112th Congress

Last month, the Federal Election Commission announced that it has doled out $17.7 million in taxpayer money to both the Republican and Democratic parties to fund their 2012 presidential nominating conventions. Days later, U.S. debt reached $15 trillion. The timing of these two events reinforces the fact that is is simply outrageous to devote millions in taxpayer money to pay for presidential campaigns when we're going broke.

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 First, it eliminates an antiquated, outdated system of public financing.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.

President Obama is having a field day campaigning against a Congress he says is not doing enough to create jobs -- despite the fact that House Republicans have passed more than 20 jobs bills that are now languishing in the Democratic Senate. However, when presented with a golden opportunity to create 20,000 jobs and decrease America's reliance on foreign oil, President Obama punted.

The U.S. national debt reached the latest in a series of sobering milestones recently. As of November 15, our accumulated debt officially stands at more than $15 trillion. Worse still, $4.4 trillion of that debt was racked up just since President Obama took office.

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.