year, based on just the alteration of the difference between 2 percent growth and 3 percent growth.

We have to face these problems. I hope our colleagues are reaching a decision about how to proceed that can be successful. We have to make progress this year. We are going to have to sustain progress for a decade. If we do so, we will put this country on the right path. If we get that debt down--it is not too hard to do it--we will start seeing our growth come back, more jobs being created, more wealth being created, more taxes being paid, less help to people who are in need because they are now working when they weren't.

So I thank the Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to share these remarks.

Madam President, I yield the floor, and I note the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that it be in order for me to offer and receive a vote on an amendment to this bill which relates to a 303(c) point of order that requires adoption of a budget resolution prior to the consideration of any appropriations bills.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank the Republican leader for his efforts in this regard. I know for a fact that Senator McConnell and the leadership on our side hoped and believed it was possible to take advantage of the opportunity of the discussion over raising the debt limit to create a major alteration in our plan of spending in this country. It has been disappointing to not have been met halfway in that regard.

When Senator McConnell was told the White House's plan included only a $2 billion cut next year in spending, I found it stunning. Our deficit this fiscal year will have added $1,500 billion to our debt. We are going to save $2 billion next year? This is not acceptable, and I am disappointed. I appreciate the Republican leader's efforts in that regard.

I would note, as to the discussion about that the war is causing our deficit, it has been expensive over 10 years. The war on terrorism, Iraq, and Afghanistan together have cost about $1.5 trillion. This next year, we are projecting a little over $100 billion to be spent. So I will just say that the amount of the deficit this one year will equal the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars over 10 years. The deficit this year is $1,500 billion. The cost of the war this year is about $150 billion. It is about 10 percent of the deficit we are running this year. Although we hope to bring those numbers down and are already projecting next year those numbers to come down to closer to $100 billion from $150 billion, the cause of our deficit is not the war. It represents about 10 percent of the total deficit we are running this year. That is just a fact. That is what the numbers show.

One of the few things mandated for Congress to do every year is to pass a budget. According to the Congressional Budget Act, contained in the U.S. Code, signed into law in 1974, the Senate Budget Committee must produce a budget resolution by April 1 and adopt a conference agreement on that budget by April 15. Furthermore, a budget must include total levels of spending, expected revenue, and deficits for no less than 5 years, and frequently we do 10-year budgets.

Once a budget is in place, Congress is prohibited from passing legislation with spending that exceeds the levels that were in the budget--sort of like we do in our homes. In essence, a budget is both a concrete plan for the future, and an enforcement mechanism to help us stay within the limits we set, and to ensure honest accounting.

One of these enforcement mechanisms in the Budget Act as set forth in the code is a prohibition against the consideration of any appropriations bills in the absence of a budget. We should not move forward with spending bills until we have established a budget. How simple is that? That is why we are supposed to have it done by April 15, because the appropriations bills come along afterwards.

This is the essence of good government. We should not spend taxpayer dollars without a plan for how to officially allocate the dollars and in a way that maximizes the effectiveness of our spending and minimizes waste and abuse and fraud. We have too much of that in our government.

This point of order--and there is a point of order in the code-- contained in section 303(c) of the Congressional Budget Act, once that point of order is raised, the legislation in question cannot move forward unless a majority of the Senators vote to waive the budget requirement that taxpayer money should not be appropriated without a budget--without a plan.

This is what the law dictates. I believe this is our responsibility as legislators and as Senators. This is what the organizational structure of this very Senate requires, and this is the duty the Democrat-led Senate has refused to fulfill for 805 days. Senate Democrats have failed to adopt a budget in more than 2 years, and this year they have refused to even produce a budget for public review. They claim they have one. They claim it does some good things, and they leak portions of it to the public and spin it as being a positive document. But when asked to produce it, they do not do so. When asked to have hearings on it, they do not do so.

If they are proud of it, if it will sustain public scrutiny, why do they not bring it forward? I have never imagined that I would serve 2 years in the Senate and now be ranking member of the Budget Committee, and we would not have a budget even presented. Today we are scheduled to vote on a motion to proceed to the Military Construction appropriations bill for fiscal year 2012, beginning October 1 of this year.

Regardless of my feelings about the legislation or my high admiration for

those who have worked on it, I think I have a responsibility, a duty, as ranking member of the Budget Committee during this time of extreme fiscal danger, the greatest debt we have ever seen, to oppose cloture on this measure and to raise the 303(c) point of order should cloture be invoked.

My objection does not mean I do not support the bill. To any who would suggest otherwise, let me say that this action is at its core a defense of our men and women in uniform. No one understands duty better than those who wear the uniform, and it is our duty to write a budget that sets priorities and ensures the needs of our troops are met. The military is a priority of the highest order. To protect that priority, we must have a budget, especially in these challenging economic times.

The Senate has failed those in uniform if it chooses political expedience over drafting a budget that includes a military spending plan. How can we protect the military from unwise cuts if spending plans are not even made public?

The only area of government significantly cut in the unseen Democratic budget proposal that I have referred to previously--that I have called a ``phantom budget''--appears to be the Pentagon's.

If we take the numbers that were leaked from their budget plan, it calls for $900 billion in cuts to the Pentagon, to the government, to the military. Well, if this is their plan we ought to know it. So I do not want to hear people say that I am objecting to the Military Construction bill because I do not appreciate the military, while the Democratic majority, who is producing this Military Construction bill, claim they have a budget that hammers the Defense Department by $900 billion.

Indeed, while that appears to be the plan, the budget submitted by President Obama earlier this year--not one produced by the Senate Democrats but the President's own budget--calls for a 9.5-percent increase in the Energy Department, a 10.5-percent increase for the Education Department, a 10.5-percent increase for the State Department, and a 60-percent increase for high-speed rail and the Transportation budget without money to fund it.

While they are proposing major cuts in defense, we have major plans on the table to increase spending next year when we are, again, going to run a $1 trillion-plus deficit. The authors of the Congressional Budget Act likely did not contemplate a future in which the governing party believes budgets are no longer necessary. That seems to be the case today. That is why I am also bringing forward legislation that will raise a 303(c) point of order threshold to 60 votes--no appropriations without a budget unless 60 Senators choose to waive that requirement. That is in the law.

We sometimes put requirements in the law. We do not have very good enforcement mechanisms. The danger we face from continuing to operate this government without a clear, concrete budget is simply too great. Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that our Nation's debt is the gravest of all national security threats we face. It is so. We are reaching a point where our economy could enter into a financial crisis as a result of our national debt.

We owe it to the extraordinary men and women who serve this country to defend at home the way of life they have defended abroad. That means the Senate must confront the debt problem that threatens us with economic disaster. Already, as economists Rogoff and Reinhart demonstrated, we are losing at least 1 million jobs a year as a result of our high debt, which is now 95 percent of GDP and soon to be 100 percent of GDP.

In just a little over 2 months our Nation's gross debt will be as large as our entire economy and growing larger. This year we will take in $2.2 trillion, but we will spend $3.7 trillion. By the end of the first 3 years of the Obama administration, we will have accumulated $5 trillion in gross debt--new debt.

