SPECIAL ORDER ON THE DEBT LIMIT

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia: I would like to bring that up because the legislation that we considered earlier today had a provision that required a constitutional amendment that is mislabeled. It is called the Balanced Budget Amendment.

Well, if you look at the provisions of the bill, not just the title, the provisions, you will see that it requires a three-fifths vote to pass a budget that is not in balance. Every budget that we have considered for the last 9 years and every budget that we will consider for the foreseeable future will be unbalanced in the first year. So all you've done is increase the threshold for any budget to be balanced.

The Republican Study Committee budget, which is probably the most conservative budget in terms of spending on the table, other budgets would probably cut the deficit just as much, but all of those severe deficit reduction bills would require a three-fifths vote.

Now remember, when the Clinton budget passed, it passed by the thinnest of margins. We balanced the budget and were on course to paying off the national debt, created a record number of jobs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average almost quadrupled. Fifty Democrats lost their seats when they voted for that bill. When you vote for deficit reduction, a lot of people will be casting career-ending votes. Increasing the threshold to three-fifths will just make it harder or even more impossible to pass.

What you can get three-fifths for, once you need three-fifths, any kind of budget can pass. You can have more tax cuts, and we got three-fifths votes from the $800 billion tax cut back in December. But a three-fifths vote, you can pass new tax cuts and new spending. You can make the deficit worse under the balanced budget amendment and probably will.

Also consider that it had the provision of two-thirds vote to increase taxes. That will obviously make it more difficult to balance the budget. Two-thirds vote to spend more than 18 percent of GDP, a number we haven't seen since Medicare was enacted. That means you're going to have pressure on Medicare and Social Security.

Interestingly, if you put all of these things together, you'll notice that you can cut Medicare benefits or Social Security benefits with a simple majority. But to save those programs with new taxes, a two-thirds vote in the House and a two-thirds vote in the Senate. And then to add insult to injury, it requires a three-fifths vote to increase the debt ceiling.

As if the drama that we've been through in the last few days and last few weeks isn't enough of a spectacle, they wanted to make that kind of thing routine, where we'd have to go through this every year. We've had to increase the debt ceiling on average once a year for the last 50 years. They want to go through this spectacle with a supermajority so that we can have these kinds of problems all along.

Now, we heard during consideration of the balanced budget amendment when we were in committee about Arizona's balanced budget amendment and how well it works. And we kept hearing this over and over again. So I thought, I wonder how they do that? So I Googled it.

Mr. GARAMENDI: Excuse me. You said that Arizona has a balanced budget amendment in their Constitution and somehow they balance their budget.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia: And I couldn't figure out how they have done it over the past few years. I figured there must be something in there. So we Googled it, thanks to Google. And we found out. The first thing I found out is, with 6.3 million people, they got $6.4 billion of stimulus money that the Federal Government borrowed and then sent to them. A thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child--$4,000 for every family. That helped them balance the budget.

But that wasn't enough. You know what else they did? They sold their State capitol and supreme court building. Did you hear what I said? They sold the State capitol building for $735 million and sold the supreme court building for $300 million and leased it back. That extra billion dollars in the budget was necessary for them to balance their budget.

Mr. GARAMENDI: Excuse me for a second, if I might interrupt. One of the proposals coming from some of the Republicans was to sell America's assets. Do you suppose they intended to sell the U.S. Capitol?

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia: Well, the Arizona State capitol was sold and leased back. So there's no telling what they might want to do. But the really regrettable part of this is the process that we're in. Because we just passed a bill that provides for trillions of dollars in unspecified cuts. They slapped the thing together behind closed doors. The final version was developed this morning after the bill had been debated. There was only 1 minute left in the debate, and they changed the bill. They added in the balanced budget amendment and some other kinds of changes and sprung it on the House.

We finished the debate this afternoon. Vote it up or down, no amendments. We took all that time doing it on a bill that 53 Senators have signed a letter saying that they're going to oppose it as soon as it gets over there.

Now, I said unspecified amendments because they don't cut anything in their bill. There are no cuts. There are caps. So we don't know what the cuts will be because they're just spending caps. We will find out next month what they have in mind because that's when we'll try to appropriate under the caps, and then we'll figure out what actually has to be cut.

But we'd have an idea of what they might cut because earlier this year they had a bill of about $66 billion. Annualized, that would be about a hundred billion for the full year. In 10-year costs, that would be about a trillion. So if you want to know what a trillion-dollar 10-year cut would look like, we can see it.

Look at what they cut. They cut safety net programs like community action agencies, legal aid, energy assistance for low-income seniors, community health centers, WIC nutrition. All cut. They had investments in our future, education. All kinds of education programs, including Head Start and Pell Grants. Cut. Job training programs in the middle of an economic downturn. Cut. NASA and other scientific research, energy research. Cut. High-speed rail, investments in our future. Immunizations and AmeriCorp. Cut.

Then routine functions of government that you would hope would not have to get cut, like air traffic controllers. They're working so hard, they're falling asleep on the jobs. Cops and firefighters. Cut. FBI agents. We spent the last couple of days in the Judiciary Committee talking about trying to chase down cases involving child pornography, and we don't have enough FBI agents to chase them down. And what do they do? Cut FBI agents.

Clean Water grants, poison control, aid to small shipyards. We have a lot of shipyards in my district. National parks. OSHA--Occupational Safety and Health Administration--personnel cut. FEMA. With all the problems we've got all over the country now, floods and everything, FEMA is cut. They talk about border security. Border protection and border security. Cut. Food inspection.

That's just a small sample of what they had in that. Then in the next bill they're cutting Medicare. All of those cut. And that's just the first trillion.