Bobby Scott

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I rise in support of H.R. 2944, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 2944, which will extend the United States Parole Commission's authority for an additional 3 years. The current authority is set to expire October 31, 2011. Although Federal parole was abolished with the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act effective November 1, 1987, those sentenced for an offense committed prior to the effect of the date of the abolition, and those sentences that have not yet been completed, remain eligible for parole. Moreover, the Parole Commission has jurisdiction over other offenders, including the Uniform Code of Military Justice offenders and those under transfer treaties between the United States and other countries. Currently there are over 1,000 parole-eligible prisoners under the Commission authority. The Sentencing Reform Act requires that release dates be set for all remaining offenders eligible for parole prior to the expiration of the Parole Commission. The Department of Justice is concerned that if the Commission's current authority is allowed to expire, Federal offenders who were sentenced for offenses committed prior to November 1, 1987, will begin to file motions for release under the Sentencing Reform Act, since the act requires such offenders to be given release dates 3 to 6 months prior to the expiration of the commission. We are now beyond that period at this point and no release dates have been set. For this reason, it is important that we extend the U.S. Parole Commission's authority as soon as possible. I urge my colleagues to support this bill and thank the chairman of the committee, the gentleman from Texas, for his leadership. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I'm pleased to support H.R. 2189, the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2011. The bill would require local, State, and Federal law enforcement agencies to report to the Department of Justice information about deaths of individuals which occur while in their custody. We've learned from history about how useful this information can be. In the 1980s, there was an increased focus on conditions in State and local jails and prisons and the problem of prisoners dying in custody. The interest in oversight of this issue was generated primarily because of the rising tide of expensive wrongful death cases brought in relation to these deaths. Press reports in the 1990s concerning prison abuses and deaths of those incarcerated being attributed to suicide led Congress to develop legislation in response to this problem. The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2000 was enacted to require States to report quarterly to the Attorney General brief information regarding the death of any person in the process of arrest or who is otherwise in custody, including jails, prisons, and juvenile facilities. That law expired in 2006, which led to the effort to reauthorize substantially the same requirements on States and to extend them to Federal agencies as well, which is what H.R. 2189 would do. This extension, as the gentleman from Texas has mentioned, modifies the sanctions applied for those who do not comply with providing the information. It is expected that the information will be given and negotiations, rather than mandatory sanctions, should result in the information being available. With detailed statistical data, policymakers at the local, State, and Federal levels can make informed judgments about the appropriate treatment of prisoners and develop ways to lower the prisoner death rate. In fact, since the focus on deaths in custody emerged in the 1980s and the enactment of the law in 2000, there have been significant declines in deaths of those in custody. This bill is an important reaffirmation of the importance of requiring that States submit this information and expands this commitment to Federal law enforcement agencies as well. This initiative has a history of strong bipartisan support; and I thank my colleagues from the other side of the aisle, particularly the gentleman from Texas, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Smith, for bringing the bill to the floor today. I urge my colleagues to support the bill, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment offered by the gentleman from Iowa. The purpose of No Child Left Behind was to ensure that all children are provided a quality education regardless of race, ethnicity, income, language, status, or disability. Although the original legislation was not perfect and needs improvement, it has helped shed light on achievement gaps facing certain groups of children who are in fact being left behind by the current system. We are aware of this deficiency in its enormity because we collect data by subgroups, and we can begin to fix the problem through educational reform. Now, this bill we're debating today is limited to charter schools. H.R. 2218 includes a definition of high quality charter schools as a school that has demonstrated success in increasing student achievement for subgroup students described in ESEA, namely economically disadvantaged students, students of racial and ethnic minorities, students with disabilities, and students with limited English proficiency. Unfortunately, this amendment would strip away the efforts to identify the students who are not performing and will cover up the fact that some groups of students are in fact being left behind. Any school that is leaving groups of students behind should not be considered high quality. I think we really ought to be collecting this data for all of the schools, not just those trying to achieve high quality, but we need to hold all schools accountable for the success of all students. This amendment goes in the opposite direction, and therefore ought to be defeated.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Madam Speaker, this rule provides for debate of legislation that was slapped together behind closed doors, providing for trillions of dollars in unspecified cuts. The final version was sprung on the House after being made public just this morning, and now we're expected to vote the whole thing up or down, without amendment, in spite of the fact that 53 Senators are already on record saying that they will oppose it. This legislation is in response to a manufactured so-called ``crisis.'' We can avoid default on our obligations the same way we have done it almost once a year over the last half century, just increase the debt ceiling. And now this final version calls for default on our obligations unless we pass a constitutional amendment mislabeled a ``balanced budget amendment.'' The so-called ``balanced budget amendment'' reported from the Judiciary Committee does not require a balanced budget. In fact, it will make it more difficult to balance the budget, and it will certainly jeopardize Social Security and Medicare. It will also include a provision that requires a three-fifths vote to increase the debt ceiling, as if this week's drama isn't enough of a spectacle. Madam Speaker, we should end this manufactured crisis, increase the debt ceiling to avoid default, and then seriously focus on legislation that will create jobs and restore fiscal responsibility.