Over the next 10 years we are projected to spend $46 trillion, adding another $13 trillion to our national debt. That is 13,000 billion. The President proposed saving $2 billion next year. He proposes we increase taxes on corporate jets that over 10 years would save $3 billion, while he has a budget submitted to the Senate that would increase the debt by $13,000 billion over the next 10 years.

I do not defend corporate jets. We can eliminate that as far as I am concerned and change our whole tax structure, which needs simplifying and more integrity and more effectiveness in it. But that is not a responsible way for a leader to suggest that we are going to fix our debt problems--by changing the corporate tax rate for jets. No nation can sustain this level of debt, nor can any nation ever raise enough taxes to cover this level of spending. The course we are on is not merely unsustainable, it is unimaginable. The American people have every right to be angry with their Congress. We are sitting here running a government and borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend. They should be furious with us. It is unacceptable. It is unexplainable.

We spend and borrow all we can. That is the fact. There is only one sound answer: control spending and grow the economy, not tax it into submission. For Americans to regain prosperity, Washington must regain discipline. Hiking taxes to bail out the Washington spenders who have put us in debt by increasing domestic nondefense spending in the last 2 years--not war, not Social Security, I am talking about general expenditures of our government have gone up 24 percent in the last 2 years. They have run up huge debts, and now they want the American people to pay more so they can continue to spend at this irresponsible level. I say no to that. I am not for that.

Since the Democratic-led Senate last passed a budget, we have spent $7.3 trillion and increased the debt by $3.2 trillion. When President Obama took office the public debt of the United States was about $5.7 trillion. In 3 years we have added close to $4 trillion in debt. In 4 years President Obama's debt that he will have run up at this rate will be larger than the debt that has been accumulated in the entire history of America.

We are on an unsustainable course. This fiscal abandon has brought us to the brink of the debt ceiling that we have. We have a limit on how much debt we can run up statutorily. Yet, still, the Senate Democrats will not produce a budget, and the White House will not put together an honest plan with real spending cuts that they will stand behind and let people analyze and score. Just more gimmicks, tricks, and games. That is not acceptable. That is why we are in this fix today.

Majority Leader Reid actually declared it would be ``foolish'' to have a budget--``foolish'' to have a budget. Would you tell a family who is having difficulty with their finances it is foolish to have a budget? Would you declare to a family who is running up credit card debt and 40 percent of what they are spending is put on a credit card every month that they should not have a budget?

The United States Code requires us to have a budget by April 15. It is easy to claim deficit reduction as a priority, but if our leaders were actually to put a plan on paper it would become all too clear that their real desire is for larger taxes and only meager cuts to spending. That is the truth. That will not get the job done. Numbers do not lie. Their rhetoric creates the appearance of savings, but those savings do not exist when you look at the numbers carefully.

But while the White House and Senate Democrats may think their strategy is clever, I do not think the American people should be amused. I do not think the American people are amused. Until the majority, who asked for the responsibility to lead this Senate--that is what they wanted. They have it. Until they allow this Chamber to adopt a badly needed budget, I am going to continue to raise points of order on appropriations bills.

Now more than ever, we should fulfill our legal duties, not shirk them. More than ever today we should. We were not elected to preside over the financial decline of this country. We were not elected to shut down the committees, deny them the right to function, to shut down debate or cede our constitutional responsibility to secret meetings and closed-door proceedings.

The debt limit is not only about fulfilling our obligation to creditors, it is about fulfilling our obligation to the all of the people we serve, good Americans. We owe them a Senate that

works, that works openly and tirelessly on their behalf, which casts votes on these important matters and has to respond and be accountable to the American people. We owe the people an honest, competent, limited, efficient government. We owe them a Senate that is worthy of their faith and trust.

We are not there. We are not fulfilling that responsibility. Therefore, I expect that I will object and raise a budget point of order against movement to the Military Construction bill.

I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

The Senator from South Dakota is an experienced member of the Budget Committee and a member of the leadership on the Republican side in the Senate. Isn't it true that we had more interest from Members wanting to join the Budget Committee this year, particularly new Members who had gotten elected and talked to their constituents about their fear of America's debt and they wanted to be on the Budget Committee, and only a few could be selected out of the group who wanted to be on it?

What has been the Senator's observation as to how they have reacted to the fact that no budget has been presented; that the committee has never met or even marked up and held hearings as the United States Code requires? Maybe the Senator can share how they feel about this.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to enter into a colloquy with my Republican colleagues.

Madam President, I thank Senator Klobuchar. She is a valuable Member of the Senate, and she mentioned some savings or additional revenue from tax increases--some were $10 billion, one was $8 billion, and I think one was $3 billion. I would just say that over 10 years, that is how much those changes would raise.

I would recall for all my colleagues that we unwisely spent $847 billion on a stimulus package that produced little income, and we are paying interest on that of about $27 billion to $30 billion a year. It adds up as the years go by, every year, just the interest on that one single expenditure.

We have now gone 804 days without a budget in this body. During that time, this country has spent $7.3 trillion. That is $7,300 billion. We have paid in interest on the money we have borrowed $439 billion just in that period of time we haven't had a budget. Interest on our debt is $439 billion in 804 days. And we have accumulated, during this time, an additional $3.2 trillion in debt. During the past 2 years, under the super Democratic majority here in the Senate and in the House--60 Democratic Senators and the President's leadership--the discretionary nondefense spending went up 24 percent, and the President proposes in his budget next year to increase the Education Department, the State Department, the Energy Department, and the Transportation Department double-digit increases again, when this year 40 cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed.

I am glad my colleagues can be with me now. I see Senator Johnson is here. He is a member of the Budget Committee. We had more people want to get on the Budget Committee this year, the new Senators who were recently elected. Senator Johnson was one of the few to be selected. And they hope to make a difference and to confront the problems we face.

Senator Johnson is a successful businessman. He just joined the Senate last year. How has the Senator felt to date about the process?

Madam President, I ask my colleague, Senator Lee from Utah who just joined us, his late father was Solicitor General of the United States and law school dean, and we are glad that Senator Lee has put a lot of effort in drafting a constitutional amendment, the good lawyer that he is, that would make a difference for our country.

Maybe the Senator would share his thoughts about his observations as a new Senator on how things are going and why he believes a constitutional amendment, as Senator Wicker from Mississippi said, would be helpful for our country and help put us on a sound path for the future.

I thank Senator Lee for his leadership and hard work on that. It is not an easy thing to draft something that people would all agree with, but I think all the Republicans have signed on to that, and we are happy for that, and I believe this is not an impossible dream.

When I came to the Senate in 1997, we had a vote on the balanced budget amendment. It fell one vote short. We got 66; it required 67. How much better off would we have been today, how much less debt would we have placed on our children and grandchildren had that amendment been passed then? I do think it is time for a national discussion again on this issue and to make that change, and would wish to point out something about the debt we now have.

The unemployment rate came in disappointingly with only 18,000 jobs created last month, in June. We look to have 150,000 just to stay level. Unemployment went up. Economic growth in the first quarter was expected to be much higher than it came in. I think the first number was 1.8. Maybe it has been revised to 2 percent.

