Our letter pledging to uphold vetoes of appropriations bills that would contribute to an overall discretionary spending total above the President’s request is gaining more signatures.

Since Friday, we have gained 50 additional signers, putting the current total at 128.
The Administration has already threatened to veto spending bills that would contribute toward a level higher than his request.

We only need 18 more signatures to get to 146, which is enough to sustain any veto if there are 435 Members present and voting.

If House Republicans stick together, we can save $23 billion for American taxpayers, which is the difference between the Democrat budget resolution (passed without the votes of any House Republicans) and the President’s discretionary spending request.

The 128 current signers are: Akin, Bachmann, Bachus, Baker, Barrett, Bartlett, Bilbray, Bilirakis, Bishop, Blackburn, Blunt, Boehner, Bono, Bonner, Boozman, Boustany, Brady, Brown, Buchanan, Burton, Buyer, Calvert, Camp, Campbell, Cannon, Cantor, Chabot, Cole, Conaway, Crenshaw, Cubin, Jo Ann Davis (VA), Davis (TN), Davis (KY), Deal, Lincoln Diaz-Balart (FL), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), Doolittle, Drake, Dreier, Duncan, Fallin, Feeney, Flake, Forbes, Foxx, Franks, Gallegly, Garrett, Gillmor, Gingrey, Gohmert, Goode, Hall, Hastert, Hensarling, Herger, Hoekstra, Hunter, Inglis, Issa, Jindal, Johnson, Jordan, King (NY), King (IA), Kingston, Kline, Kuhl, Lamborn, Lewis (KY), Linder, Lucas (OK), Lungren, Mack, Manzullo, Marchant, McCarthy, McCaul, McCotter, McHenry, McKeon, Mica, Miller (CA), Miller (FL), Musgrave, Myrick, Neugebauer, Nunes, Paul, Pearce, Pence, Pickering, Pitts, Poe, Porter, Price, Putnam, Radanovich, Reynolds, Rohrabacher, Rogers (AL), Rogers (MI), Roskam, Royce, Ryan, Sali, Schmidt, Sensenbrenner, Sessions, Shadegg, Shuster, Smith (TX), Souder, Stearns, Sullivan, Tancredo, Terry, Tiberi, Upton, Walberg, Walden, Wamp, Weldon, Westmoreland, and Wilson (SC).

Undisciplined spending.

Now, it may seem counterintuitive to think that tax revenue increases when tax rates decrease. But, it's true. Why? Tax cuts stimulate the economy. They change behavior. When you have more money, what do you do with it? You invest it. You spend it. You create jobs, you do all kinds of good things. That's why after the tax relief was enacted, the economy went from flat lining to consistent growth. In fact, since the tax relief became law, 7.8 million new jobs have been created. The unemployment rate has dropped to 4.4 percent (from 6 percent). The stock market has increased by 40 percent – reversing a three-year decline.

The Democrats, however, believe that this 46 percent increase in revenue for the federal government wasn't enough, and that whatever you got, it was too much. They want to take more of what you earn and send it right to Washington. So, when you hear the Democrat's argue that the tax relief has caused the deficit, take their comments with a grain of salt. The numbers show that the tax cuts increased revenue and they encouraged growth in the economy.

The real problem is Congress' uncanny ability to spend like a drunken sailor. We need to fix our spending problems, not increase your tax burden.

A few days ago, I wrote a blog post revealing that Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) slipped a secret earmark into a bill to authorize funds for our intelligence operations. It directs $23 million toward a drug center in his district despite conclusions from the House Government Reform Committee that it is both wasteful and unnecessary.

Because of this, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) tried to have the earmark removed from the bill. Shortly thereafter Murtha angrily approached him on the floor. Rogers provided the following description of what happened next:

Murtha, who has enormous power over defense projects as Chairman of the Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations, came to me on the House floor and said: “You don’t have any earmarks in the appropriations bills now or forever.”

I replied to him that threatening retribution is not the way we do business in Congress.

To which he replied: “That’s the way I do it.”

No Member of Congress should ever be threatened because of his or her efforts to crack down on wasteful spending and protect the interests of taxpayers.

This is exactly why Americans are disgusted with the United States Congress and it’s out of control spending.

Mr. Murtha’s threat violated more than the House rules – it violated the public’s trust.

