Speech

This legislation makes really significant reforms in the way the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) decides baseline calculations. The CBO automatically budgets for inflation and discretionary spending. This process runs completely counter to what every American does with their own budget. No family sits down and assumes they will automatically have an inflationary increase in their budget next year.

This bill spends less --$70 billion less-- than the president requested and $6 billion less than we spent last year, the second year in a row we have actually cut discretionary funding.

The legislation before us actually does three important things. First, it eliminates an antiquated, outdated system of public financing. Second, it terminates an obsolete commission, and finally, and not incidentally, it actually saves money -- something we talk a lot about around here but seldom actually do. When the Presidential Election Campaign fund was actually created in 1973, it was during a time before things like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. Widespread use of the internet did not exist. That's no longer the case today.

There are certainly members on this floor that are a lot more knowledgeable about this particular piece of legislation than I am. I don't serve on any of the relevant subcommittees on Appropriations, and so they're going to talk about it in more depth and detail than I ever could. But I tell you what -- and I certainly would be the first to say -- that we did not have a perfect process. I would have preferred individual bills, I think most of us on the Appropriations Committee would. And we didn't cut as much money as I would have liked to have cut.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. Tom Cole (OK-04) made the following remarks on the House floor in support of the Budget Control Act:

"There's no question this isn't a perfect bill.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. Tom Cole (OK-04) made the following remarks in the House floor in support of the Budget Control Act of 2011:

"Every now and then you need to step back and look at the record and put the rhetoric aside. When this majority showed up in January of this last year, we found a situation where our fends on the other side of the aisle had failed to write a budget for this year, failed to pass any appropriations bills, and had just sort of gone home.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. Tom Cole (OK-04) made the following remarks in the House floor in support of the Budget Control Act of 2011:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. Tom Cole (OK-04) made the following remarks before the House approved his amendment to prohibit funding for military operations in Libya by a vote of 225-201. Cole offered the amendment to the FY 2012 Department of Defense Appropriations Act (H.R. 2219).