House Republicans are painting Democrats like Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) as hypocrites for opposing a Constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment set for a Friday floor vote — even though they voted to send an identical amendment off to the states for ratification in 1995.
In his weekly briefing with reporters Tuesday, Hoyer offered a comprehensive defense of his change of heart and argued that Republicans have proved too irresponsible to steward a country that is required by its Constitution to maintain balanced budgets every year.
“Since I voted in January of ’95 a lot of things have happened,” Hoyer said.
Specifically, he noted that just months after passing a balanced budget in 1995, House Republicans escalated a fight with the White House that ultimately led to the infamous shutdown of ’95-’96. And he noted that after President Clinton balanced the budget in the late ’90s, Republicans took power and replaced those surpluses with deficits.
“I did not contemplate the irresponsibility I have seen fiscally over the last nine years — or eight years of the Bush administration and Republican leadership of the House and Senate,” Hoyer said. “And this last few months where Republicans took America to the brink of default. They placed the confidence of the world in America’s fiscal judgment into question…. Immediately upon again achieving majority in Washington in 2001, the Republicans set about undermining that very fiscal responsibility and in fact added over $3 trillion to the deficit over the next eight years. So that I have over the last 16 years had a substantial erosion in my confidence of the willingness of the other party to [put us on a] responsible path to get to balance, particularly paying for what they bought.”
