Today, the Senate vigorously debated the details of a balanced budget amendment. Below are comments from some of my colleagues, who agree that we need a strong BBA that will truly force the federal government to live within its means, rather than a Trojan horse BBA that will make runaway deficits a permanent part of Washington’s books:

Senator Jim DeMint: “President Obama, as I said, proposed a budget that doubled the national debt in the next ten years. That’s not responsible leadership at a time when we are already at an unsustainable debt level. Despite all the bipartisan promises to cut spending, Washington is still voting to make government bigger and more expensive than ever. And this includes some Republicans joining the fray here to just increase spending. Federal spending went up 5% in the first nine months of the year despite all the hoopla about us cutting spending here. There’s one way to judge if we’re cutting the budget or not despite all the Washingtonspeak: If we know if we’re spending more, we just have to ask ourselves, are we spending more than we did last year? The answer is yes. And we’re going to spend more next year than we did this year, based on the bills we’re passing this week and next.… It’s gluttony. It’s political gluttony. Since Obama became president, the debt limit has been raised four times. The debt is rising faster and higher than ever. Yet the senate refuses to pass a budget or cut spending. We must budget and balance the budget or we’re going to bring down our whole country.”

Senator Orrin Hatch: “For 2010, spending on interest on the national debt is greater than the funding for most other federal programs. Just look at that. If you can see in one year spending on interest is greater than most programs… $414 billion for interest expense. $173 billion for the Department of Labor. $129 billion for the Department of Agriculture. $108 billion for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Just one other I’ll mention, $92.9 billion for the Department of Education. Well, the impact of this quickly escalating debt burden could prove catastrophic for economic growth and for America’s families.… What happens if interest rates rise? Right now, they’re at historic lows. But that will not always be the case. And we’re figuring on historic lows right now as though they’re going to continue…. We’re spending at historic highs and going higher and with interest on the debt taking up a larger and larger share of spending, we need to be concerned we are entering a debt spiral from which we will have a difficult time extricating ourselves. For these reasons, Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concluded that our national debt is ‘the biggest threat we have to our national security.’”

Senator John Cornyn: “It’s true as the senator from Maine has said, that the basic conundrum we have in times when we passed deficit reduction legislation like Gramm-Rudman-Hollings and the other is purely statutory fixes are fine but they can’t bind future Congresses. We need a constitutional amendment that will make at this time law of the land that cannot be ignored by future Congresses when we do, as I hope we will do, embrace our responsibility to pass this constitutional amendment. Well, the facts show that — show that the time for a strong balanced budget amendment is now. It is today. Joint Resolution 10 is a strong balanced budget amendment that will protect the American people from runaway deficits and reckless spending. If ratified by three quarters of the states, that’s 38 states, it will require a two-thirds supermajority of Congress in both chambers to approve a deficit in any fiscal year. A supermajority would be needed in a time of emergency to approve a deficit in any given year and it can’t be open ended. It has to happen each year that a deficit might be run. And we can imagine that emergencies could occur, but it shouldn’t be a routine matter as it is now where we engage in deficit spending.”

Senator Rand Paul: “I rise today in support of the balanced budget amendment. In fact, it’s beyond me to imagine that anybody in this body could oppose a balanced budget amendment. I ran my election last year primarily on this fact, that government spending was out of control and that debt was consuming our country and that we needed serious rules to bring our budget into control. We tried in the past. This body passed Gramm-Rudman-Hollings and immediately began to evade it. This body passed PAYGO and then proceeded to disobey [its] own rules 700 times. We wonder why 9% of the people approve of Congress? It’s because we cannot even obey our own rules. We need new rules. We need a balanced budget amendment that would be an amendment to the Constitution because we do not adhere to the rules that we pass. This body is literally out of control.  Now, the other side says, trust us. Trust us. We can balance the budget. This other side hasn’t even passed any budget this year or last year, not just a balanced budget, the other side can’t pass any budget. So I think we really do need new and stronger rules to force us to do what is right, what every American family has to do and that’s balance our budget. A nation is no different.”

Senator David Vitter: “First of all, I hope it’s perfectly clear that our debt, our growing, unsustainable level of debt, is a clear and present danger and an immediate danger to our republic, to our democracy, to our economy, to our future. Debt, overspending has been a problem for quite a while in Washington. It’s been a problem under Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses. But forever it was a problem because we were passing on these big debt figures, this big burden to our kids and grandkids and we were kicking the can down the road. It was a problem for the future, which we should correct now, but largely a problem for the future. As Senator Paul said, that’s not true anymore. It is an immediate threat right now. It’s not a question of just our kids and grandkids. It’s a question of next month, next year, whether we avoid a crisis as is brewing in Europe which could be the biggest hit to our economy since the Great Depression, bigger than what we went through in 2008. So this issue is an immediate threat and it’s not some esoteric issue about balance sheets.”