Republican Leadership Press Conference
February 3, 2010

Participants:
- Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH)
- Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA)
- Conference Chair Mike Pence (R-IN)
- Conference Vice Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)
- Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)
- Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)

Multimedia:
Audio  

Conference Chair Mike Pence
Good morning. House Republicans just completed our weekly meeting of the House Republican Conference and there was much discussion about the president's budget and the need to restore fiscal sanity to Washington, D.C. Like the budget the president introduced a year ago, the fiscal year 2011 budget spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much and the American people know it. The American people know we can't borrow and spend and bail our way back to a growing economy.

As House Republicans met with the president and dialogued with the president last week, and the president acknowledged, House Republicans have a different plan. We have an approach and a solution that'll get this economy moving with a combination of fiscal discipline in Washington, D.C. and fast-acting tax relief for working families, small businesses and family farms. It's time Washington, D.C. got serious about fiscal discipline and reform.

House Republicans are ready to work with our Democrat colleagues and work with this administration. That'll all begin by rejecting the fiscal recklessness and unsustainable path outlined in the president's budget this week.

Republican Whip Eric Cantor
 
Good morning. As we are all talking about the budget, and our Ranking Member of the Budget Committee has been engaged in those discussions, we will as well engage in those discussions today in the Ways and Means Committee. The President is out talking about his new program dealing with small business. We appreciate finally the fact that perhaps maybe small businesses are going to be a priority, because we know that small businesses are the job generators in our economy. But let's look at what kinds of things that are being proposed by this President in his budget as far as small business is concerned. His proposal is a Jimmy Carter era tax policy that failed.
 
We're about saying, look, no one is going to hire anyone until we remove the climate of uncertainty, that we talk about reducing the deficit so we don't incur higher taxes in the future, so that we don't have to see business people fearful of a cap and trade bill that will impose a national energy tax, so that we don't have to say to small business people, ‘hold on, wait, you'll have more health care mandates and, oh by the way, all the tax cuts that have been in place are going to be repealed and taxes will go up at the end of this year.' That's the reality. Their budget does nothing for job creation. We are trying to set the debate back towards the center and say we've got to be about growth in this economy and we've got to get our fiscal house in order and can't raise taxes in this recession.
 
Conference Vice Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers
 
If the president and the majority should have learned anything in 2009, it's that you can't borrow and spend your way into prosperity. What we saw last year was the stimulus package of $787 billion and we saw $1.4 trillion deficit. And what did we get? We got 4 million more job losses. It's just not sustainable.
 
And then last week at the State of the Union, the president seemed to acknowledge that deficit spending, that the government spending, was out of control. And then this week, we see him roll out his budget plan that is just more of the same. It is more deficit. It is $5 trillion of additional debt in the next five years. Think about what that means.
 
There is not enough money in the entire world to pay off that debt without raising interest rates or devaluating our currency, or maybe both. This is not what we should be giving to our children and our grandchildren. These are policies that will actually threaten our economy and threaten our future. And Republicans cannot stand for these kinds of budgets that are unsustainable and are going to threaten our future as Americans.
 
Rep. Paul Ryan
 
I'll just say, the rhetoric we heard last week was reassuring. The substance we got this week was jaw dropping. The president's budget, by his administration's own standards and own admission, is not a credible budget. This is a budget that has $2 trillion, by their own definition, of extra tax increases on workers and small businesses. Fourteen trillion in more debt and borrowing.
 
We can't keep getting all of this money from the Chinese and everybody else. They will stop lending us money one day down the road. And what we know is it is not too late for America to turn around its fiscal problems. It is not too late for us to get our debt under control, our deficit paid off, and our economy growing again without hitting our families and our small business with such large tax increases.
 
But what we have here is a budget that is just not credible. That's not my words, that's the budget director's words. This is a budget who's deficits never get to a sustainable level.  I just find it amazing that the leader of our country would not give us a budget that puts us on a path to paying off our debt, to keeping our word on our bonds, and to getting this economy growing.
 
It's just to me astounding the lack of leadership and the insatiable appetite for more spending and more borrowing. And so we will be offering alternatives. We don't think this is the way to go, because if we implement the president's budget as he's proposing it's implemented, it will be too late down the road to turn things around. We know right now irrefutable, statistically, that we are going to give the next generation a lower standard of living. We know that our children and our grandchildren are going to inherit a mountain of debt and taxes where they won't have the kind of life that we had. That is not what we do in America. We fix our problems in our generation so the next generation is better off. And that, in this budget, is being severed. It's unconscionable, it's irresponsible, and to use the administration's own terminology, it's not credible.
 
Rep. Cynthia Lummis
 
I was so encouraged last week with the State of the Union message and the President's visit to our Conference in Baltimore, and then all of that encouragement just disappeared yesterday, vanished, when we had our meeting on the budget with Mr. Orszag.  It is just more of the same old spending money that we don't have.
 
As Mr. Ryan said, he repeatedly used the term, ‘this is unsustainable,' and justified it by saying the previous president had unsustainable budgets as well. That's not the right answer for a responsible nation. That's not the right answer to the American people who say we want true fiscal discipline now. 
 
We need to enact strict budget caps that apply this year, not next year. We need to deal with 100 percent of our budget problems, not the one-eighth that the president has chosen to freeze. President Bush inherited a mess when 9/11 happened just a few months into his presidency, and he had to deal with that crisis, and it took him off his agenda, yet he dealt with it responsibly.
 
This president may not have wished he came in to tough fiscal times when unemployment was growing, but that was the card he was dealt, and instead of dealing with it responsibly, they're in denial, and pursuing an agenda that is absolutely unsustainable in a good economy, let alone an economy that is struggling. We need jobs, we need fiscal responsibility, we need to respond to the issues at hand.
 
Republican Leader John Boehner

The president and Democratic leaders think their political problems are that they haven't focused their message accurately.  Well, let me say to the president, and to Ms. Pelosi, and to Senator Reid: it's not the message that the American people are concerned about, it's what you are doing.

You know, whether it's cap-and-trade, the government takeover of health care that they're still trying to find a way to pass, and now we've got this budget that - it's real simple - it spends too much, it taxes too much, and it clearly borrows too much from our kids and grandkids. We need real budget caps and we need them now - real spending caps and now.

But you know, the American people are still asking, ‘where are the jobs?'  And as long as they have their job-killing agenda out there and they continue to spend the money at the rate they are spending it, and borrowing at the rate, there will be no money out there for small businesses to borrow. It's time that we find some bipartisan way to say no to all of this spending.