As lawmakers, we must have an obligation to shine a spotlight on earmarks and eliminate wasteful spending, as Mr. Murtha’s pet project surely is.

As a former FBI agent who pursued cases of organized crime and public corruption, it is disappointing to see such behavior in the People’s House.

This pork-barrel project takes precious intelligence resources from spies on the ground catching terrorists and sends it to bureaucrats in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. You might think Speaker Pelosi would step in and hold Murtha accountable for this egregious pork project or at the very least reprimand him for his threatening behavior. Nope. To the contrary, she is defending him for his “bipartisanship” and calling this entire discussion “unjustified.”

I guess she really didn’t mean it when she said last November that she wanted to make "this the most honest, ethical, and open Congress in history.”

The Democrats’ FY 2008 Budget Resolution, which was adopted yesterday, calls for a large increase in federal spending. If you compare the Democrat budget for discretionary spending to the President’s, the difference is roughly $23 billion. In other words, holding the line at the President’s lower spending level for discretionary spending, would mean a savings of $23 billion for taxpayers.

The Administration has already threatened to veto bills that spend more money than requested. House Republicans need to make sure that these vetoes can be sustained. And with $23 billion of taxpayer money at stake, this showdown may be the most consequential fight to restrain spending that will take place this year.

That is why Paul Ryan, Jeb Hensarling, Dave Weldon, and myself, are seeking signatures on a letter to the President stating that we will uphold his vetoes of spending bills that would contribute toward an overall spending level that exceeds the President’s request.

78 Members have so far signed this letter: Bachmann, Bachus, Barrett, Bartlett, Bilbray, Bishop (UT), Blackburn, Blunt, Boehner, Boozman, Boustany, Brady, Brown (SC), Burton, Buyer, Campbell, Cantor, Chabot, Conaway, David Davis, Mario Diaz-Balart, Doolittle, Dreier, Duncan, Fallin, Feeney, Flake, Garrett, Gingrey, Goode, Hensarling, Herger, Hoekstra, Hunter, Inglis, Issa, Johnson (TX), Jordan, King (NY), King (IA), Kingston, Kline, Lamborn, Lungren, Mack, Manzullo, Marchant, McCarthy (CA), McCotter, McHenry, Mica, Miller (CA), Musgrave, Myrick, Neugebauer, Nunes, Paul, Pearce, Pence, Pitts, Price (GA), Putnam, Rohrabacher, Roskam, Royce, Ryan, Sali, Sensenbrenner, Sessions, Schmidt, Shadegg, Smith (TX), Stearns, Tancredo, Walberg, Walden, Weldon, and Westmoreland.

146 votes are needed to sustain a veto. So we will keep working to get signatures until we have at least that many—right now we are slightly more than halfway there. Green Eyeshade Blog will update you to new signatures as they come in.

Today, the House is voting on a bill to authorize the military's funding for fiscal year 2008. Included in the bill are 680 earmarks. A colleague of mine and fellow RSC member, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), prepared amendments to debate the merit of some of these requests. The Democrat's blocked him from being able to take any of them to the floor for a vote.

What is there to hide? If these projects are worthy of taxpayer dollars then there should be no hesitation with having an open, healthy debate on them.

Click here to read about similar actions taken by the Democrats' during last week consideration of the intelligence bill.

Since I joined Congress in late 2005, I have seen us pass bills to subsidize all kinds of things. I have seen us pump taxpayer money into programs that benefit individuals who enter fields like nursing, math, engineering, and medicine. But, amidst all of this, there has been one profession that everyone recognized we had enough of...lawyers.  In fact, our nation has more lawyers per capita than anywhere else on earth.

Nonetheless, a bill passed yesterday to provide taxpayer financed subsidies of up to $60,000 for law school graduates who enter government practice. To be fair, the argument behind the legislation is that law school graduates who enter the public arena have a far more difficult time paying off their student loans than those who enter the private sector. Fine.

But, if that's the case, then we should just pay our government attorneys more. Simply creating another bureaucracy that entangles more taxpayer dollars in red tape is bad bad policy. It offers a diminished return by wasting much of the allocated funds in administrative costs. The real solution is in the hands of the appropriate local, state, and federal jurisdictions, and how they choose to compensate and recruit their attorneys. It is not in the hands of Congress in the form of some bureaucratic, red tape laden federal subsidy.

And so you know, I voted against this bill in spite of heavy lobbying on the yes side from my niece who works for the Los Angeles Appellate Division.