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. It's in that context that the actions of this Congress have to be taken into consideration because last December we passed an $800 billion, 2-year tax cut--not new tax cuts--extending the ones that were there. Had we let them expire, which I think would have been better judgment, we would not be in the situation we're in. We passed $400 billion a year tax cuts. We now have a general consensus that we need, in the next 10 years, $4 trillion worth of savings, deficit reduction, about $400 billion a year, exactly the same as what we did in tax cuts last year. All of these cuts we're talking about are necessary to partially offset the fact that we extended the tax cuts last year. And the process was all up or down. You had to vote it all up or down, one vote, without any choices. We didn't need to extend all of the tax cuts. Maybe if we extended some but not all, we could have avoided cuts in Head Start, in food inspectors, firefighters and those kinds of things. We didn't make the choice step by step. It was, we have to extend the tax cuts, and in order to preserve those tax cuts, we're making the cuts in Medicare and Social Security and Pell Grants and Head Start, clean water grants, poison control, and on and on. It's in that context that these cuts are so regrettable.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. On that point, if we do nothing and let them expire--we're not talking about new tax cuts--if we just let them expire, we have enough deficit reduction on the table to match Simpson- Bowles.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Well, the Arizona State capitol was sold and leased back. So there's no telling what they might want to do. But the really regrettable part of this is the process that we're in. Because we just passed a bill that provides for trillions of dollars in unspecified cuts. They slapped the thing together behind closed doors. The final version was developed this morning after the bill had been debated. There was only 1 minute left in the debate, and they changed the bill. They added in the balanced budget amendment and some other kinds of changes and sprung it on the House. We finished the debate this afternoon. Vote it up or down, no amendments. We took all that time doing it on a bill that 53 Senators have signed a letter saying that they're going to oppose it as soon as it gets over there. Now, I said unspecified amendments because they don't cut anything in their bill. There are no cuts. There are caps. So we don't know what the cuts will be because they're just spending caps. We will find out next month what they have in mind because that's when we'll try to appropriate under the caps, and then we'll figure out what actually has to be cut. But we'd have an idea of what they might cut because earlier this year they had a bill of about $66 billion. Annualized, that would be about a hundred billion for the full year. In 10-year costs, that would be about a trillion. So if you want to know what a trillion-dollar 10- year cut would look like, we can see it. Look at what they cut. They cut safety net programs like community action agencies, legal aid, energy assistance for low-income seniors, community health centers, WIC nutrition. All cut. They had investments in our future, education. All kinds of education programs, including Head Start and Pell Grants. Cut. Job training programs in the middle of an economic downturn. Cut. NASA and other scientific research, energy research. Cut. High-speed rail, investments in our future. Immunizations and AmeriCorp. Cut. Then routine functions of government that you would hope would not have to get cut, like air traffic controllers. They're working so hard, they're falling asleep on the jobs. Cops and firefighters. Cut. FBI agents. We spent the last couple of days in the Judiciary Committee talking about trying to chase down cases involving child pornography, and we don't have enough FBI agents to chase them down. And what do they do? Cut FBI agents. Clean Water grants, poison control, aid to small shipyards. We have a lot of shipyards in my district. National parks. OSHA--Occupational Safety and Health Administration--personnel cut. FEMA. With all the problems we've got all over the country now, floods and everything, FEMA is cut. They talk about border security. Border protection and border security. Cut. Food inspection. That's just a small sample of what they had in that. Then in the next bill they're cutting Medicare. All of those cut. And that's just the first trillion. I yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Thank you very much, and I appreciate your doing this. As our friend from New York has said, we need to be focused on jobs. The other side of the aisle is quick to say that you cannot raise taxes in the middle of an economic downturn, and then the next thing they say is we need to cut spending. Spending cuts have a much larger impact on employment because, when you have an agency and when you cut the budget, people get fired immediately. There is a more immediate effect than tax cuts, which you don't pay until later on. It has a larger effect. So, when we start talking about the jobs, these cuts will have an adverse effect on jobs. We need to focus on jobs first. We wouldn't be going through this kind of attack on our economy, on Medicare, on the education programs if it had not been for the threat to shut down the economy. This threat is unprecedented. We need to pay our obligations. We cannot default. It's actually manufactured, because never in American history has there been any serious effort to fail to pay our obligations as we've been going through in just these past few days. We need to increase the debt ceiling in the same way we've done it every year, sometimes twice a year--on average about once a year, sometimes twice a year--over the last 50 years. Just increase the debt ceiling. We should not be jeopardizing. We should not be having all this uncertainty in the markets with what's going on here today. As that saying goes, ``Just do it.''

