{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["http://sanford.house.gov//media-center/newsletters/budget-deal", "Budget Deal", "2013-12-14", "2013", "2013-12", "Republican", "House", "SC", "Mark Sanford", "S000051", "sanford.house.gov", null, null, "legacy", "Why is it that spending always seems to win in any government? Jefferson warned two hundred years ago that the normal course of things was for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield, and unfortunately yesterday\u2019s Ryan-Murray budget deal was another data point in support of our third President\u2019s hypothesis. I voted against the deal because it\u00a0raised spending while shattering Washington\u2019s only current platform for financial constraint.\nThis is not to say that its authors\u00a0weren't\u00a0trying to fix a problem, they were and I applaud them. They\u00a0even had some\u00a0steps toward reining in spending that suggested important bipartisan compromise. It is just that their fix will prove most expensive for us as taxpayers.\nLeaving spending aside for one moment, I have been struck since returning to Congress, after a 13 year absence, with the disappearance of the budget process in our nation\u2019s Capitol. What were once yearly debates on each of the 12 categories of government spending, have now devolved to the point that the operations of our government are run on automatic pilot. In Washington they are called \u201cContinuing Resolutions\u201d and they simply fund the portions of government under Congress\u2019s yearly oversight as they were funded the year before. It\u2019s bad for the taxpayer and disastrous for the aspects of government that we fund because it neither rewards, nor penalizes, the parts of government that do and don\u2019t work.\nThe question we had to ask in this debate was should a return to the correct budget process in Washington cost $63 billion? More precisely the question is should we spend $63 billion for the promise of going back to that process for the guarantee of just a year, or if we were lucky 24 months?\nEven if we got a return to the normal budget process in Washington, the bill still had glaring deficiencies in raising spending and adding yet a bit more in taxes.\nOn spending it did what Washington always does, increase it now and promise to pay it back later. So the $63 billion of new spending comes overwhelmingly in the first year, and the promise to repay comes overwhelmingly after ten years. It means the deficit would go up by $41 billion in just the next 24 months. Even more frightening was that minutes after we took the vote, the deal began to prove anything but binding. We won\u2019t have to wait for ten years to see if Congress will abide by the new spending limits; they were broken within ten minutes! It\u2019s ridiculously hard to believe, but literally the next vote we took after the budget deal was the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act. It overwhelmingly passed and authorized spending levels for defense at $31.6 billion higher than the cap in the Ryan-Murray budget deal.\nSo let\u2019s think about this. Congress passes a law to hold the line on spending. This bill on Thursday breaks that law for a new deal that will hold the line on spending, and within about ten minutes Congress has already laid the course for breaking that law.\nAs if all this were not enough, this bill would raise taxes. They are not called taxes, but if it involves money leaving my wallet and heading to Washington, it\u2019s sure a first cousin. In this case the fees we pay to fly will be going up.\nWe might have passed the \u201cclean\u201d Continuing Resolution the President, and House and Senate Democrats were calling for a month ago, and taken some time to consider all these things. Sometimes no deal is the better deal, and Thursday night it struck me that there was something to what Jefferson articulated. At minimum, hanging onto any spending restraint one can find in Washington is important, because the only budget you can count on is this year\u2019s.", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["http://sanford.house.gov//media-center/newsletters/budget-deal"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.756749115884304, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}