The Rogoff-Reinhart study has studied debt defaults in countries all over the world for eight centuries, a highly respected study. Secretary Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, said it is an excellent study and in some ways it underestimates the risk.

This study says when your debt reaches 90 percent of the economy, 90 percent of the gross domestic product, it pulls down economic growth by 1 percent to 2 percent. We are now at 95 percent debt to GDP. We will be at 100 percent of debt to GDP by the end of this year.

I believe our growth could have been 3 percent instead of 2 percent the first quarter. And 1 percent growth, according to Obama White House's economic adviser Christina Romer amounts to 1 million jobs created. So I believe we have lost 1 million jobs that could have been created, we have lost additional tax revenue and growth and prosperity that would help us deal with our debt because of the debt. You see, you can't keep borrowing.

Maybe when we get our GDP was 30 percent--maybe that is what it was when Senator Wicker probably came to Congress and now we are at 100 percent. Our debt is as large as the entire productivity of our economy, and economists tell us it is pulling down our growth and it is costing jobs. Americans are not working today because of debt, and what we hear is, Don't worry about it; debts don't matter.

Senator Wicker has been here in the House and in the Senate. Has the Senator seen the situation in which our financial crisis, short term and long term, systemically is more severe than it is today?

Senator Johnson, as I recognized, is a businessman. President Clinton recently said we need to reduce our corporate tax rate. I was on a TV show with Senator Bill Nelson, my good Democratic colleague, who said we ought to reduce some of these tax expenditures, as some call them. My understanding was we could use that to help get our rates down so we are more competitive worldwide and create more jobs.

I guess my question is, if you simplify the Tax Code and you eliminate gimmicks, should the money be applied, as President Clinton suggested, to reducing our rates so we are more competitive or should they be used to subsidize more spending by Washington?

I would say that I do believe we are at a national crisis with our debt. I believe it endangers the Nation, because Erskine Bowles, who chaired the Debt Commission appointed by President Obama, has told us that we are facing an economic crisis as a result of the debt in written testimony to the Budget Committee, and he warned that we have to change our course. I certainly believe that is true; and I believe the Rogoff and Reinhart study, affirmed by Secretary Geithner, is correct, that it is already pulling down our growth. I am worried about the future of our country.

Maybe Senator Lee will wrap up for us. He just finished a campaign, talking to hundreds of thousands of people in his State. What is the Senator's perception of what we need to be doing at this point in time?

I thank the Senator. Madam President, I would cite that the interest factor my colleague mentioned is very real.

This year we are expected to pay $240 billion in interest. How much is that? That is just a number. The amount of money that we spend under the Federal Highway Program is $40 billion. The amount of money we spend on Federal aid to education is $100 billion. This year we are paying $240 billion.

However, under the budget that was submitted to the Congress by the President--the Democratic Senate has never brought one forward on their own--that budget added $13 trillion more to the debt, and the Congressional Budget Office, our nonpartisan accountants, has calculated what the interest payment would be in the 10th year of that 10-year budget. It has concluded the interest payment that year would be $940 billion. That is larger than Medicare, it is larger than Medicaid, it is larger than Social Security, it is larger than the defense budget. These numbers are incredibly large and

we cannot--as a gentleman told me at a townhall meeting--borrow our way out of debt. We cannot keep spending. It is dragging down our economic growth right now. It is costing jobs right now.

There are some people who say we do not have enough jobs; we need to spend more. Where are we going to get that money? Borrow that money. We are already borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend. Can we afford to borrow more to try to get a sugar high, keep growth artificially growing now? I think we just have to be mature, grownup, and realize we are going to have to work our way out of this fix.

We can do it if we create stability and soundness in our economy. If we do this right we can create a system in which we can have growth. Our business community is hanging in there. They are doing pretty well. They are holding up, but we have to create jobs. We have to have more job growth and more growth in the entire economy. That is what we need.

I do believe the debt is a weight on us. It is a burden that is reducing growth, and we must have that to pull our way out of this crisis. I am glad to see the President has joined in the discussions, but I have to say I think he has moved from the budget he submitted just a few months ago, which was the most irresponsible budget ever submitted to Congress calling for more taxes, more spending, and more debt. In other words, over the period of 10 years his budget laid out that taxes would go up, the spending would go up more than the taxes, and the deficit would go up more than the current path we are on. It made it worse.

We cannot do that. When that budget was brought to the floor--I brought it to the floor--and we got a vote, it failed 97 to 0.

I am glad the President is working now. Together we have to somehow develop a strategy to put us on a course so all Americans and the business community in our country and the world financial community will say: Boy, the United States is getting their act together. They are making the right decisions. They are on a sound course now. Maybe that is where we need to put our money instead of some other place because they are on the right path. Right now it is very dangerous.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, the situation involving the need for a budget and the situation involving the need to raise the debt limit for the United States is getting more and more crucial, it seems, by the hour. I have been a firm and consistent critic of this idea that has been developing the last several years in the Congress that a few people meet in closed, secret meetings and somehow reach a decision that I am supposed to assume is good and decent and ought to be confirmed by a vote here in the Senate.

I feel that there are 100 Senators--and some a lot smarter and more capable than I--but I feel a personal sense of obligation and duty to ensure that when I vote on an important piece of legislation my constituents care about, that I know what is in it and that I understand what is in it, and it is hard to know. When you have a bill that comes out that proposes to have changes in the trillions of dollars, involving Federal spending for a decade, in a budget or some other fashion, it requires us to be careful about that.

So I would express again my dissatisfaction and belief that this Senate--not the House--has failed in its duty to participate in an open process concerning our budget. The House of Representatives did. The Republican House promised to have open hearings. They had a bill on the floor--a budget. They passed it within the time required--by April 15. It completely changed the debt trajectory of America and put us on sound footing. It reduced spending by $6 trillion--not $2 trillion but $6 trillion--and it didn't raise taxes on the American people. In fact, it reduced taxes in a way they felt would engender better economic growth, which is the best way to engender more tax revenue--having more people make more money and pay more taxes. So I really believe the House fulfilled their constitutional duty.

In the Senate, we have now gone well over 800 days without a budget. We didn't have a budget when our Democratic colleagues had 60 Senators--the highest number one party has had in probably 70, 80 years, maybe longer. They didn't pass a budget. You can pass a budget with 51 votes--with the Vice President, 50 votes. It is a simple majority. It is an expedited procedure. Budgets have been passed when parties have only had one-vote majorities in the Senate.

So I would say it is odd that we have gone 2 years without a budget, but it is not odd--in part because of having no budget--that we have seen the largest surges of debt the Nation has ever seen. President Bush was criticized for running up debt. He had, in 1 year--his last year--a $450 billion deficit, and he was roundly criticized for that. Some of that was TARP money, which they scored as monies spent, and it was properly and accurately scored. So it came out to $450 billion. The year before, it was a $160 billion deficit. President Obama's first budget deficit was $1,200 billion. His next budget was $1,300 billion. This year's budget, by September 30, is projected to be around $1,500 billion. We haven't had a budget. Is anything connected there?