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. And I couldn't figure out how they have done it over the past few years. I figured there must be something in there. So we Googled it, thanks to Google. And we found out. The first thing I found out is, with 6.3 million people, they got $6.4 billion of stimulus money that the Federal Government borrowed and then sent to them. A thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child--$4,000 for every family. That helped them balance the budget. But that wasn't enough. You know what else they did? They sold their State capitol and supreme court building. Did you hear what I said? They sold the State capitol building for $735 million and sold the supreme court building for $300 million and leased it back. That extra billion dollars in the budget was necessary for them to balance their budget.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I would like to bring that up because the legislation that we considered earlier today had a provision that required a constitutional amendment that is mislabeled. It is called the Balanced Budget Amendment. Well, if you look at the provisions of the bill, not just the title, the provisions, you will see that it requires a three-fifths vote to pass a budget that is not in balance. Every budget that we have considered for the last 9 years and every budget that we will consider for the foreseeable future will be unbalanced in the first year. So all you've done is increase the threshold for any budget to be balanced. The Republican Study Committee budget, which is probably the most conservative budget in terms of spending on the table, other budgets would probably cut the deficit just as much, but all of those severe deficit reduction bills would require a three-fifths vote. Now remember, when the Clinton budget passed, it passed by the thinnest of margins. We balanced the budget and were on course to paying off the national debt, created a record number of jobs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average almost quadrupled. Fifty Democrats lost their seats when they voted for that bill. When you vote for deficit reduction, a lot of people will be casting career-ending votes. Increasing the threshold to three-fifths will just make it harder or even more impossible to pass. What you can get three-fifths for, once you need three-fifths, any kind of budget can pass. You can have more tax cuts, and we got three- fifths votes from the $800 billion tax cut back in December. But a three-fifths vote, you can pass new tax cuts and new spending. You can make the deficit worse under the balanced budget amendment and probably will. Also consider that it had the provision of two-thirds vote to increase taxes. That will obviously make it more difficult to balance the budget. Two-thirds vote to spend more than 18 percent of GDP, a number we haven't seen since Medicare was enacted. That means you're going to have pressure on Medicare and Social Security. Interestingly, if you put all of these things together, you'll notice that you can cut Medicare benefits or Social Security benefits with a simple majority. But to save those programs with new taxes, a two- thirds vote in the House and a two-thirds vote in the Senate. And then to add insult to injury, it requires a three-fifths vote to increase the debt ceiling. As if the drama that we've been through in the last few days and last few weeks isn't enough of a spectacle, they wanted to make that kind of thing routine, where we'd have to go through this every year. We've had to increase the debt ceiling on average once a year for the last 50 years. They want to go through this spectacle with a supermajority so that we can have these kinds of problems all along. Now, we heard during consideration of the balanced budget amendment when we were in committee about Arizona's balanced budget amendment and how well it works. And we kept hearing this over and over again. So I thought, I wonder how they do that? So I Googled it.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the NASA Langley Aerospace Research Summer Scholars program. In 1986, under the leadership of Dr. Sam Massenberg along with the support of senior leadership from NASA Langley Headquarters, the Langley Aerospace Research Summer Scholars (LARSS) program was established. This program was designed to create internship opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and ultimately provide a pipeline of experienced graduates into NASA's workforce. Today, I would like to take this opportunity to recognize and commemorate the program's 25th anniversary. The LARSS program is NASA's oldest year round internship program providing high school, undergraduate, and graduate students hands on research experience working side-by-side with NASA engineers and scientists. This program was ``the first of its kind'' and has served as a model for other NASA centers. During the 25 year history of the LARSS program, more than 4,500 competitively selected students from all over the United States and the U.S. territories have participated in the program. The program began with a class of 20 in 1986 and has since grown to include more than 200 students annually. This year the program received its largest applicant pool with nearly 800 applicants applying over the fall, spring, and summer sessions. The LARSS program has been benefiting engineering undergraduate and graduate students for 25 years. Many of these students join NASA's workforce and have taken a significant role in preserving NASA's leadership in aeronautics and space science. This program has been a catalyst for promoting careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics especially in the African-American, Hispanic, and Native American communities. The result continues to be a well educated, well trained, and diverse engineering and science