‘a good step in the right direction, as a decent down payment on the deficit, and it is a huge change in the culture of spending’

Budget chairman Paul Ryan for the defense, in a press conference, moments ago:

Think about where we were in the beginning of this process. The President asking us for a blank check. He didn’t get that. Then we had a President asking us for a big tax increase on job creators. He didn’t get that. We said, with the Speaker’s leadership, for every dollar of debt increase you have got to cut a dollar’s worth of spending. We got that. We have been trying to get discretionary spending caps in law since I have been here for 13 years. [Jeb] Hensarling and I have been introducing legislation for the last 8 years to get caps on spending. We couldn’t even get caps on discretionary spending the last time the Republicans were in the majority. We got that. That is important. 

We see this as a good step in the right direction, as a decent down payment on the deficit, and it is a huge change in the culture of spending. We are cutting spending. We are spending less money next year on this treasury spending than we spent last year. You haven’t heard that kind of a statement before around this town. We have a long ways to go. This does not fix our problems, but we really do believe that the value of this Republican majority has been a change in this culture. 

In the old days, we had what you called the Gephardt rule. The Gephardt rule meant you could just sweep a debt ceiling increase into a budget resolution, and no one would really have to be seen voting for it when we took the majority, we repealed the Gephardt rule so we would do this in plain sight, so the public could see, and what we did with that was use this as an opportunity to change the culture and spending, and that is exactly what this bill does.