The end of 2011 marks the end of the first session of the 112th Congress and my third year serving you in Washington. While history is usually measured over centuries, I've observed a dramatic – and probably historic – shift in the tone o
The end of 2011 marks the end of the first session of the 112th Congress and my third year serving you in Washington. While history is usually measured over centuries, I’ve observed a dramatic – and probably historic – shift in the tone of debate in Washington over the course of the last three years.
When I was sworn into office in January 2009, President Obama and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi commanded a 255 seat mostly liberal, and all Democratic, majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Their solution to our nation’s economic problems was to spend immediately a trillion dollars that we didn’t have and call it a stimulus package. As then-White House Chief of Staff and current Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel famously said, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”
It turns out there was a lot of waste in that so-called stimulus bill, and we still have a serious economic crisis on our hands. In the president’s first two years in office, money poured out the gate for new federal programs, but very few unemployed Missourians went back to work because of it. In addition to exploding our national debt, another consequence of this spending binge was to greatly increase the power of the executive branch of the federal government. Increased taxpayer money and expanded federal programs lead to government agencies having more impact on and control over your day to day lives. The American people caught onto this very quickly, and the Tea Party movement tried to take us back to a government based upon the U.S. Constitution.
In the summer of 2009, the president’s cap-and-trade plan passed the House. Fortunately, it wasn’t enacted. Had it been, it would have essentially forced farmers, ranchers, business owners and employees, and consumers throughout Missouri to pay a new national energy tax, since our state relies on coal for 80 percent of its electricity. In 2010, despite my vehement opposition, we weren’t able to defeat two similarly overreaching and misguided proposals: the government takeover of health-care and a bill to address the financial crisis that punished main street banks that played no part in it and did not even mention the failed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Since conservatives became a majority in the U.S. House in 2011, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in the tone of the debate. We aren’t talking about how much we can spend anymore, but how much can we cut. We cut tens of billions of dollars out of the domestic budget the first year alone, passed a budget that reforms Medicare to save it for future generations and makes Medicaid more sustainable, refused to give the president the blank check he wanted to increase the government’s borrowing authority, held a vote in the House on a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution for the first time in over 15 years, and held the line on taxes despite the president’s intention to raise them on a struggling economy. The debate on taxes is now about extending tax cuts and reforming the code to make it simpler.
As a result of the president not being able to get what he wants from Congress, the executive branch has ramped up its use of regulations; as an example, the EPA even talked about regulating farm dust and the Department of Labor discussed restricting the ability of young people to work on farms. In response, we passed a bill to require congressional approval on all executive branch regulations that cost $100 million or more. We may not have gotten everything we wanted, but conservatives only control one half of one third of the government. However, we have reset the terms of the debate for the first time in decades and that is positive and, I believe, historic.
