Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I am on the floor to speak again in support of amendment No. 115, which I propose in connection with the patent reform bill, a bill I support and a bill I intend to vote for and a bill that is going to be used as a vehicle for this amendment that calls for the sense of the Senate on support for the need of a balanced budget amendment. I am grateful to have the support of my good friend, the former Governor of West Virginia, now the junior Senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, who is cosponsoring this amendment with me.

Here is what it does. It calls on us as Senators to come forward and vote on whether we think we should amend the Constitution and submit that to the States for ratification to restrict our power to engage in perpetual deficit spending.

We, as Members of Congress, are authorized, pursuant to article I, section 8, clause 2 to incur debt in the name of the United States. This power has been abused over time to such a degree that we are now almost $15 trillion in debt. By the end of the decade, we will have amassed annual interest payments that will be approaching $1 trillion. This threatens every government program under the Sun. Whether you most want to protect Social Security or national defense or any other government program, you should be concerned about this practice that will threaten the livelihood of so many Americans who depend on these programs one way or another, whether it is to fund their day-to-day existence or fund programs that provide for our safety and security as a nation.

We do have an increased reason to be optimistic about this for a few reasons. First, we have recent polling data showing Americans overwhelmingly support the idea of a balanced budget amendment. Secondly, a recent GAO report shows we could find at least $100 billion annually in wasteful government spending. This is the type of wasteful Washington spending we ought to have eliminated a long time ago, that we could eliminate and would be forced to eliminate if we, in fact, had a balanced budget amendment.

It would also require us to address issues that will confront our children and grandchildren. As a proud and happy father of three, I can tell you, as difficult as the choices we will have to make may be, I am unwilling, as a father, to pass these problems on to my children and my grandchildren who are yet unborn. I am unwilling to pass along to them a system that mortgages the future of coming generations for the simple purpose of perpetuating government largess and wasteful Washington spending.

All this amendment does is call on Members of the Senate to come forward and say they support the idea. By voting in favor of this amendment, they do not have to embrace any particular balanced budget amendment proposal. But what they do say is that they want the wasteful Washington spending to stop, they want the perpetual deficit spending practice to stop, and they want us to stop the practice of mortgaging the future of coming generations. This is immoral, it is unwise, and it ought to be illegal. Soon it will be. With this amendment, we will set in motion a sequence of events that will lead to just that.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I rise to speak on an issue that is very important to me. The immediate subject I am going to address is an amendment I am going to propose to our pending patent reform legislation. This amendment calls upon the Senate to get the sense of the Senate that we need a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

As I prepared for this day, I reviewed the maiden speeches of a number of Senators who served in this august body, and I have seen a consistent theme in the speeches that have been given over the course of the last 50 or 60 years. Over and over, they address spending. These issues have spilled over, Congress after Congress, until the point we have reached today, the point at which our national debt stands at an astounding figure, close to $15 trillion.

As I like to say, $15 trillion is a lot of money. A lot of people do not make $15 trillion in a whole year. Even when you divide $15 trillion by 300 million Americans, you are left with a figure of about $50,000 a head. This is not an inconsequential number.

This is not a problem any of us created. It is a problem each of us inherited. Yet it is a problem I think none of us wants to leave to our successors. It is a problem that requires us to do something different than we have done in the past, and by this I mean I think we need procedural, structural, and indeed constitutional reform. We need to put Congress in a straitjacket because we have been unwilling or unable in the past to make the difficult spending decisions that have to be made.

In the past, there has been a great debate between, on the one hand, some Republicans who have been unwilling to cut some programs, to consider in any context cuts in the area of, say, national defense; you have had others, perhaps from the other party, who have been unwilling to consider any cuts to any entitlement program. But we are now faced with a scenario in which both sides of the aisle can understand that our perpetual deficit spending habit places in jeopardy every single aspect of the operations of the Federal Government.

To paint one scenario, I would like to point out that the budget projections produced by the White House just a couple weeks ago predicted, based on a fairly optimistic set of projections, that over the next 10 years we will acquire enough new debt that, when added to our existing debt, will cause us to be spending almost $1 trillion every single year just on interest on our national debt. To put that in perspective, $1 trillion is more than we currently spend on Social Security in an entire year. It is more than we currently spend on Medicare and Medicaid combined in an entire year. It is significantly more than we spend on national defense in any year. This $1 trillion number is one that could actually be much larger if some of these projections turn out not to be correct.

We now face a moment when both liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, regardless of what they most want to protect in their Federal Government, have to realize that what we most want to protect is placed in grave jeopardy by our current spending practices.

I am troubled by the fact that as we approach debate surrounding a continuing resolution this week, a continuing resolution that is likely to operate for just a few weeks to keep the Government funded, we are still talking about adding, on an annualized basis, to our national debt at a rate exceeding $1.5 trillion a year. I think the American people deserve better. I know they demand better.

Some of the things we saw in the 2010 election cycle portend something much greater for what we are going to see in the 2012 election cycle. The polls support the fact that what we can see from the 2010 election cycle is that Americans want Congress to balance its budget. They want us to do something more than just talking about it. They want us to put ourselves in a straitjacket.

Benjamin Franklin used to say: He will cheat without scruple who can without fear. I think the congressional corollary to that might be that Congress, which can continue to engage in perpetual deficit spending, will continue to do so unless or until they are held accountable by the people or required by that Congress to put itself in a straightjacket. That is the straightjacket we need. That is why I am proposing this amendment so, at a minimum, before this patent reform legislation, which I support wholeheartedly, moves forward, we can all agree as Members of this body that we need a constitutional amendment to keep us from doing what is slowly killing the economy of the United States and gradually mounting a severe challenge, an existential threat to every Federal program that currently exists.

I invite each of my colleagues to vote for and support this amendment and to support S.J. Res. 5, a constitutional amendment I have proposed that would put Congress in this type of straitjacket.

Here is, in essence, what S.J. Res. 5 says: If adopted by Congress by the requisite two-thirds margins in both Houses and approved by the States, three-fourths of them as required by article V of the Constitution, it would tell Congress it may not spend more than it receives in a given year, it may not spend more than 18 percent of GDP in a year, it may not raise taxes, and it may not raise the national debt ceiling without a two-thirds supermajority vote in both Houses of Congress. That is the kind of permanent binding constitutional measure I think we need in order to protect the government programs we value so highly and upon which 300 million Americans have come to depend, in one way or another.

I urge each of my colleagues to support this amendment and to support S.J. Res. 5.

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

Mr. President, I send a motion to the desk.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside, and I call up amendment No. 115 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Yes.

This is a self-explanatory amendment. I am a supporter of this legislation, the patent reform bill. I also point out that this amendment does not bring about any substantive change to that legislation, nor does it lock anyone into a particular variation of a balanced budget amendment proposal.

I am happy to work out an agreement as to the timing for a possible vote, and I hope we can get to that sometime soon.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the joint resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the joint resolution be printed in the Record.