So I want to say, first of all, one of the ways you act responsibly is when you do it out in front of the people.

I noticed at the press conference today that President Obama, when asked about some of these matters, pushed back and said: Well, we want to have an agreement right now. We don't want to wait any later, close to the election.

He was basically saying--it is pretty clear, really, and I am not exaggerating anything--when you get close to the election, Senators and Congressmen don't like to vote for more debt and they do not like to vote for more taxes. What is wrong with that? The American people don't want debt. They do not want taxes. They want us to bring this government under control. But what is being suggested is, oh, it is politics. There is something corrupt politically if you believe you shouldn't bail out the big spenders in Washington by taking more money from hard-working Americans and taking it out of the private sector to give to the public sector that has mismanaged the money they have.

Some might say: Well, Jeff, we have these big deficits because you all cut taxes.

We haven't cut taxes in years. President Bush cut taxes with revenues much higher today than when those taxes were cut. We have gone into an economic decline, and this recession has reduced our income. That is true. It is not so much the rate of taxes. It is the rate of profit. It is the rate of income. It is the rate of money people are being paid, so they do not have as much money and they are not paying as much in taxes. Now, we can run around and find everybody who is left with money and try to tax them, but at some point that begins to be self- defeating.

So I guess I am trying to raise the point, How did we get here? Well, there is another way we got here with these huge deficits we have. In the Keynesian philosophy of economics, we had a big spending bill called a stimulus bill. I opposed it. I remember reading a piece by the Nobel laureate, Professor Becker, from the University of Chicago, not long before the vote saying it was not going to create jobs; that it was not sufficiently stimulative to be a good stimulus bill, in fact, in his mind, as a Nobel Prize-winning economist. And that is exactly what happened. It didn't create jobs. It went to social

programs, it went to State aid, and it went to things other than the infrastructure that we were told it was going for. Only 4 percent of that money went to roads and bridges--4 percent out of $850 billion. Every penny borrowed will be to create or to stimulate jobs, they said. We are going to redo our infrastructure, they said. It was not done that way. It was social spending overwhelmingly, and it didn't create growth in the economy.

Another reason we have the debt is because the baseline spending has surged under the Democratic leadership and President Obama. Defense Department has gone up 3 or so percent the last couple of years in spending. Nondefense discretionary spending--the things we do such as energy programs and road programs and aid and grants and things we like to spend around here--went up 24 percent in 2 years. We were having a drop off in income, a drop off in tax revenue, and we increased spending dramatically.

We never had 10, 12 percent increases in spending per year. But hold your hat. The budget the President submitted to us in February of this year--several months ago--proposed increases for the Education Department of 10.5 percent, proposed increases for the State Department of 10.5 percent, with 9.5 percent for the Energy Department and a 60- percent increase for transportation--the high-speed rail projects. But we don't have the money. All of that would have been borrowed. We couldn't sustain flat spending without borrowing money, we are so far in debt. Forty cents of every dollar we spend today is borrowed.

So I have been a big critic of this scheme to meet behind closed doors and not tell the rest of the Congress or the American people what we are doing and to plop down on the floor of the Senate some proposed deal that we have to sign at the eleventh hour or the government is going to shut down. Why haven't we been talking about this? They talked about it in the House. They voted on it. They reduced spending $6 trillion. In the phantom budget that has been talked about by our Democratic colleagues, one they never produced so it could actually be accounted for, they are claiming it would reduce spending $2 trillion and are patting themselves on the back about how great they are. But when you take out the interest savings that occur, it is only $1.4 trillion in actual reduction of spending and it is a 2.7-percent, we estimate, increase in taxes.

Senator Conrad, the chairman of the Budget Committee, does a good job. He is a smart man. I think he understands the threat America faces. I thought he did, although this phantom secret budget that they just leak out descriptions of whenever it is convenient has not impressed me. Really, it just hasn't been impressive. Is it a vision? Is it a specter of some kind of a budget that nobody can ever grasp their hands around, and it is only what the people who are holding it close to their vest say it is and all the rest of us have to accept that? I don't think so. I have become very uneasy about what we hear in this city of Washington about plans and policy.

When President Obama announced his budget, it was the most irresponsible budget this country has ever been presented with by a President. I don't think anybody can dispute that. I am prepared to defend that against anybody who says so. It increased spending, it increased taxes. Over a decade, it increased taxes and increased spending and made the deficit worse than if we hadn't done anything, at a time when the Nation should have been working from January until today figuring out how to bring this government under control and contain the growth in spending and contain the debt. This is what he said, and his budget director in our committee said--Mr. Lew--that: Our budget calls on us to live within our means and pay down the debt.

The Congressional Budget Office scored the budget. They analyzed it over 10 years. The lowest single annual deficit that was occurring during that time was $750 billion, the lowest deficit, almost half again higher than President Bush's highest deficit. And it starts going up in the outyears 8, 9, and 10--to over $1 trillion in the 10th year annual deficit. Interest on that debt that would be accrued by such an irresponsible budget would go from around $200 billion last year, $240- some-odd billion this year, to $930 billion in 2021. That would be larger than Medicare, larger than Social Security, larger than the defense budget including the war--much larger than those. So interest is a danger.

Senator Conrad talked this afternoon about his phantom budget, and he told us a lot of things he wanted us to know about it, and he articulated it in a way that made you think that it is not such a bad idea. But we have real numbers people. Just like President Obama said his budget was going to pay down the debt and cause us to live within our means when it had no deficit lower than $740 billion--he said it is a blueprint. He said it is a framework. But he didn't say it was a budget because it is not a budget. A budget is a document that can be read, ascertained, evaluated, and scored.

So they leak it to the Washington Post--not to Members or colleagues of the Senate here--they leak to the Washington Post some of the good things he wanted to get out, and then they talk about some of the good things here today. Forgive me if I am not impressed. If it is such a good budget, why don't you print it out and propose it to us? That is what the House of Representatives did. They are prepared to defend their budget.

Senator Conrad said this: that he thought it could play a part in this big deal the President is talking about to change our debt trajectory in a positive way. Well, those words are good words, just like the President's statement that he had a budget that was going to cause us to live within our means and pay down our debt. That is what he said. That is what his budget director said. Well, you can say things, but it doesn't make them true. I can say I don't have a desk in my hand, but I have a desk in my hand, reality being what it is. So that was not a good budget he submitted, and I am worried about this phantom budget we are hearing about today.

The way we calculate this phantom budget and the things that have been released about it, it would raise taxes as much as $2.8 trillion and cut spending about 4 percent over the 10 years--this is a 10-year budget--at a time when we are projected to add, under the President's plan, $13 trillion to our national debt. So we are going to reduce the debt by 4 percent from $13 trillion--an utterly unsustainable figure. The House budget would cut discretionary spending $6 trillion. The Toomey plan would have cut spending $8 trillion.

