S. Con. Res. 41, H. Con. Res. 112, S. Con. Res. 37, S. Con. Res. 42, S. Con. Res. 44 En Bloc--Motions to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. CRAPO. Mr. President, I appreciate the efforts by our Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, and by the ranking member of our Senate Budget Committee, Jeff Sessions, to give the Senate a chance today to do its job. It has been more than 3 years since the Senate has passed a budget, almost 1,100 days, $4 trillion in increased debt since we last had a budget. Yet it seems as if the current majority are the only ones who do not think passing a budget is part of our job.

I have to stop here for a moment and commend the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Senator Conrad. I know he has fought mightily to get a budget to this floor. But the politics he faces have not allowed him to do so. As of today, for 1,100 days we have not been able to see a budget proposal reach the Senate floor from our committee.

I have worked with Senator Conrad long and hard and will continue to do so, trying to get a broad, bipartisan solution brought forward. But today we need to take action on the Senate floor. Everyone else has a budget. The President has offered a budget. The House Republicans have offered a budget. The House Democrats have offered a budget. The Senate Republicans have introduced several budgets, which we will vote on here today.

Every American family and every American business has to develop a budget. Previous Congresses, including those that enacted the Congressional Budget Act last year, clearly saw the importance of Congress enacting a budget every year. In fact, it was that congressional budget act that we were able to get in place last year that put into effect the mechanism we are employing today which says if the majority party leadership fails to bring a budget forward by the statutory deadline, then any Senator has the right to call for consideration of any budget on the Senate Calendar.

Let's look at the budgets we will be voting on today. First we have the President's budget. At a time when our national debt is more than $15.6 trillion, well more than 100 percent of our gross domestic product, the President's budget seemingly makes no acknowledgment of the dramatic and predictable fiscal crisis we face. Instead of embracing the comprehensive work of his own fiscal commission, the Bowles-Simpson commission on which I served, or any of the other key bipartisan proposals that are available such as the Ryan-Wyden proposal or the Domenici-Rivlin plan or even coming up with a true reform plan of his own, the President's budget regrettably remains within the old discredited framework of trying to tax and spend our way into prosperity.

The President's budget would raise taxes by $2 trillion. This is in addition to the $1.2 trillion of tax increases in the

health care law which are just beginning to take effect and will continue to roll out over the next few years. Perhaps even more remarkable, the President's budget actually increases spending by $1.2 trillion more than current law. So another $1.2 trillion in new spending, another $2 to $3 trillion in new taxes, no structural entitlement reform, and no discretionary spending reform.

Even though it is widely acknowledged that the current paths of our entitlement programs are unsustainable and even though they are on track to soon become insolvent, the President's budget has no comprehensive reforms to our entitlement programs--none. The modest amount of health care savings he does propose would not even be enough to offset the extension of the doc fix or the other increases in the health care spending he proposes.

This is a dangerous approach, and it should be noted that this budget failed by a vote of 0 to 414 in the House. Yet we have no other pending proposal from the other side to consider.

Today the Senate will also have an opportunity to reject the President's approach to the Federal budget, and I expect it will do so, just as it did last time. Because the Democratic majority here in the Senate has failed to produce their own budget, we will also have the opportunity to vote on some important budget proposals offered by the House Budget Committee chairman and by our own colleagues here in the Senate, Senators TOOMEY, PAUL, and LEE. Each of these proposals would include true comprehensive reforms to our entitlement programs to prevent the impending insolvency and to protect the programs for current and future generations, and would put us on a sustained pathway to balancing our Federal budget.

These budgets also call for comprehensive tax reform which takes us out of the old paradigm of Congress debating whether to raise or cut taxes and, instead, these proposals would each in their own way dramatically streamline the Tax Code, reduce the tax rates, and unleash significant economic growth in our economy. A byproduct of this robust economic growth would be an increase in revenues to help us deal with our pending debt crisis.

I again commend the chairman, Senator Conrad, for his effort to bring forward a comprehensive plan, a solution--one that originated with Bowles-Simpson on which he and I sat and one which has then been worked on by the so-called Gang of Six for a significant amount of time now to improve and bring forward, and one which the chairman is prepared to move when the opportunity is available. I have encouraged him to do it now. I believe we ought to have it on the floor today for this debate. But whenever the time becomes available, it is a proposal such as this that we need to be dealing with. We need to develop the bipartisan support that is necessary to pass it.

What is it? First of all, as we worked on the Bowles-Simpson commission, we made some basic decisions. We concluded that spending was the major problem--that is where the major part of the solution should be--but that revenue was also critical to the solution and that growing our economy was an important part of anything Congress should do. We first discussed putting together a strong approach to entitlement reform, structural entitlement reform. We put strong spending caps in place and we made clear that our spending patterns in the Federal budget would be brought under control. In addition, recognizing the importance and need for strong growth, we concluded that our Tax Code must be reformed and not on the traditional battleground of whether to raise taxes on one group or lowering taxes on another but in a complete paradigm shift to focus on the reforming of both our corporate and individual tax codes.

If you went about trying to create a Tax Code that was more unfair, more complex, more expensive to comply with, and more anticompetitive to our own American business interests, you would be hard pressed to do it different or worse than we have done with our own Tax Code. We concluded that we ought to reform that code to develop a strong, dynamic tax code for America to go forward with. That is why we proposed broadening the base, reducing the rates, and reforming the way we tax in America by simplifying our Tax Code and making America a strong, powerful, and robust economy as it historically has been.

Then we put together what is critical for any plan to succeed, and that is an enforcement mechanism. Congress has a perfect record of violating its own budgets. Congress has a record of ignoring the budgets, simply getting 60 votes to waive the Budget Act whenever Congress wants to spend in excess of a budget. Literally in every budget for the last two decades or more, Congress has done so; Republican or Democratic, the Congresses have done so. What we put together in our negotiations was an enforcement plan that would keep Congress within the walls of the budget we adopt. It would have a series of points of order to protect against the declaration of emergencies unjustifiably and would then force even emergency spending, that usually is conducted outside the budget, to be done in the face of a sequestration backed up by 67-vote points of order on the floor of the Senate. This kind of strong enforcement is also critical to what we must do to protect our Nation.

We need a comprehensive plan, we need to have entitlement reform, we have to have discretionary spending reform, and we need to have budget enforcement that is solid. We need to strengthen our revenue stream and enforce our Tax Code by lowering taxes. That gives American businesses the opportunity to compete aggressively across the globe.

If we do so, we will see a strong revenue component to our reform measures, and we will see strong growth coming out of the fact that we put together effective spending controls. But we have to get there. We have to do it.

I appreciate the opportunity to work with Senator Conrad as we try to put this kind of broad, comprehensive reform package together and build bipartisan support for it. But I am very discouraged still that we cannot get a budget proposal onto the floor of the Senate that we can work on.

I also appreciate the leadership of Senator McConnell and Senator Sessions, who have given the Senate the opportunity today to debate this issue and have votes, at least, on meaningful proposals that move us down the path I have discussed, and put us onto a pathway for economic prosperity and growth for all.

America is at a terrible crisis point. Our national debt is now exceeding over 100 percent of our GDP and threatens our economy. We must take action. We cannot let another year go by without adopting a budget on the floor of the Senate.

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