workforce for NASA. Minorities made up 23% of the 200 scholars participating in the program this past year and that number continues to increase. Since 2006, the Virginia Space Grant Consortium has managed the LARSS program for NASA under a sub-award from the National Institute of Aerospace. This has allowed the program to grow from a summer only program to a year round program in the spring, summer, and fall. The success of the LARSS program has been recognized by the Langley and Hampton Roads communities, and it was recently ranked sixth on a national list of the ``10 Best Internships for 2011'' by Vault Career Intelligence. As the world becomes increasingly relevant on technology, the importance of the United States remaining technologically competitive and producing quality engineers and scientists is vital. Mr. Speaker, I am proud that 25 years later we are able to recognize the importance of this great program and the dynamic impact it has made on American society. On this 25th anniversary of LARSS, I commend NASA for the progress it has made to strengthen STEM education, and I challenge it to continue to inspire our youth to create new ideas, new products and innovative solutions to solve our nation's problems. It is my hope that LARSS will continue to provide NASA and our nation's engineering and science community a pipeline of problem solvers and innovators. I thank NASA Langley for continuing the great legacy of the LARSS program over the past 25 years, and I look forward to its continued success.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, we're talking about being serious. And here we're considering a $2 trillion bill, $200 billion a year, slapped together behind closed doors and sprung on the House less than 24 hours after it was printed, an up-or-down vote, no amendments, and is legislation that 53 Senators already say they are going to oppose. We have a situation where last December, we passed $400 billion a year in tax cuts, and now everybody says we need $400 billion a year in deficit reduction. This bill does not cut anything. It has caps, promises for cuts in the future. And we don't know what those cuts are going to be. But we know in the continuing resolution, food inspection was cut, FBI agents, air traffic controllers, flu shots, clean water grants, schools, scientific research, community health centers, transportation--we can expect all of those to be cut in the future, all to preserve tax cuts, many for millionaires and oil companies. That's not right. Let's go through the regular process so we know what we're doing.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment. Our focus today ought to be on jobs. And as some of my colleagues have already said, funding the arts creates jobs. For negligible investments, we create lots of jobs, because not only are the arts supported, but when you have artistic programs, restaurants and other activities generate jobs all over the community. And our focus ought to be on education. Those children, for example, who are involved in of the arts, do better in school. Now we're trying to cut funding for the arts in this amendment, and we cannot ignore why all these cuts are necessary. Last December we passed a tax cut of $800 billion, $400 billion a year. Now, we're looking to make cuts. Most of the projections are that we need $4 trillion over the next 10 years in deficit reduction, $400 billion a year. I hope we don't ignore the fact that that's the same number, $400 billion tax cuts a year, and now we're looking for $400 billion spending cuts a year. So when we talk about cutting the arts, when we talk about cutting Social Security and Medicare and education and everything else, we cannot ignore the fact that all of these cuts are designed to preserve the tax cuts that we passed last December. And so to preserve those tax cuts--many are going to millionaires, multimillionaires, and oil companies--we find ourselves having to deal with this amendment to cut the arts. Mr. Chairman, we should not be lulled into accepting caps. Caps just delay the inevitable because caps don't cut anything today. But when you start appropriating under the caps, in a few weeks or a few months, we'll find that there's not enough money for the arts, there's not enough money for Head Start, there's not enough money for education or Social Security or Medicare. So when you accept the caps, you're ultimately going to make these cuts. We don't have any crisis today, Mr. Chairman, because some don't want to increase the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is a perfunctory responsibility of this Congress. We've already spent the money. The debt ceiling just acknowledges what we've already done. We need to just pass the debt ceiling and get back to the regular order where we make choices. Do we want to cut Social Security and Medicare and the arts in order to preserve tax cuts, many going to the oil companies and multimillionaires? I hope not, and we should begin by defeating this amendment. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I thank the gentlelady for yielding. If we are going to talk about how bad the budget situation is now, I think it makes sense to explain how we got here. First, in the early 1990s, the budget had gone totally out of whack. The first President Bush got together with the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate. Unfortunately, we had to break his pledge on ``read my lips, no new taxes,'' and they came to an agreement and did a little bit to fix the budget. In 1993 after President Clinton came in, we did some serious work about the budget. We raised some taxes and got the budget under control in the 1993 budget. When you vote on budgets, they are tough budgets. President Bush to a large extent can credit his decision to address the budget with new taxes as part of the reason for his defeat. And when the Democrats, without a single Republican vote in the House, and not a single Republican vote in the Senate, passed the 1993 budget, 50 Democrats lost their seats. It was a tough vote. You lose your seats when you have very serious deficit reduction. But as a result of that 1993 budget, we not only balanced the budget in just a few short years, but we went into significant surplus and created a record number of jobs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average almost quadrupled. In 1995, when the Republicans got in control by demagoguing the votes that we cast fixing the budget, they came in and tried to undermine everything in the entire budget. President Clinton let the government get shut down rather than sign those irresponsible budgets that the Republicans passed. As a result of his tenacity and holding on to his original plan, the budget was balanced in a few short years. Now, there are some in Congress who talk about the historic balanced budget amendment in the mid-90s. Well, if they hadn't come to such agreement, the balance would have balanced itself. We didn't know when we voted on that, as a matter of fact, whether the budget had already gone into surplus. They hadn't finished counting the money. It went from a 290 deficit, we got down to $10 billion, and the agreement slowed down the progress a little bit. But we still went into surplus. In 2001, Chairman Greenspan was answering questions like, what's going to happen when we pay off the entire national debt held by the public? What's going to happen to interest rates? What's going to happen to the bond market when there are no government bonds? How do you calculate investment strategy when you don't have government bonds setting the no-risk limit, and you have increased rate of return after that, how do you calculate investment strategies if there are no government bonds because you have paid them all off? By 2008, it was projected we would owe no money to China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. We would have paid off our entire national debt. So people are thinking this is hard. We had done it. In 2001, by August of 2001, after the first round of tax cuts, we had already gone broke. Instead of the surplus, Social Security surplus, they were talking about the lock box, put that away for Social Security, Medicare surplus, put that in the lock box for Medicare. We had a surplus over that. By August of President Bush's first year, we had gone through all of the surplus, and we were into Social Security and Medicare by August. You cannot blame September 11 for the fact that we had already gone broke a month before. And so after two tax cuts, not paid for, after prescription drug benefit not paid for, a couple of wars not paid for, we are in the ditch. Now, during the Clinton administration, we had PAYGO. You wanted to spend some more money, you had to come up with the money to pay for it. You wanted to cut taxes, you had to cut some programs, you had to pay for it. Everything you did, you had to pay for it. When President Bush came in, they did away with PAYGO and put us in the ditch. Now we're so far in the ditch that most experts suggest we need $4 trillion in deficit reduction to get back to a point where we are fiscally responsible. About $4 trillion. The Simpson-Bowles committee came up with one plan with a lot of this and a little of that--$4 trillion. But there is one interesting thing that you could do to come up with almost $4 trillion: let all of the Bush tax cuts expire. Done. That is all you have to do. As a matter of fact, in the Congressional Black Caucus budget this year, we started off with that premise. Let them all expire. But we wanted to extend some, and so we paid for them. We cut the oil loopholes and extended some, and we cut some other loopholes, and added this tax and cut this. We got to a point where we could extend a lot of the tax cuts because we paid for them. If you want to know what deficit reduction looks like without revenue, you can look at the continuing resolution earlier this year. It started out at $66 billion, which annualized, was about a hundred billion. And 10 years, that would be about a trillion. If you look at what was in that first trillion dollars that they wanted to cut, it was so bad that they couldn't get it passed. They ended up having to compromise. We had cuts in the safety net like community health centers, cuts in energy assistance for low-income seniors, cuts in community action agencies, and we had cuts in investments in the future. Head Start, Pell Grants got cut. Scientific research and NASA all got cut. And then just perfunctory parts of government. FBI agents got cut. We're sitting up in the Judiciary Committee trying to figure out how to deal with many of the problems we've got, and half of it is we don't need new criminal laws. We need new FBI agents to investigate the cases. FBI agents were cut; 4,000 fewer. Clean Water Grants, Environmental Protection, all cut. Air traffic controllers. There are so few. They're working so hard that they're falling asleep on the job. They were cut. The next round of cuts would be, obviously, Medicare and housing and other programs were next on the chopping block. We could not get--they could not get that passed. As a matter of fact, by the time they finished, now they're going to a program suggesting that we need to cut not $1 trillion but $2 trillion or $3 trillion. If you couldn't get the first trillion passed because you're so deep into the things that people believe in, things that--Clean Water Grants, food inspectors. There are so few food inspectors in that budget that some meatpacking plants would have to close because they are obligated to have a Federal meat inspector on site. And if you can't be on site, you can't operate. They had so few meat inspectors that they anticipated many of the