Default Prevention Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BLUMENAUER. Thank you.

Madam Speaker, I am listening to my friend from Louisiana rewrite history.

It is not the President who is threatening to default on the national debt. It is the Republican Congress that is refusing to do what was granted to every President in the past--Republican or Democrat--which is to deal with raising the debt ceiling, which is, after all, money we have already spent, money that they approved.

They have been in charge for the last 5 years. The notion that we can somehow distinguish the semantics of this proposal, distinguishing between sovereign debt and the rest of the 80 million transactions that the Treasury makes every day, is lunacy.

If you disagree with our protections to seniors, veterans, the military, Medicare, Medicaid, the FBI, food safety, cut them, but you don't. You nibble away at them. You have never offered a balanced budget when you have been in charge. We had balanced budgets when President Clinton was President. Thank you very much. Unless you assure everyone, nobody is protected.

As for the notion somehow that the President walked away from the negotiations with Simpson-Bowles, where was Paul Ryan? I like Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan refused to embrace Simpson-Bowles' proposals. They cannot pass their vision. They want to blame the President and the American people.

I would respectfully suggest that we ought to reject this fig leaf and get down to business: raise the debt ceiling as we have done repeatedly in the past for Presidents, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, get past the rhetoric, and then deal with structural issues going forward.

Let's rebuild and renew America. Let's raise the gas tax so we can deal with our crumbling infrastructure, something that Ronald Reagan did in 1982, when we faced a deficit in the highway trust fund then.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BLUMENAUER. There are simple, commonsense solutions, by the way, that are supported by the U.S. Chamber and the AFL-CIO, truckers and AAA, business, government, to be able to get the country moving again, to repair crumbling infrastructure, and not add to the deficit. One simple, little step--something we could do--not deal with goofy legislation like is offered today.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source