Senator Conrad actually said on the Senate floor that his budget-- which raises taxes, as I indicated--would reduce taxes by $700 billion. He said it would reduce taxes by $700 billion. Now, how is this accounting--this trick, I will suggest--accomplished? Well, to get to that number, he is obviously comparing it to a CBO baseline which assumes that every single tax rate from the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that has been in place now almost a decade is going to expire and all those rates go up. So he is saying that if he keeps a few of them from going up, he has cut taxes. Only in Washington can you raise taxes dramatically, change the tax rates that have been in place for a decade, see taxes go up dramatically, and call that a tax cut.

By the way, baseline is very important. We don't know what baseline the chairman of the Budget Committee is using. He understands it very well. He is one of the most knowledgeable, capable Members of our body, and he understands these well. I believe the phrase he used was that it is a plausible baseline--a plausible baseline.

Well, let me tell you the baseline we should use. The baseline, when you talk about whether spending increases or whether spending decreases, should be what you are spending today. If you are spending $100 billion today and if you spend $102 billion, you have spent $2 billion more. If you spend $98 billion, you are spending $2 billion less, right? Well, what they do in Washington and the reason this country is so close to bankruptcy is they assume growth rates, baseline growth rates. Then when you reduce the baseline growth rate, and it is going up $10 billion next year and you reduce that increase to $9 billion, you claim you cut spending by $1 billion and it went up $9 billion. Now, that is the kind of logic that has put us in the difficult position we are in.

So I have decided and told my staff on the Budget Committee that when we get numbers, we are going to compare them to the only thing that is solid, and that is a level baseline--does it go up or does it go down? In fact, the Ryan House budget that cut $6 trillion still increases spending. It is not a real cut.

So you do have to figure out how much you are talking about and what baseline you are using to know what the numbers are. The best way to do that and the most objective way to do that is to use a flatline number and see whether we are up or down, and then we can communicate. But if you get to choose your baseline--and CBO has one, the President has another one, and it looks as though the Senate Democrats have chosen another one they call a plausible baseline. I don't know what that means. The debt commission that had their recommendation for reducing debt chose another baseline. It makes it confusing, and it makes it harder to understand.

So when you talk about a budget that is supposed to really make a difference in our economy and you propose $2 in tax increases for every $1 in spending cuts and suggest this is the kind of thing you are working with the President on in their negotiations, maybe we can begin to understand why the Members of the House and the Members of the Senate who have been in these meetings have been walking out of these meetings and saying: All they want to do is raise taxes.

The President himself said several months ago that he thought $3 of spending cuts and $1 of tax increases would be a good mix. But what we are hearing today is $2 of tax increases to $1 of spending cuts. That is not acceptable and has no chance of passage. And if the American people have time to read that kind of legislation and find out that is what is in it, they are not going to be happy with anybody that supports it, in my view. So perhaps that is the reason they want to wait until the eleventh hour, claim the country is about to shut down, and try to force it through. As the President suggested, you don't want to get it too close to the election when people might remember what you did to them.

Goodness gracious, they talk about a $900 billion cut in the Defense Department. That is part of their plan too. Well, let me just tell you how that gimmick works. You propose a $900 billion cut in the Defense Department and you know that almost 20 percent cut is not going to become law, but you go out and tell the public you saved $900 billion and you plan to cut it from the Defense Department, and you can't cut that much money from the Defense Department. So no wonder our retiring fine Senator Joe Lieberman, after the Democratic discussion of this, was moved to say he was worried about what such a budget would do to our national security. Well, he should be.

I have been on the Armed Services Committee. I don't deny that the military has to tighten its belt. Just like every other department in this government, it may even have to take a real reduction in spending. But we are not going to have an 18-percent, 20-percent reduction. Are we going to have our men and women who place their lives on the line for us have to pay for profligacy in Washington? I don't think so.

Mr. President, I would ask Majority Leader Reid, who I believe is the strategist in the Senate who told our chairman, Senator Conrad, that he should not bring up a budget--I think Senator Conrad and I were prepared to bring up a budget. He was working on one. His staff was working on one. We were within days of a markup. He was going to produce a budget, and those of us on the Republican side had amendments to offer, and we were preparing for a debate, and they decided all of a sudden not to have a markup. Later, Senator Reid said it would be foolish to produce a budget.

I would say it would be foolish for the Congress of the United States to take a paycheck to operate the way we are operating when 40 cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed. That is unthinkable. How did we get in this position where we are spending $3,700 billion and taking in only $2,200 billion and all the difference is borrowed?

Finally--this is important--a lot of us have heard these numbers but it has not resonated with us about how important they are. Professors Rogoff and Reinhart have written a book called ``This Time It's Different,'' studying eight centuries of sovereign governmental default on their debts, the kind of thing Greece is going through today. They have analyzed how it happens and the consequences. They chose the name because they said that every time politicians ran up debt in their country to high levels and caused a crisis, they said: It will not happen to us. This time it is different. We are different from those other countries that went belly up. Then it happens just like that, savagely, immediately, like the financial crisis that hit us in 2007- 2008. What they concluded in further study was something else. Not only when you get your debt too high do you run the risk of a financial crisis, but your debt slows your economic growth and the countries that have debts that equal 90 percent of the economy--I see my good friend, Senator Reid. He has the toughest job in Washington and I am not making it any easier for him. It will be good for him to hear this. I think he knows it.

But they have concluded when your total American debt reaches 90 percent of our economy, our GDP, and goes above that, it pulls down your economic growth by 1 percent. CBO now is scoring our growth to come in at .9 percent below what it otherwise would be because of our debt.

The first quarter we had 2 percent economic growth. If we had 3 percent economic growth that would be a 50-percent increase in growth. If we had 1 percent greater increase in growth that would amount to, according to the White House economic team some time ago, an increase of 1 million jobs in America.

What I am saying is we erroneously state too often, I think, that the question is about our children and grandchildren. I truly believe the sluggish growth and the very weak job numbers we have been having are the result of carrying too much debt. We have to start reducing that debt even if it is painful for us to do so. I hope our colleagues will produce a budget that will actually change the numbers. I am not confident that will happen.

Failing that I do hope, Mr. Leader, and I say this to my leader, too, that if a bill is brought forth in the Senate we have at least 7 days to consider it before we are asked to vote on it. I believe it will take that long to properly evaluate it.

I see the majority leader here. It is always a pleasure to work with him.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, while the Senator is still here, I recall--Senator Cornyn is a member of the Budget

Committee and knowledgeable about these issues--that we have had one budget actually presented to the Senate, and that was the President's budget. It was scored by the Congressional Budget Office, which shows that under the President's budget, the debt of the United States would increase by $13 trillion in 10 years.

I do not know if the Senator is aware, but I would ask him is he aware of how much additional revenue would come to the government if the President's proposal on corporate jet taxation were to be imposed, and would that make a difference in the $13,000 trillion that would be added to the debt in the next 10 years?

I thank the Senator.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to enter into a colloquy with my Republican colleagues for up to 30 minutes.

If Senator Cornyn could join us, we would be pleased.

Mr. President, the debt situation we are in today is the most serious our Nation has ever faced. A lot of people do not understand it and do not understand how serious it is. Even after World War II, we had growth. We had the baby boomers just coming of age, we had more young people and fewer older people, and the situation was more positive than it is today, even though we had debt after the war. That is just a fact.

