Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  You agree with me because we’ve had conversations about this.  Congress has the legislative and purse-string authority to pretty much put a stop to whatever they want to, and yet seems to get rolled and hosed by Obama time and time, and by the Senate time and time again.

Rep. Louie Gohmert:  Well, and actually I have to add something to that.  We also get hosed by ourselves.  And I brought this up yesterday in conference because a year ago, Mike, some of us – and Steve King, Michele Bachmann and I were really pushing hard.  Jack Kingston was helping.  We were really pushing hard to defund the 105 billion that had already been appropriated to make ObamaCare happen.

Mike:  Okay.

Louie:  And the biggest problem we ran into was not the Senate, it was not the President, it was – and you understand, every time a new Congress comes in you have to adopt new House rules.  They’re about 99, 98 percent exactly like the prior Congress, and most of them are like the rules that Thomas Jefferson adopted.  They’re nothing like Robert’s Rules of Order I thought we would face.  But our own rule says this:  “A reappropriation of unexpended balances of appropriations may not be reported in a general appropriation bill.”  In other words, you can’t go back and claw back money that hasn’t been expended and spend it somewhere else.  And the B part of that says:  “A provision changing existing law may not be reported in a general appropriation bill.”

And so every time you try to claw money back, like the 105 billion, you’re exactly right, you and I have talked about it, we have the power to just defund anything we want to.  But we have these rules that we create for ourselves, and appropriators pushed it because once an appropriator gets, you know, money appropriated for something, they don’t want to have to come back and reargue that down the road, you know, when somebody’s trying to defund it.  So you basically, under our rules, our administrative rules, you can’t defund things.  Mike, I don’t know if you saw on the news last week, it didn’t make much of any mainstream news, but 687 billion, with a “B,” billion dollars was appropriated in 2010 and 2011 and is sitting in executive department accounts, unobligated, unspent, just sitting there, 687 billion.  And Obama says, oh, we just can’t even find one or $10 billion.  They’ve got 687 billion.

So I’ve been pushing, look, let’s claw that back.  Either reduce the deficit or make up for the sequestration of our national security that you guys screwed up when you let that be on the table.  And we’re faced with, well, but it would violate a rule.  We’re not allowed to rescind prior appropriations.  And my comment was, look, somebody’s going to have to get with Frank Luntz or somebody really good with words because you’re going to have to explain to the American people how we can’t defund ObamaCare, and we can’t recapture that unspent $687 billion from the last two years because the rules we make every year, and we change every time we want to, would be violated if we did that.  Now, how in the world is the American people going to buy that?  They’re not going to buy it.

Mike:  They’re not going to buy it.  They’re not going to buy it.

Louie:  It would never get by – it’d never get past Mike Church, for sure.

Mike:  [Laughing] Well...

Louie:  He would say “Change the rules.”

Mike:  Yeah, well, the...

Louie:  Change the rule.

Mike:  Article I is pretty clear on this, that Congress shall be the judge of its own rules.

Louie:  Exactly.  We have powers of the purse, and we could defund anything we wanted to, except a bipartisan approach from appropriators is no, no, no, no, we want to keep that rule that doesn’t allow anybody to ever come back and rescind prior appropriations.

End Mike Church Show Transcript