companies would have to close down or at least close temporarily because there were so few. Now they're trying to figure out how you can do $2 trillion or $3 trillion worth of cuts. They came up with this idea of the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is something that recognizes the fact that we've already spent the money. So you raise the debt ceiling not because you're spending any money but because you have already spent the money. It's a perfunctory kind of thing. Dozens of times, almost once a year over the last 50 years, we've had to increase the debt ceiling. Democrats and Republicans all have had to vote for the debt ceiling. The charade about the thing is usually the majority party has to cast the tough votes and the minority party gets to talk about fiscal irresponsibility and grandstand a little bit, but it's never in the context that there's any question about whether the debt ceiling is going to be increased. Speeches are made, but it's in the context it's going to pass. And you can make a speech about it. Now they're saying, Maybe we won't increase the debt ceiling. Nobody knows what would happen if the debt ceiling were not increased, if we defaulted on our bonds, if we didn't send out Social Security checks. Nobody knows what would happen--what would happen to the investments, what would happen to the interest rates. We had a temporary technical glitch a few years ago where checks were a day or two--couple of days late going out and they calculate that as a result of that little glitch we paid about half a percent higher interest rate for many years. Now, a 1 percent interest rate on the national debt now is about in the range of $100 billion. So if you're looking at what would happen if you defaulted on the debt and people charged more interest, well, that's the order of magnitude that we would be talking about. We shouldn't have to even discuss what would happen ``if,'' because it could be anything. And who would want to find out? We ought to just go ahead and increase the debt ceiling and not use it as a threat that unless you do this, we'll blow up the economy. I would hope that our leadership would not capitulate to those kind of threats because if you capitulate this time, in October they can shut down October by not passing appropriations bills. Don't get ``my way or the highway'' to close down the government. In a year or so you would have to do the debt ceiling again. Same thing. So if you capitulate to these kinds of childish threats, there will be no end to it and you will certainly invite them back. As a matter of fact, what is going on now is they're kind of slow-walking us through some cuts that never could have been made in the normal legislative process. Last year, in December, we extended the Bush tax cuts. That cost $400 billion a year. Now we're broke, and we need to come up with about $400 billion a year, as if we had forgotten what we did last December. Now, when we extended those tax cuts, there's no mention of how it would be paid for. It would have been nice to know what the plan was, whether we're going to have to cut Social Security or Medicare in order to afford the tax cuts that were extended in December. Now they're going to try to get some cuts that they couldn't otherwise get if you're making rational choices. And legislative process is about choices. If you want a program, you ought to pay for it. If you're willing to pay the taxes, then you can have your program. Not willing to pay the taxes, can't have your program. Last year we passed health care reform. It cost a trillion dollars. We raised more than a trillion dollars in taxes. That's a balanced approach. If we didn't want to pay the taxes, we couldn't have the program. And so that's the balanced approach that we're not making as we go along now because the next step in this process will be not cuts but caps. No program will be cut if any deal comes on. These $2 trillion or $3 trillion deals come back. Not a single program will be cut. There will just be caps. Three months from now, when you try to appropriate under those caps, you'll wonder why you can't afford Head Start, why you can't afford any food inspectors, why you can't afford any FBI agents, because the caps are so low. If you put them all together, if you had made your choices, if you had known you were going to have to cut Head Start and FBI agents and Clean Water Grants when you cut taxes, maybe you wouldn't have cut the taxes. You should have made the choices all at once.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I yield to the gentlelady from Texas.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. In terms of jobs, much has been said about the reason why you would not want to increase taxes in an economic downturn. Because you would adversely effect the economy. That's true. But if you have spending cuts, the effect on the economy is not only larger but more direct and more immediate. Increases in taxes don't hit until the following year. As soon as you cut spending, somebody is getting fired. Jobs get lost immediately when you have spending cuts. So for the same reason that they say you can't increase taxes during an economic downturn, the stronger argument could be made that you should not have any spending cuts. The estimates on some of the Republican plans are that hundreds of thousands of jobs would be lost if those plans had been enacted. Now, one of the real tragedies about all this discussion is sometimes--talk about rhetoric in politics--some people are talking about this so-called balanced budget amendment as a condition of moving forward. Well, one of the things about the legislation that we'll consider called the balanced budget amendment is a bill that has a misleading title. It says: Proposing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Guess what that legislation does not require?