I have tried to look at the creation of a budget that would balance in 10 years, bring us into balance in 10 years. It is hard to do. It absolutely can be done. It takes some real effort, but it can be done. We can do it, and we have to do it. But President Obama, during his years as President, is on track to have four consecutive trillion- dollar deficits--the highest deficit we have had previously was the $450 billion deficit that President Bush had. We have had $1.2 trillion and $1.3 trillion.

This September 30, when the fiscal year ends, it is estimated to be $1.5 trillion for 2011. We take in $2.2 trillion, we are spending $3.7 trillion, and 40 cents of every dollar we spend this year is borrowed. It is an unsustainable course.

President Obama appointed a deficit commission. He appointed Erskine Bowles, a former Chief of Staff of President Clinton, as co-chair. He also chose Alan Simpson, a former Republican Senator. They submitted a statement to the Budget Committee that this country faces the most predictable economic crisis in its history. We have to act, they told us.

They were asked when could this crisis happen. Mr. Bowles said it could happen within 2 years--not for our children and grandchildren; he said 2 years, maybe a little sooner or maybe a little later. Alan Simpson popped up and said he thought it could be 1 year; in other words, some sort of economic crisis like we had in 2007 and 2008 or something that could put our economy in a tailspin. It is that serious. The debt trajectory path we are on is unsustainable.

Tomorrow, I have to say, will mark the 800th day this Senate has not had a budget. We are borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar we spend, and we have gone this long without a budget. There is no plan, apparently, to present one. The chairman of the Budget Committee, on which I am ranking Republican, tells us he has one, and he talked to his colleagues and they have agreed on it. But it remains secret.

The Congressional Budget Act explicitly says we should have a budget by April 15. It says the committee should report a budget resolution on April 1. Well, we have not had a markup. Apparently, there is no plan to have one. We are just going to wait and see if secret negotiations can produce something. That is not acceptable at a time in which the debt is the primary threat to the health, security, and welfare of our Nation, and there is no doubt about it.

Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the greatest threat to our national security is our debt. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a very similar statement. They are exactly right. There is no dispute about it.

We have had nothing on the floor of the Senate except a resolution saying we should tax the rich--a sense of the Senate, that has no power, no binding authority, no numbers, not how much we are going to attack the rich.

We are in serious condition. I think the American people, if they understood how little has been done in this body this year on the most important issue facing this country, would be even more dissatisfied with the U.S. Congress than they are--more dissatisfied at least with the Senate. I knew the Senator from Missouri before, who is not new to Congress. He was a Republican whip in the House of Representatives. The House has passed a budget this year--an honest budget that changes the debt trajectory of America in a solid way, and it would put us on a new path for prosperity. Everybody doesn't have to agree with everything in it, but they met their responsibility by April 15.

It is great to be here with Senator Blunt. We are so pleased to have him in the Senate. I ask him if he would share his thoughts at this time about this situation.

To my knowledge, at no time since I have been here did the Senate not attempt to pass a budget. In the last 2 years, even when our Democratic colleagues had 60 votes--the largest majority in recent memory in the Senate--they only attempted to bring a budget to the floor once. Last year a budget did go to committee. It was marked up by Senator Conrad. It came to the floor, but the majority leader decided not to bring it up. This year, it seems that Senator Conrad was told not to have a markup, not to even produce a budget in committee.

It seems to me to indicate a lack of willingness to lead because-- would the Senator not agree?--a budget sets the priorities, demonstrates the vision for the future of the country and what we should spend, what we should tax, and how much debt we can afford to run up. Those are fundamental responsibilities. How would he evaluate the fact that tomorrow we are 800 days without a budget? What does that say about the leadership we have seen in the Senate?

Before the Senator shares his thoughts about the appropriations process from his extensive experience in the leadership of the Congress, just briefly, I want to make sure the American people and our colleagues know what happened.

I see our newly elected colleague from Wisconsin, Senator Ron Johnson. He won election, you could say, in an upset--a popular, big victory. He campaigned all over his State and talked about the issues we are talking about today.

As a new Member of the Senate, I would love to hear Senator Johnson's comments about where he thinks we are today.

Well, let me just note that we had a sense-of-the- Senate resolution on the floor, and we had a cloture vote on it that I think everybody voted to go to the bill. That is what the leader wanted to do. We go to the bill. But it is really nothing because if it passes it has no impact and makes no change whatsoever. It basically says we should tax the rich more.

Well, we can debate these issues, but I will just note that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, which is an organization for the development of world businesses has concluded that the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. We always thought the Europeans were more hostile to wealth and more socialistic than we were, but that is their analysis.

As Senator Blunt said, how much more do we want them to pay? Maybe they should pay more. Let's debate it and let's talk about it. But that is not going to fix our problems.

Senator Johnson was a successful businessman, an accountant. I have seen his work. I am so glad he is on the Budget Committee. I guess he and Senator Enzi are the only accountants around here, and we are glad the Senator is here. I have seen his work.

He actually adds up numbers and makes spending charts. He showed me one this morning, trying to figure out a way to change America.

But my first question is--the Senator was a successful businessman and he had never been a politician before, so why did the Senator run?

I ask unanimous consent that I be given 1 additional minute.

Mr. President, I just want to say we have in this colloquy Senator Blunt, who was the second ranking Republican leader in the House and who has dealt with these issues for many years. We are so glad to have him in the Senate--and Senator Johnson, a new Senator, passionate and concerned about the future of America, both of them. I think the American people should be proud of the service they have rendered.

We have to change. I believe we can, and we are going to keep fighting toward that end.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I understand that President Obama has summoned certain congressional leaders to the White House tomorrow to discuss spending, debt and deficits, and the debt limit we now operate under. The President has summoned congressional leaders to the White House on at least eight different occasions in recent weeks to discuss budget and debt issues, not including the private talks involving Vice President Biden.

Yet with only weeks to go before the debt limit deadline--we are told August 2--secret discussions have failed to produce any grand bargain. Talk is not an action. I do think that is a problem the President has. He thinks making a speech or having an announcement is something that actually involves changing course in America and it has some effect, when it is pretty clear it does not.

We have had lots of talks and we have heard lots of speeches, so I think we should stop paying attention to these private talks, from which no details emerge and no public discussion is heard. We are getting much too close to the point at which it will be too late to involve the public and allow Congress to fulfill its constitutional duty on spending and taxes.

In remarks yesterday, the President said, ``To truly solve our debt problem, we need to take on spending and domestic programs and defense programs and entitlement programs.'' Well, I agree. Yet the only plan he has put forward proposed increases in his spending for next year in the budget he submitted. He submitted a budget earlier this year. He made a speech backing away from it a little bit but not a lot, because his speech, when we carefully tried to study it, did not do much to change what the trajectory is in his budget.

But this is what the budget calls for next year that we are supposed to be working on now and are not. This budget proposes to increase spending in 2012, beginning October 1, 2012--well, the inflation rate is projected to be 1.3 percent. It may be a little higher than that. Defense called for a 4.3-percent increase in spending. The Energy Department called for an 8.9-percent increase in spending, that big bureaucracy that is trying to make sure we block production of American energy. It proposes for the State Department a 9.3-percent increase in spending, and the Education Department a 13-percent increase in spending, at a time this country is in incredibly difficult straits. We are having double-digit increases.