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who serves as ranking member of the House Committee on the Budget, put together this insightful post for the blog.  Paul is a real source of knowledge and wisdom when it comes to fiscal issues in Congress.  Check it out below.

I believe that the Democrats’ FY08 budget represents an enormous missed opportunity, and sets a disastrous course for our nation’s fiscal and economic future. 

First: The key – and seemingly only – fiscal policy of this budget is to raise taxes. If it stays within the scope of the House and Senate bills, this budget will impose on the American economy and American workers either the largest tax increase in our nation’s history, or the second largest tax increase in our nation’s history.

One of the most frustrating parts of our debates on the House budget was the Democrats’ dogged insistence that they are NOT raising taxes – pointing to some language they threw in there saying that they hope not to take this course. But a budget is numbers, and their numbers don’t lie. They unequivocally show a tax hike in the House of $400 billion, and a tax hike in the Senate of over $200 billion.

Even the Washington Post found the Majority’s claim inconsistent with the facts, noting that the House budget raises taxes nearly $400 billion; the Senate budget raises them more than $200 billion – the latter of which my House Democratic colleagues appeared to commit to following our motion to instruct on the floor this week.

But I’d hardly consider a $200 billion tax hike a "win" for American workers.

The Majority’s enormous tax hike will clearly threaten the economic and fiscal progress our nation has made these the past several years. As I’ve said many times before, the tax relief that we passed in 2001 and 2003 has turned this economy around and brought us out of a recession. It has improved job growth, GDP growth, the unemployment rate, business investment, and the entire market. In addition, it has led to surging revenues coming into the federal treasury. Raising taxes would threaten to reverse all of this.

And just think of the impact that tax hike will have on our small businesses. Our small businesses, who already have the second highest tax burden in the industrialized world, will be told that they are just not paying enough. In this increasingly global economy, where these companies are struggling to compete with China and India, imposing an even larger tax burden will be crushing. It will severely threaten our ability to compete – led alone lead.

Second: This budget does absolutely nothing to control spending. At every opportunity, the Majority has chosen to increase spending – they increased discretionary spending by $6 billion in this year’s omnibus appropriations bill; they’re proposing another $20 billion or so of extraneous spending in the supplemental; and now, the House budget would increase discretionary spending by $26 billion in FY08.

For all the talk we’ve heard about how the Democrats have to "clean up" what they call the "fiscal mess" Republicans left them, their only response seems to be spend more and tax more. This formula has never worked for getting control of the budget, and it won’t work now.

Finally, the Democrats’ budget not only avoids any effort to address the unsustainable growth of federal entitlement spending for at least the next five years, but in fact, actually compounds the problem, by including in so-called "reserve funds," promises to add another $150 billion in NEW entitlement spending – without, of course, any way to pay for it.

They’ve chosen to do this even after a parade of highly respected witnesses – including the U.S. Comptroller General, CBO Director, OMB Director, and Chairman of the Federal Reserve – warned us that the path of entitlement spending threatens to devastate both the budget and the economy.

Even with the $400-billion tax increase included in the House-passed budget, entitlement spending will quickly outpace revenue again, and by increasing amounts. We cannot raise taxes fast enough, or often enough, to deal with this unsustainable growth in spending.

So why has the Majority failed to do anything? Because, as Senate Budget Chairman Conrad recently put it on 60 Minutes, "it's always easier not to. [I]t's always easier to defer, to kick the can down the road to avoid making choices. You know, you get in trouble in politics when you make choices."

I appreciate the sentiment, but we all know that’s not what budgeting is about. It’s about making choices – even when they’re tough, even when they’re not politically popular – because that’s what we’re here to do.

And again, I believe that the budgets we’ve seen fail to make any real choices – let alone the right ones.

Our House Republican budget PROVED that we can not only balance the budget – we can do it without raising taxes – by keeping our economy growing strong and creating jobs, and by restraining federal spending.

This Congress must work together to change the dangerous course the Democrats’ budgets appear poised to set, and craft a plan to better our nation’s future.

Last night (or actually about 1:45AM this morning), the House passed a bill to fund our intelligence operations (CIA, NSA etc.). Disturbingly, several earmarks were slipped into this important national security legislation without the knowledge to most members until the very last moment. Altogether, 26 unclassified earmarks were included totaling around $97 million.

