Paul Ryan On The Deal, Obamacare, and ’16

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Hugh Hewitt Show:

12/16/13

 

The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, was a guest to start the program today with Congressman John Campbell filling in for Hugh. Here is the audio of the interview.

 

Johm Cammbell: Paul Ryan, welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show, great to have you back here. And lets just get straight into things. First of all, the deal, explain in your own words to the Hugh Hewitt audience what is this deal and why was it a good thing for you and for me to vote for?

 

Paul Ryan: Well, hey, John, good to be with you, thanks for having me in the first place.

 

First of all, the deal needed to maintain our principles. That is no tax increases, make sure you actually net reduce the deficit. If you recall, the Budget Control Act, which set the sequester in place, it envisioned replacing the sequester with cuts in other part of government we call mandatory spending. Thats the sort of entitlement autopilot part of spending that Congress does not address on an annual basis. And it said that for every dollar of sequester, you had to cut a dollar of mandatory spending. Well, we exceeded that, and thats why we have deficit reduction. Now is this our budget? No, this is not our budget. The budget that you and I voted for that we passed out of Budget Committee that you helped me write last spring is what we believe and what we want, what were going for. That balances the budget, pays off the debt, reforms all of our entitlement programs. This prevents two government shutdowns from possibly occurring next year. This allows us to stay focused on Obama and Obamacare and all of its problems. It allows us to stay on offense and rollout a conservative vision for what we need to do to grow the economy and keep America safe. And it makes sure that we can keep our focus where we want to. I think it puts us in a better position for 2014. The Democrats came to the table saying get rid of the entire sequester. In this agreement over the next year and a half, we keep 70%. And the 30% of the sequester relief, half of it goes back to Defense to prevent that from being cut further, which is a concern of many of our fellow colleagues. And 92% of the sequester is retained in this agreement over the life of the sequester. And weve established a new precedent, which is you dont go back to the taxpayer. You actually net cut spending so that you further reduce the deficit if youre going to have fiscal pressure relief.

 

So I believe given that we did not have the votes to keep the sequester throughout next year, and you and I both know that, that this was a step in the right direction, and that this puts us in a much better position for 2014. And it shows that we have to actually reduce the deficit whenever we do something like this.

 

So this isnt what we fully want. This isnt going a mile in our direction. This takes a step in the right direction.

 

And it also shows that we can govern. It prevents government shutdowns from occurring. I think that people are kind of sick of crises in Washington, and I think theyd like to know that the Republicans are up to the task of being a majority party, of governing, of stopping these crises, and of making government function at the basic level. The last point is finally, for the first time in a few years, were taking the power of the purse away from the administration, and bringing it back to Congress. By having this agreement, that means we write the appropriations bills. We in Congress set spending levels. We who are in the Congress can add spending cuts to government agency budgets along with our oversight, which is real oversight of things like the Environmental Protection Agency. We havent done that in many years. Weve given the president a blank check, and by reclaiming the appropriations process and the power of the purse, we can restore some Constitutional balance which weve been missing in Washington. So for those reasons are why I think you and I, and others, needed to support this.

 

(Snip)