Senator Enzi: (4:25 PM)

• Spoke on the budget.
  • "I get real frustrated because I know that we're $20 trillion in debt and headed to $29 trillion, and then I hear people say, yes, but we cut the deficit in half. That's not the debt. I don't like the word deficit. I call it overspending. That's what we're doing. And we just got the report that we're going to be $590 billion overspent this year. And as Senator Lankford pointed out, 70% of the budget is on auto pilot, so that 30% that we get to make a decision on, that's $1,070 billion. We've got to worry a little bit because interest rates might go up. At $20 trillion, if it's 1%, that's $200 billion a year we're throwing in a rat hole. If that goes to 5%, which is the norm for the federal government, we're now $1,000 billion a year in interest. We get to make decisions on $1,070 billion, and a $1,000 billion of that would go to interest. We better solve this pretty quick. We could be at 5%, I think, within three years."

 

Senator Corker: (4:32 PM)

• Spoke on the budget.
  • "One of the problems with the budget process, we pass a budget that makes assumptions, but those assumptions never become reality, and so we say the budget balances over ten years, but we never do the tough things that it takes for those policies to actually be put in place. So a forcing mechanism - I know several thoughts have been put forth - to force us to do that,  to keep government open, to keep functioning is something that has to occur. So I'm proud to be a part of this effort as a wingman. I appreciate all the meetings that are taking place. I hope that we are going to get to a result. I agree with Senator Enzi. It would have been good to have done it when we didn't know who the president was going to be or who was going to be in the majority. That's not going to happen, but things like this that matter, that save our nation, take years to happen."

 

Senator Ernst: (4:37 PM)

• Spoke on the budget.
  • "Washington can't even do the basic business of balancing our own budget. Plain and simple, we should. Families in Iowa do it every day, and they expect us here in Washington, DC, to do the same. After all, it is their tax dollars that are being spent, and it deserves to be spent wisely. Unfortunately, it might just take a complete overhaul of Washington's ways to help us solve this problem. And again, I want to thank my colleagues for joining us in this effort. And while some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have certainly made it very difficult if not impossible to conduct business in any sort of regular manner, the reality is excess spending in this town seems too often to be bipartisan. And I know my colleague from Georgia mentioned earlier that our debt has ballooned under both Republican and Democratic administrations. We are far too often unable to take a good, hard look at the money that's being spent because we often will get a 1,900-page bill at the last minute, and we're given the options of either taking it or leaving it."

 

Senator Rounds: (4:44 PM)

• Spoke on the budget.
  • "Today, those mandatory payments account for nearly three-quarters of all of the federal spending. That means that the continuing resolution that we just did is based upon about 28% of the total amount that we'll spend next year. It's simply not acceptable that we continue to look at and try to balance a $500-plus billion a year deficit every single year when we only look at 28% of the total spending that goes on. Let me just suggest this, that in order to fix this as my colleagues have said today, we have to begin a process with expectations that the process actually works once again and that there are timelines established well in advance of the end of the fiscal year. But even more than that, any process that we use in the future also has to bring in accountability, authorization, and appropriation together. Why is it that when we talk about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, we just don't talk about it?"