Preventing Paygo Sequestration

Floor Speech

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Mr. ARRINGTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, to the gentlewoman's point about working together, Democrats did not offer a hand of bipartisanship in this ram-and-jam job on the $2 trillion bailout bill. They even lost Democrats on it. So they didn't work with us.

It was a pure partisan play, and there is a reason for that. It is mostly unrelated to COVID. It is bailout galore. It is a wish list of the liberals in this House, and they just pushed it through and called it, in disguise, COVID relief.

But the fundamental principle we are talking about today is paygo. This is a law passed by Democrats, signed by a Democrat President. It says, fundamentally--and the American people understand this--if you spend beyond your means, you have got to find a way to pay for it. You have got to offset it or you go into debt.

Mr. Speaker, the American people, if they don't pay their bills, they get their water turned off or their electricity turned off. The IRS will hunt them down and put them in jail if they don't pay their taxes. They will have their mortgage foreclosed, their cars repossessed. That is what happens to the American people when they don't pay their bills.

President Obama, when he signed the law, said, You can't spend a dollar unless you cut a dollar elsewhere. I agree with him.

Ms. Pelosi, our Speaker, gave a speech and she gave glowing points as she embraced wholeheartedly and full-throatedly this paygo. She said it is important `` . . . to our fiscal soundness, and to our children and grandchildren.''

She said: `` . . . who could oppose this great idea?''

She went on to say: `` . . . investments in our children's future . . . must be paid for, or else we are heaping debt onto our children.''

The national debt is almost $30 trillion and counting.

Who is going to pay for that?

Not us. Not you. Our kids are going to pay for it.

These are Ms. Pelosi's words, Mr. Speaker: ``This pay-as-you-go is part of a blueprint for fiscal responsibility. . . . ''

She said: `` . . . subjecting spending to the harshest scrutiny. Every Federal dollar that is spent must be subjected to scrutiny to make sure taxpayers get his or her money's worth.''

Bailing out union pensions, giving cities and States money that horribly mismanaged their business prior to COVID, giving people more money to be on unemployment than they made in their previous jobs, paying people who are not economically harmed in this COVID disaster, all of these things are wasteful. There is a litany of wasteful, irresponsible, and unnecessary spending, hundreds of billions of dollars.

And the Speaker is saying every dollar is going to be scrutinized. We are going to stick it to our seniors. We are going to stick it to our kids. That is a profile in courage, if I ever saw one. Now, that is the leadership that made this country great, Mr. Speaker. These are Ms. Pelosi's words, not mine, but I agree with her.

We have an opportunity here to do the right thing by our children, to offset the spending here in this $2 trillion bailout with the wasteful spending that is in there. And I gave you a list, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I plead with you and I plead with my colleagues to offset this and do right by our kids and their future in this country.

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