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I yield to the gentlelady from the Virgin Islands.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. What would he do? What would the Republicans have supported him doing to reduce the deficit? Would they have supported increased taxes? What spending are they talking about with specificity?

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Legislation is about choices. I mean, if you want a Head Start program, you've got to pay for it. If you want clean water grants, you've got to pay for them. We need to be making these choices, not in the context of threats about blowing up the economy, but by making the rational choices about what kind of vision and what kind of future we think we want. Some of us think that education is important. You have to pay taxes to get a good education. Some people think that clean water grants are important. Some people think that scientific research, food inspectors, FBI agents, air traffic controllers are important. There are a lot of things we like in government, and you've got to pay for them.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. It does not require a balanced budget. What it does is require a three-fifths vote to pass a budget that is not unbalanced. Every budget we consider this year was not in balance the first year. So the Ryan budget that passed would have required a three- fifths vote. The Republican Study Committee plan that was not balanced the first year that in the fullness of time would cut discretionary spending 50, 60, or 70 percent was not in balance the first year. It would require a three-fifths vote. Now, as I said, when you cast those tough votes, the first President Bush lost his Presidency trying to balance the budget. Fifty Democrats lost their seats in 1993 trying to balance the budget. I will guarantee you that there will be Republicans who will lose their seats for voting for the Ryan plan because it included, essentially, a repeal of Medicare and replacing it with an inadequate voucher, and they're going to lose their seats over it. We already picked up one seat in upstate New York where that Ryan plan was an issue, but when you vote on real deficit reduction, people will lose their seats. If you were to move the threshold up to three-fifths and if you were the chief sponsor of a severe deficit reduction plan, common sense will let you know that it will be harder to pass if you move that thing up to three-fifths. So the enactment will make it harder to pass deficit reduction. Once you need three-fifths, there is no limit to how irresponsible you can get. The tax cut extensions of $400 billion in December, that got three-fifths. You could have more tax cuts and more additional spending totally out of control, and all you'd need is three-fifths.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. The caps are another part.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. There are four provisions. The first is you need three-fifths to pass a budget. That's going to make it harder to pass a budget. The second provision is a two-thirds vote to raise taxes. So, if you're trying to balance a budget, having a two-thirds vote to raise taxes will obviously make it harder to balance the budget. This thing is called a ``balanced budget amendment.'' The first two provisions obviously make it harder to balance the budget. The third provision is you need a two-thirds vote to pass a budget that spends more than 18 percent of the gross national product, a two- thirds vote to pass if it's more than 18 percent of GDP. We haven't been that low since we passed Medicare, so that's going to put a lot of pressure on the Medicare program. Guess what? If you put all these things together with the pressure on Medicare, we know we can cut the benefits with a simple majority, but to save the program with new taxes: two-thirds in the House and two-thirds in the Senate. There is another little insulting provision at the end. It's a three- fifths vote to raise the debt ceiling, and raising the debt ceiling this year has been enough of a spectacle that they want it to be an annual, everyday occurrence. You have this thing called the ``balanced budget amendment,'' which will make it harder to balance the budget, and it would certainly put pressure on Social Security and Medicare by allowing those programs to be cut with a simple majority. Yet to save them with new revenues like increasing the amount right now with Social Security a little over $100,000--no more Social Security tax--and if we were to extend that like Medicare to all of your income, we could pretty much solve the problem, but you couldn't do that without a two-thirds vote. You couldn't close an oil loophole to save Social Security without a two- thirds vote--but to cut the benefits, a simple majority. They want to inflict the balanced budget amendment in there to preserve their oil company millionaire loopholes and jeopardize Social Security and Medicare and put us in a budget situation where it will be virtually impossible to ever balance the budget. People should read the bill past the title. Most people, when they hear the title, they start debating whether it's a good idea or a bad idea to have a balanced budget or whether it's a good idea or a bad idea to balance the budget every year without exception, which would not allow countercyclical spending in times of downturn. Now, interestingly enough, the gentlelady from Texas and I serve on the Judiciary Committee, and we heard one of the Representatives from Arizona talk about the Arizona balanced budget amendment and how that works on the State level. Then we did a little research to find out: How did Arizona balance its budget? We found out, first of all, they got billions of dollars of stimulus money to help them balance the budget, but that wasn't enough. Do you know, in the last couple of years, the Arizona State government has sold--sold--their State capitol and sold their Supreme Court building and leased it back? They got hundreds of millions of dollars in the kitty that helped them balance the budget by selling the State capitol and by selling the Supreme Court. That's what a balanced budget amendment does for you, I guess. We need to make sure that we don't get lost in the rhetoric about the misleading titles of legislation, and we need to actually read past the title in the balanced budget amendment.