Disgusted with Government Spending

Floor Speech

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Mr. BURCHETT. Mr. Speaker, I want you folks to know that I won't be as eloquent as my friend, and I won't be as long either. You all will be able to get out of here if you are waiting for a break. If you need to get up and go, you go, you are not hurting my feelings one bit.

Mr. Speaker, I am absolutely disgusted with the way our government spends money and where it puts its priorities. We spent over $114 billion on Ukraine. Don't get me wrong, Putin is a thug and I wish the Lord would take him out. Russia's GDP is somewhere between that of France and Canada.

We have given Afghan refugees over $2,200 a month and we only sent the Maui residents one single $700 payment when they lost everything. Illegal aliens cost the Texas taxpayers somewhere around $850 million.

Folks, we are over $33 trillion in debt. Fitch, which is a rating agency, recently downgraded the United States' credit rating because of the general government deficit, which it anticipates will be 6.3 percent of gross domestic product in 2023, when it was only 3.7 percent in 2022. That is a huge jump for 1 year. Folks, that has almost doubled.

Another reason they gave was leadership, and that has been over the last 20 years. That cuts both ways. That is both parties. The United States spends approximately $300 billion each month. That is nearly $7 million each minute. It only takes our government 2 hours and 22 minutes to spend a billion dollars if you can imagine that.

We are all on the verge of a government shutdown, which none of my colleagues want--contrary to popular belief. Some of us conservative folks aren't sitting in a room hoping for this because we don't want our constituents to suffer undue pain because of our lack of work.

However, this out-of-control spending needs to change. Many of my Republican colleagues and I, we are going to fight for that change to happen today--not in 30 days or 3 months or right before Christmas because that has pretty much been the plan.

We pass a continuing resolution for 30 days, and then they say: We need another one for 30 days. Guess what? We are backed up to the Christmas holiday. Then they say: We need to pass an omnibus.

Basically, an omnibus is just a large continuing resolution. In my opinion, it is chock full of goodies for powerful Members of this body. It is also chock full of goodies for lobbyists and their specialist interests that we continue to grease.

Mr. Speaker, there are several solutions we can bring to the table. My colleague, Jodey Arrington from Texas, chairs the Budget Committee. I was on that committee and I asked to be taken off of it. If you know anything about our history in the last 30 years, we have not passed a dadgum budget, we haven't even attempted to because we don't want to.

The people in power in both parties--if we pass a budget, there would be a lot more accountability and you all would know what was going into it. You would probably get disgusted and send a few of us home.

My friend, Jodey Arrington, chairs that committee now, and he has a plan that would balance our budget in the next 10 years.

Mr. Speaker, if we just went back to pre-COVID spending levels, we could balance this budget.

Now, I dare say there is probably very few Americans that could tell me something that has been added to their plate since COVID from the Federal Government that they could not do without. Yet, we continue on this spending spree.

As I have stated many times with these continuing resolutions, they tell us to pass a continuing resolution so we don't have to pass another continuing resolution. Well, that line of thinking is like telling a crackhead that I am going to give you more crack to get you off of crack. The truth is we are just addicted to money, and now we are addicted to our great grandchildren's money.

We need to make some serious cuts to our bloated government in areas where we don't need it. We have way too many bureaucrats. Yesterday, I brought several amendments to the floor, literally, due to the Holman rule which allows us to line-out certain individual people's pay. They were caught doing something illegal in the past administration and they were fired, yet this administration seemed like they should bring them back. They brought the people back that helped them get back. That is your Federal Government.

Mr. Speaker, my daddy fought in the Second World War in the Marine Corps in the 1st Marine Division all the way across the Pacific. My mamma's brothers all went to the war. My dad's brother went to the war. My mamma actually flew an airplane during the war because her eldest brother, Roy, had gotten killed.

I tell you all that to tell you this: our Pentagon is a bloated disaster. I prefer to call them the war pimps because that is exactly what they are. Every year we pass a bigger and more bloated budget for the Pentagon. This year, I believe it was $30 billion more than the year prior to the last budget--I believe that is correct--more than even President Joe Biden had asked us to put in.

Yet, when folks like myself question it, people question our patriotism.

Mr. Speaker, I am not offended by much up here, but that is the cherry on top. We should stop focusing so much on passing a bill that will be totally fine in the Senate. As we said during the debt ceiling debate, we should put our stake down. Now we don't want to put our stake down. We want to send a bill over there, at one time, that would just cut the rate of growth, which is Washington speak for not cutting anything.

We are not Senate Democrats; we can't pass a budget that looks like theirs. The art of compromise should be in there.

When I was in the State legislature in Tennessee, I was the House sponsor of a bill to raise the speed limit. I asked for 85, knowing that I would get 70. Oddly enough, my Senate colleague was Steve Cohen, who is now my colleague here in the United States Congress. We compromised, but we knew what we needed.

Mr. Speaker, truth be known, I brought Peyton Manning to the floor of the House the week before. I probably could have gotten 100 miles an hour and maybe even gotten Communism, I am not sure, or I might have been anointed as king at that point because Peyton was, and still is, that popular. That was a different time.

We have got to make some serious changes now or we are going to lose our dadgum country.

I always remember my daddy, who was a World War II veteran. We were at our house in West Knoxville, 8220 Bennington Drive--I no longer live there. We were in the dining room, I remember, one of the few times it was cleaned out. We always cleaned it out for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but most of the time it was for storage.

We were in there, and we had this little color TV that was over there. We were watching the election results that were coming in that night, and they were not going very well.

I remember my daddy said the blessing. It was just me and him, and we had a Mr. Gatti's pizza, or, as I like to say, we were having a traditional Italian meal. Don't send me any letters, I realize that is not very traditional.

Anyway, daddy said the prayer, he said the blessing. Really all he said was: Lord, please do not let us lose our country.

I guess that is what drives me now because, dadgummit, I am afraid we are going to lose our country. Continuing down this road of reckless spending is going to be the quickest way to get us there. We need to stop spending the American people's hard-earned money like we are a kid in a candy store.

One of the areas where we could be doing some cuts, in my opinion, I think we should close down our Department of Education. Now, I have a degree in education. My mama was a schoolteacher for her whole life. My sister has a degree in education. My daddy was a dean at the University of Tennessee.

I didn't mean defund education, but if we would just send that money to the States and stop Washington, D.C., from taking its cut off the top, I think we could go a long ways.

There is not one bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., in the Department of Education who ever taught a little kid how to read at Sarah Moore Greene Elementary School in Knoxville, Tennessee, and I daresay there never will be. However, they are going to be taking their cut off the top, just like the mob does, and that needs to stop.

We need to allow the States the responsibility that they deserve, to be responsible stewards of our money, and send it to them and let them decide. What works in Washington, D.C., sure as heck doesn't work in Claiborne County in east Tennessee.

We have got to stop spending the American people's hard-earned money like we are a kid in a candy store with a credit card with no limit because that limit is coming due.

We do not need a continuing resolution. We don't need to play any more games. We just need clean bills with real cuts to get our country back on track.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your time, and I appreciate the folks in the audience's indulgence. I yield back the balance of my time.

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