Hearing of the Committee on Rules
Open Hearing to receive Member testimony on proposed changes in House Rules
Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the Rules Subcommittee. I would like to thank you for calling this hearing this morning. I appreciate this opportunity to propose a change to the Rules that govern the procedures of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The intent of my proposed Rules change is simple: To make in order amendments to Appropriations bills to reduce spending and pay down the public debt.
Currently we have two options when amending Appropriations bills: cut or spend. If we want to offer an amendment to pay down the debt, a point of order can be raised. If we want to cut or spend, we just need a majority of the Members of the House, and of course we need to stay within the Budget Allocations. I strongly believe we should have the third option of offering amendments to set aside money for debt reduction.
As a Member of the Budget Committee, I am very aware that it is currently the responsibility of the Budget Committee to set spending limits, and whatever is left over at the end of the year goes toward debt reduction. This actually happened in 1998 because our economic output started exceeding our projections. But limiting our debt reduction options to the money that is left over at the end of the year is not enough. I believe it would be useful for all of us, on both sides of the aisle, to be able to juxtapose debt reduction with each program and each dollar of spending as we go through the Appropriations process.
That is my intent. Now here is my proposal, which has been passed out to you. This proposed Rules change would make it in order to consider amendments to Appropriations bills which would reduce the appropriation of programs in the bill and make appropriations, up to the amount reduced, to a debt reduction account. The account is an existing account in Section 3113 of title 31 of the U.S. Code, which was created to collect gifts from the public to pay down the public debt.
As this Rule change is written, an amendment to reduce an Appropriations bill and put that money toward debt reduction would be Budget neutral and the money placed in the debt reduction account would be counted toward the 302(a) total allocation. You could look at it as being able to put aside money for debt reduction if you can find an offset in the Appropriations bill.
One of my goals was to make this as simple and nonintrusive as possible, so I left scoring changes to the Budget Committee and suballocation adjustments to the Appropriations Committee. Also, this Rule obviously would not immediately impact the Senate. If our Appropriators were to convene a Conference Committee on an Appropriations bill, and some debt reduction amendments had passed in the House, that would become part of the negotiations. It would give our Appropriators an additional tool in those negotiations to talk specifically about debt reduction versus spending instead of just debating different levels of spending.
This approach is different than any debt reduction "lock box" proposals that have come before your committee in the past. As opposed to taking Appropriations money off the top of a bill, this Rules change just allows the majority of the House to decide dollar by dollar if specific spending is more important than debt reduction. Instead of a two dimensional debate over spending versus cutting, I would like to add a third dimension to each debate: debt reduction. I think making this debate three dimensional will be healthy for the House. Thank you for your time.
