The 10th Amendment Task Force

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Mr. NEUGEBAUER. Well, I thank the gentleman, and he brings up some excellent points.

I am a proud member of the 10th Amendment Task Force because I think one of the things that we have to do in order to restore order in this country is to get back to some of the principles that our Founders intended. They didn't intend for government to be the answer to every issue in this country.

One of the things I think back to happened a few years ago in my congressional district, which was not too long after we had the Katrina incident in New Orleans. We had a major fire in an area called Cross Plains, Texas. I went down there the next day, and the people in that region had already brought clothes to the church, so the people who had lost everything in the fire were able to receive clothes. For the people who had lost livestock, other people were going out and helping them. For people who had lost their homes, people in the community had provided temporary housing.

And within a very short period of time, the people in this community met their own needs. And I got an interesting phone call from a member of the media, and that person said, well, what is the government doing for the people in Cross Plains today? And I said, well, you know, the good news, we didn't need the government in Cross Plains today because the people responded to that.

And I think what we've gotten away from, as the gentleman points out, is we've kind of turned the whole concept of what the Founders thought about this country upside down. They never intended for the government to be the solution and, in fact, the best solutions happen when you keep the government closest to the people.

So the Tenth Amendment Task Force, what we're going to try to do is not only analyze some of the things we've already done; but as legislation is brought to this very floor, we're going to try to remind our colleagues of the principle of federalism, and is this the right place for this particular piece of legislation to be originated, or should this be left to the people, because every time the Federal Government puts a new law in place, individuals' liberties and freedoms are eroded.

Now, one of the things that we've been talking about in this body for a number of months now is these record deficits in our country. It wasn't many years ago that this country had a budget of $100 billion, in fact, back in, I think, 1962. This year the President of the United States brought a budget to this floor that spent over $3.7 trillion. And by the way, it's $3.7 trillion, and we don't have $3.7 trillion. In fact, we're going to borrow 42 cents for every dollar we're going to spend.

One of the reasons that we are running these record deficits is we have all of this money being funneled into the Federal system, and then we have all of these people up here in Washington trying to figure out how to spend the taxpayers' dollars, and then those monies go down to the States, and the States try to figure out how to distribute those dollars, and then the States pass them out maybe to the local communities. And here's what happens:

Here is a dollar bill that the taxpayers pay in taxes. Now, what happens is, after Washington washes this money in this massive federalism, then we have the dollar that actually gets back to the intended purpose. It's a shrunk dollar. And one of the things we can do if we really want to be serious about, one, being more government efficient is getting the government out of some of the businesses they're in so that this dollar is the dollar that gets to the people, and not this dollar that's been washed through Washington and through the States, but back to the local governments.

As I close and yield back to the gentleman, I think about the days when I was on the city council in Lubbock, Texas. And it was so discouraging to me where we would be sitting in council meetings, and we would be sitting with staff, and someone would have an innovative idea of better ways to serve our citizenry in Lubbock, Texas. But we would always hear from some of the staffers, well, there's a Federal regulation that we'll have to check on; or I'm not sure that that is in keeping with certain regulations that would keep Lubbock from getting certain kinds of funding, because it was stifling creativity in our local communities.

And so, as the gentleman points out, the Founders were very sincere about not letting the Federal Government have very many powers, because they knew where the best work happens, that to keep innovation and liberty and freedom in place was to limit the powers of our Federal Government. Some way along the line we lost our way.

And one of the reasons I joined the Tenth Amendment Task Force was to see if we can restore the spirit of the Constitution back to this body.

And with that, I yield back to the gentleman and thank him for his time.

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