The largest beneficiary of these secret earmarks was none other than Rep. John Murtha (D-PA). One of his earmarks directs $23 million to a drug intelligence center in his hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. He got this pork for his district even though both the Government Reform Committee and GAO have criticized the center for being an unnecessary use of taxpayer dollars. The center’s remote location and the fact that there are 19 other operations just like it have caused these oversight panels to publicly oppose its continued operation. Even drug enforcement officials have been quoted as saying the center is basically “a jobs program that Mr. Murtha wanted for his district.”

Three times yesterday, motions were made to take the House into secret session so that we could discuss any such earmarks and whether they have legitimate merit or are just pork. Three times on near party-line votes, these motions were defeated. Also, an amendment was offered to strip just the Murtha earmark and use the money for more human intelligence resources. That too was defeated. Why? Did the Democrat's not want to open up their earmarks for disclosure even to the rest of us in Congress? How much money will not be spent on real intelligence efforts because of secret earmarks? I guess Rep. Murtha and the Democrat's feel bringing home the bacon is more important than prioritizing and properly using our national security funding.

This week, the federal government reported record revenues in April. In fact, more tax money was deposited by the United States Treasury on April 24th, 2007 than on any other day since the founding of the Republic. Revenues for the fiscal year are now up 11.3 percent. That's after they were up 11.5 percent last year. And 14.6 percent the year before that. If I just add those up without compounding, that's a 37.4 percent in the last 3 years. That's pretty darn good. Way over the historical average. Did your salary go up that much in the last 3 years?

So why are the Democrats so determined to raise taxes? Is a 37 percent revenue increase in 3 years not enough? Do they want to increase spending by more than that? Of course they do. There's no other explanation. If we held spending to no increase for next year, the deficit would be gone in one year. There is simply no logical reason to increase taxes with revenue going up so much. But, the Democrat's will likely vote to raise taxes as soon as next week.

Clearly, whatever we send them of our money, it will never be enough.

Please find below a clip of a one minute speech I gave on the floor this morning relative to this topic. It was followed by applause from groups of people in the gallery. To my knowledge, I do not know any of these people and they had not clapped for any of the previous 12 speeches. The speaker immediately gaveled them down since you are not supposed to express opinions from the gallery.

To watch it click here.

Since the Democrats took power last January, they have authorized the government to spend over $61,856,100,000.00 in new spending. Last week alone, they authorized $2,584,000,000.00 in spending. Included in these figures, you will find money being spent for research on the sexual politics of waste in Dakar, Senegal, reproductive strategies of Phayre’s Leaf Monkeys, and bison hunting on the late prehistoric Great Plains.

What’s more, these figures do no even account for $126,000,000 that was authorized last night to give reparations to the people of Guam for losses they experienced during the Japanese occupation of WWII.

Spending is absolutely out of control here. The Democrats have decided to spend money on just about everything.

However, when some important issues come up like national security and illegal immigration law enforcement, they all of a sudden become frugal. Today, the House is debating the Department of Homeland Security Authorization Act. Rep. John Sullivan (R-OK) offered an amendment to the bill that was blocked by the Democrat's from coming to the floor for a vote. It would have allowed state and local authorities to be reimbursed for expenses related to immigration enforcement training. These expenses sometimes can run as high as $10,000 per week. The 9/11 Commission even championed greater involvement by local law enforcement officials, stating in their report that "there is a growing need for state and local law enforcement agencies. They need more training and work with federal agencies so that they can cooperate more effectively with those federal authorities..." Further, existing programs like 287(g) that train and enhance cooperation have been successes.

Nonetheless, the Democrats apparently think Phayre's Leaf Monkeys and reparations to Guam are more important, and blocked this amendment from getting to the floor.

I have no doubt that the good people of Guam faced great adversity during the Japanese occupation, and I wish we could have liberated the island sooner than 1944. But, I cannot figure it out for the life of me, why our government should be giving these residents a check as an apology for something that we didn’t even do.

I am especially opposed to this idea when one considers that our national debt is nearing $9 trillion. Our budgetary deficit is $337 billion. Medicare's trust fund is projected to be completely exhausted in 12 years and Social Security is slated to be broke by 2041.

It does not take a CPA to realize that these are very stark figures that need to be addressed. We need to prioritize spending not just continue throwing money at everything that comes across our desk.