Then in the Transportation Department, he proposes a 62.4-percent increase. Do we really need to have high-speed rail within walking distance of 80 percent of all Americans? We do not have the money to do that. Most of the high-speed rails are not working--are not paying for themselves around the world. They can work in certain highly congested areas in good locations, perhaps. This idea that we are going to have a massive national interlocking system of maybe $700 billion of high- speed rail is not realistic in the short term. But his budget called for a 62-percent increase.

We asked where the money would come from. They said it is a tax.

What kind of tax?

Well, it is not a gas tax.

So I called it the ``not gas tax tax.'' What tax then do you propose, Mr. Secretary, before the Budget Committee?

Well, we will talk with Congress about that.

Well, the Congressional Budget Office, which is required to analyze expenditures against revenues, said that is not a proposal of revenue, and they scored that as all expenditures without any revenue, because we are not going to pass a big tax to increase this kind of spending. Give me a break. If we do, we ought to use some of the money to pay down the debt, not continue to surge spending in this fashion.

I wish again to point out that President Bush in his last year in office had the largest deficit I believe the country had had in recent modern times. The largest he had was $450 billion. That was large. It was roundly criticized. It included a lot of the TARP money that they threw in at the last minute.

But what about President Obama's first year? That was $1.2 trillion in deficit. The second year: $1.3 billion. And this year, it is projected around $1.5 trillion, going into 2011, ending September 30. Then September 12, he has got these kinds of increases. What kind of responsible behavior is that? For the President of the United States to say that we need to truly solve our deficit problems, we need to take on spending in domestic programs and defense programs and entitlement programs, and this is what we get as a proposal, to increase spending at double-digit rates, basically. I mean what is this? There is no proposal whatsoever to deal with entitlements. Those long-term unsustainable programs threaten the future of our country economically. Indeed, we are in more trouble right now than a lot of people realize from our debt situation.

So the only plan the President put forward, as I said, is increasing these expenditures and not confronting entitlement programs at all. And when the House Members passed a far-reaching, historic, honest, fact- based budget that would have actually changed the debt trajectory of our country over a period

of years, it was considered to be tough, but even it did not balance within 10 years.

We are in a deep hole. It is hard to balance this budget. The House proposed that and they laid out a plan, after 10 years, altering Medicare so that it would help put Medicare back on a sound basis. All of it was slammed by the President of the United States. He even had a speech at the White House and invited Congressman Ryan, who is the brilliant chairman of the House Budget Committee, and had him sit right in front of him, and then he slammed his bill. Congressman Ryan had courage and integrity and he produced an honest budget that would have made a difference for America. Would we have agreed with everything in it? Of course not. But he didn't deserve to be hammered by the President of the United States.

To begin to change the debt trajectory we are on, we need to cut at least $6 trillion of spending over 10 years. That is not enough, but we need to do that. If we do that, it will make a huge difference. Just $1.5 trillion or $2 trillion in cuts will not be enough. It will not be enough. The President's budget, which he submitted in December--the only budget we have gotten from the Democratic side--would increase the debt by $13 trillion, and $2 trillion in spending cuts is not enough.

We are long past the point when the President needs to share his vision with the country and admit that he cannot keep up this spending rate. His budget was a failure to confront the reality that we don't have the money to keep up unsustainable spending.

According to Bloomberg News, Democratic officials claim that a deal will have to be reached between July 15 and July 22 ``in order to write a bill and comply with congressional rules requiring advance publication before consideration.'' In other words, we have as little as 3 days to see the legislation.

I have proposed legislation that says we ought to have 7 days to consider this historic piece of legislation that would raise the debt ceiling. We want to see how much change in spending the bill would mandate. In other words, if we are going to raise the debt ceiling, because we have limited how much debt America can approve--Congress has--and to keep borrowing--we are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend--if we keep borrowing, we have to raise it. What we, and the American people, are saying is we don't like raising it, but if we do, you better show us that you have changed your ways and you are not continuing this reckless spending, when we don't have the money.

Every bit of that increase is borrowed. We can't continue that. I truly believe that Congress needs to assert its role, step up and accept responsibility for the crisis we are in and begin to develop the procedures openly and publicly and get us out of this fix.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I would like to just briefly say that the matter of the merits of the Libya resolution the majority leader wants to move to is not something I am addressing at this point. It is a significant issue, and good Senators can disagree about that, but the reason we are here this week is because 46 Senators from the Republican side objected to the Memorial Day recess, because we have done nothing on the budget, and were clearly going to object again when it came to the Fourth of July because we have the debt ceiling issue that we are told creates an emergency by August 2.

We haven't passed a budget in 797 days. The Democratic majority has not

even brought one to the floor in that time. The country is spending itself into decline and damaging our future. We know that. It has been talked about for months. We have had no discussion in the Budget Committee, of which I am ranking member, about marking up any kind of budget this year. The Budget Act in the United States Code says we should pass the budget by April 15. So the objection I and others had to going home and recessing this week was not in order to discuss the Libya resolution; it was to get to work now to confront the financial situation we are in.

We are not going to be serving our constituents well if some sort of secret agreement comes to fruition and a bill is plopped down on the Senate floor on August 1 that has to be passed by August 2. That is not responsible. It is not acceptable. Even the President understands that. Last week, he said this:

And so there's no point in procrastinating. There's no

point in putting it off. We've got to get this done. And if

by the end of this week, we have not seen substantial

progress, then I think members of Congress need to understand

we are going to start having to cancel things and stay here

until we get it done.

He is talking about spending--debt, the debt ceiling, the limit on the amount of money the U.S. Government can borrow. That is what he said last week. And that is what we have been saying for over a month.

Regardless of how one feels about the Libya resolution, that is not what we need to be doing this week. The letter we wrote to Senator Reid concerning the Memorial Day recess said this. This was a month ago.

Until a budget plan is made public, and until that plan is

scheduled for committee action, on what basis can the Senate

justify returning home for a 1-week vacation and recess when

our spending and debt continue to spiral dangerously out of

control?

That is what we said then and it remains true now. This Congress is acting in an irresponsible manner and it is not healthy for us. I am beginning to wonder if the Senate is, in fact, beginning to lose its reason for being. Are we supposed to just sit here and wait for two, three, four, or five people to meet in secret and then tell us at the eleventh hour that we have to pass a bill? Is that legislating? Is that what Congress should do?

We certainly are in violation of the Budget Act, which says a budget should be marked up in the Budget Committee by April 1 and passed by April 15. We haven't even called one up, and we haven't passed one in 797 days.

I recall, as we make the decision on our vote today, what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen said recently, which is that the greatest threat to our national security is the debt. That is what he said. The President has not asked for a Libyan resolution. It is not something he cares about, apparently. He hasn't asked for it. He doesn't consider it important.