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I rise today in opposition to an unfortunate trend that seems to be creeping up all over the country: laws requiring voters to show some form of photo ID before voting. Currently, 29 States have laws on the books requiring all voters to show some form of identification before voting, and many of these require a photo ID. Now, my home State of Virginia requires voter identification or a signature on an affirmation of identity form, which is a much better process. This year, many other State legislatures are considering measures that would require voters to have an actual identification. While voter ID may seem like a good way to keep voter fraud at a minimum, this type of requirement has serious unintended consequences. Mr. Speaker, requiring a photo ID will make it a little bit more difficult for some voters to exercise their right to vote. We should particularly be concerned that provisions like these have a disparate impact on minorities. One nationwide study of voting-age citizens found that African Americans are more than three times as likely as others to lack a government-issued photo ID. And these laws have unintended consequences, such as the situation where nuns were denied the right to vote because they couldn't produce a photo ID, even though they were personally known to the election officials. It's obvious that voter ID laws will not prevent people from voting, but it creates another little barrier that will mean that a few potential voters will not get their paperwork in on time and will miss the voter registration deadlines. These few voters could make the difference in an election. Mr. Speaker, these voter ID laws are a solution in search of a problem. There's no credible evidence that in-person voter fraud is a persistent problem. And the voters who will be denied the opportunity to vote under these processes will certainly outnumber any fraudulent votes that are prevented. Voting is not an arbitrary, inconsequential act. Mr. Speaker, it is important that we ensure that every eligible voter is given the opportunity to vote free from any unnecessary barriers.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I oppose this legislation, and I would like to focus my comments on the balanced budget amendment because the dirty little secret about the balanced budget amendment is that it does not require a balanced budget. It will actually make it more difficult for future Congresses to balance the budget, so the title is just misleading. Let's go through some of the provisions. The first provision of the balanced budget amendment requires a budget not in balance to require a three-fifths vote in the House and the Senate. The fact is every budget that we considered this year--in fact, most of the budgets, virtually every budget in the last 10 years--was not balanced in the first year. So all of those budgets, including the Republican Ryan plan, even the Republican Study Committee plan, would have required a three-fifths vote to pass in both the House and the Senate. Now, the deficit reduction requires tough votes, often career-ending votes. The 1993 Clinton budget that was on the way to paying off the national debt, if we hadn't changed it after 2001, we would have paid off the entire debt held by the public. By now, we would owe nothing to China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. But that didn't get three-fifths of the vote, and 50 Democrats lost their seats as a result of that plan. Likewise, this year's Republican Ryan plan, which repeals Medicare as we know it, is a good deficit reduction plan. Didn't get anywhere close to three-fifths, and Democrats have already picked up one seat in the special election because the Republican candidate supported the Republican Ryan plan. So deficit reduction requires tough votes, and increasing the votes needed to pass it will not help pass a deficit reduction plan. Now, while it's harder to pass a deficit reduction plan because of the three-fifth's requirement, increasing the deficit can still occur. Last December, we passed $800 billion in additional deficits by extending the tax cuts. Those still could have been passed under this legislation because you only need a simple majority to cut taxes. And a budget which even proposes additional tax cuts and even higher deficits would require the same three-fifths vote as the tough deficit reduction would require. Tax cuts can pass by a simple majority, but tax increases will require a two-thirds vote. Common sense will tell you that that will make it harder to balance the budget. The two-thirds provision to spend more than 18 percent of GDP will obviously put pressure on Medicare and Medicaid, since we haven't been to 18 percent of GDP since Medicare was enacted. You can cut the benefits with a simple majority, but to save the programs with additional taxes will require a two-thirds vote. Finally, Mr. Speaker, we know that we should not be distracted by misleading titles. We should notice that the legislation will make it harder to actually balance the budget because it increases the number of Members who might have to cast career-ending votes, makes it virtually impossible to raise revenues or close loopholes. It will compel deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and you can't cure that with a simple nice little title. I urge my colleagues to oppose this legislation.