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“When Republicans gained the majority in the House this year, we promised to restore an open and transparent process that had gone away under the reign of Speaker Pelosi,” stated Westmoreland. “Never was this more important than in dealing with appropriations bills. During the first seven months of this new Congress we saw that open process at work: appropriations bills had subcommittee and full committee markups and members on both sides of the aisle were allowed to introduce amendments on the House floor. Unfortunately, portions of this conference report were never marked up by the full Appropriations Committee and Members of Congress could not offer amendments to the report. If we truly want to regain the trust of the American people, Congress must keep our promises.”
The federal government is currently being funded by a continuing resolution that expires Friday, November 18, 2011. In order to keep the agencies not covered by the ‘minibus’ portion of H.R. 2112 up and running, the conference report passed today also includes a CR to cover the nine remaining appropriations packages that have not passed Congress through December 16, 2011. It sets discretionary spending levels for those nine packages at $1.043 trillion.
“I made a promise to my constituents that I would cut federal spending, pay down our national debt, and get this country back on a path of fiscal responsibility,” stated Westmoreland. “The spend now, pay later mentality Congressional Democrats and President Obama have instituted in Congress these last several years have resulted in a 40 percent increase in our national debt. Earlier this week, our national debt topped $15 trillion – that’s larger than the size of our country’s entire economy. Our failure to address this problem in any kind of real way has resulted in a downgrade in our credit rating and is leaving our children and grandchildren with crushing debt they may never be able to pay off. While I am pleased to see that House Republicans have been able to change the debate in Washington from more spending to more cuts, I believe the discretionary spending levels in this CR are still too high. When you’re dealing with a federal budget of almost $4 trillion, cutting federal spending $7 billion – or less than one fifth of one percent of the total federal budget – is just a drop in the bucket. We owe the American people more.”
The legislation is expected to be passed in the Senate before Friday’s deadline and sent to the president for his signature.