I will tell you one thing we have to do: We have to fulfill our responsibility as a Congress, as the people who control the purse. That is our ultimate constitutional responsibility. We are not fulfilling it and, therefore, I urge my colleagues not to move to the Libyan resolution but to send a message to our Democratic leadership that we insist on moving toward solving the financial crisis this Nation faces.

I thank the Chair. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I thank Senator Thune so much for his comments, and that of Senator Johanns. They are raising a fundamental question.

We have never, ever been in a financial situation in our country that is as systemically deeply dangerous as we are today. You go through a war and you borrow a lot of money. You go through a recession, maybe your debt goes up some. We are systemically in a recession, but we are also in long-term projections of a dangerous surging level of debt, as your chart shows.

Last year the Democratic majority moved a budget out of committee. Senator Thune is a member of that committee, and remembers that debate. Senator Reid declared that he wasn't going to bring it up. It was never brought up on the floor of the Senate or even debated.

This year, apparently the majority leader decided once again we would not have a budget, and directed that the Budget Committee not even mark up a budget. So we have not even commenced work on a budget this year.

Indeed, the majority leader said it was foolish for the country to have a budget this year, which is stunning, since during the 792 days we have been without a budget the debt of the United States has increased some $3.2 trillion. It is a stunning thing.

So, yes, I believe that history shows in the past, and based on the real crisis

we face in the future, there has never been a more important time for us to do what so many States do: Have a balanced budget amendment that requires us each year to balance that budget. I believe this is the right thing for us, and it would be so much better for our country.

Senator Johanns is here, and he talked about executive leadership. You and Senator Thune were talking about how dangerous the debt path we are on is, how much greater it was in Nebraska's situation. Alabama has had to cut spending. But we are not cutting spending at all here. We haven't been. We have been increasing spending here.

I wanted to ask you a serious question. Do you feel that the first responsibility of a Chief Executive of the United States, the President, would be to honestly tell the American people that this is not just a political dust-up, but that we are facing a very serious debt crisis that could actually put us into an economic tailspin again, knock us down again, and the debt numbers we are seeing will look even worse? Do you feel he has that responsibility, and do you feel it has been met?

I thank the Senator, the former Governor for those comments. I do believe it is difficult for Congress to ask the American people to make sacrifices if the President does not acknowledge clearly and articulately the deep crisis we are in and why those sacrifices have to be made. It is not that we want to; it is because we do not have the money and we have to make some changes in what we do. That is why a number of us called on Majority Leader Reid to not recess next week. Let's stay and do something about the debt.

I understand we may now be staying next week, but I am not at all sure that the plan is to deal with anything involving the greatest threat to our Nation, which is our debt. Apparently, they want to talk about other issues. That was not what drove the concern. It was not about a patent bill--much as I would like to see it passed. That was not what we were concerned about when we said we need to be in next week. It is because, by the end of this month, maybe the first of August, we will see a monumental bill of some kind produced by the Democratic majority in the Senate, brought out here, and we are going to be asked to vote for it in a matter of hours, being told every minute that the country is about to sink into oblivion if we don't sign it and vote for it, not knowing fully what is in it, not fully having studied it, the American people not knowing what is in it. That is wrong policy. We object to that.

I believe the regular order in this Senate should be conducted, that we ought to have a proposal brought forth so it can be amended, so it can be analyzed, so it can be accounted for. How much taxes are going to be raised by the President? What taxes does he propose to raise? What does Senator Reid want to do? Let's see those numbers and let's debate them and let's have amendments. That is why we need to be here next week, not to deal with a patent bill or some other legislation. That is why we called for it and I am prepared to work and I believe our colleagues are, but it needs to be on something significant.

The history of our Congress and the surging debt crisis we face is so significant that we have to have a balanced budget constitutional amendment. We almost passed that before. It would have been so much better had we done so. Let's do it this time and change the course of our country. Nothing clears the mind so well as the absence of alternatives. When Senators and Congressmen have no alternative but to live within their means, they will figure out a way to do it. But if we can find an alternative, history tells us too often we will, and we will act irresponsibly.

I yield the floor.

I thank Senator Johnson for his leadership on this issue.

As the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, I share my colleagues' disappointment that we have not functioned. It is good to see Senator Ayotte and Senator Johnson, who are members of that committee. We worked hard to get prepared some weeks ago on the assumption that the Senate would meet its statutorily required duty; that is, to produce a budget.

I am holding up title 2, section 632 of the United States Code, and it is the Budget Act. It requires that the Congress annually produce a budget. We have now gone 792 days without a budget.

The first line of the act is: On or before April 15 of each year, Congress shall complete action on a concurrent resolution on the budget for the fiscal year beginning October 1 for the next fiscal year.

We haven't done that. It also says we should meet by April 1.

Senator Conrad, our Budget chairman, Democratic chairman and able, experienced chairman, was prepared to go forward. It is pretty clear to me that the majority leader decided we shouldn't have a budget process.

Last year, the Budget Committee produced a budget out of committee, but the majority leader failed to bring it up for vote on the floor. As the leader, he has the power generally to control that fact and was able to do so. This year, he said it would be foolish to have a budget; and, basically, we would not even meet in committee to have a budget.

So we are facing the most serious systemic debt crisis in our Nation's history. The numbers are so serious and our path is so unacceptable that it is clearly the No. 1 issue of our time.

The Chairman of President Obama's debt commission gave a written statement to the Budget Committee that said this Nation has never faced a more predictable economic crisis. When asked, Erskine Bowles, President Clinton's Chief of Staff, said it could be 2 years, a little before, a little after.

What I am saying is, these individuals, particularly the ones who just finished a campaign, traveled all over their State, talked to hundreds of thousands, millions of people in their State, got a feel for it. They are bringing new vitality and new insight into what is happening, and what is happening is nothing. Six months have gone by, and we have not had any hearings, we have not had any votes on the floor. We haven't seen any legislation. So I think this is an unacceptable method. I think it undermines the classic constitutional duty of Congress to appropriate money and deal with taxes.

It is our responsibility. But have you observed mayors who say: I am not going to present a budget to city council. I am going to let them decide. Do you see Governors not presenting budgets to the State legislatures and then fight for what they believe in? Look what is happening with Governor Christie, Governor Cuomo in New York, Governor Brown in California, Governor Bentley in Alabama.

It helps to have that one single person elected to represent everybody, to provide some impetus, and it is astounding to me that we haven't seen that from the majority leader in the Senate or from the President. He submitted a budget but then backed away from it and it was voted down 97 to 0 on the floor just a few weeks ago, but it was never seriously considered.

So what are we looking to do? We are heading to a time where we may be asked in a few hours to vote on a monumental multitrillion-dollar deal to raise the debt limit of the United States. What will be in it? Will we be changing the trajectory of our Nation or will it be business as usual? We are not going to have time to review it. That should be on the floor now. People should be standing and casting votes right now. How much do you want to increase taxes? Do you? Which ones? How much do you want to cut? Where?

Let's have the vote down here. That is what we should be doing. I think it will help the American people understand how serious our problem is, and what it will take to get out of it. It is much more serious and our problem is greater than most people realize.

I thank my colleagues for their good comments and the enthusiasm they have brought and the passion they have brought to this critical issue.