Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Subcommittee Hearing on Republicans’ Misguided Balanced Budget Amendment Push
Washington, D.C. (December 3, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government hearing on Republicans’ misguided attempt to advance a Constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget, amid a debt crisis of their own making that they could solve legislatively.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government
Hearing on “Balancing the Federal Budget: Examining Proposals for a Balanced Budget Amendment”
December 3, 2025
Thank you, Chairman Roy, and thank you to the witnesses for being with us here today.
Our Republican colleagues have convened this hearing to discuss a constitutional change to solve a problem that they have created legislatively, which is gigantic runaway federal budget deficits. We don’t need a constitutional amendment to legislatively balance the budget. We just need some old-fashioned fiscal discipline.
In the 1990s, President Clinton worked with a Republican-controlled congress to eliminate the deficit, and they ran huge surpluses without the aid of a contrived balanced budget constitutional amendment, or even rhetoric about a balanced budget amendment. They just did it. Why can’t Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate and the White House, do the exact same thing today, with control of every part of the government? If they want to balance the budget, just do it.
They could just take action on their own to make the hard decisions, but instead they say, no, the real problem is we need to go out and get two thirds of the House and two thirds of the Senate and three quarters of the states to do it, instead of just passing it by a majority in the House and the Senate and the White House. Obviously, they lack the political will or the fiscal discipline to do it.
They think that maybe they can distract everybody now with this extremely stale and tired rhetoric about passing a constitutional amendment. We can’t even get reporters to come and cover this charade anymore. They’re practicing spectacular fiscal irresponsibility and budget recklessness, and then try to cover it up with the pathetic papier maché of a balanced budget amendment. The problem of ballooning deficits returns whenever Republicans enjoy complete control of the political branches. This is one of the great ironies of our political rhetoric. When they are in control, the budget deficit soar. And it’s the Democrats who always bring the deficits down. But they pass giant giveaways for wealthy corporations and billionaires.
It was the policies of President George W. Bush and the GOP congress that squandered the record budget surpluses of the Clinton years in the 1990s on tax cuts for the wealthy, even as the country was waging the staggeringly expensive no-end wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2017, President Trump and a Republican congress passed a so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a law that increased the federal deficit by $1.9 trillion. This year, they passed the Obscenely Ugly Profligate Law, which will add a jaw dropping $4 trillion to the national debt because of its giveaways for corporations with political insider influence and billionaires at the same time that they’re stripping health insurance and food assistance from tens of millions of Americans to offset just a small part of the enormous cost of the tax breaks that they cut for wealthy elites.
So, we don’t need to start finger painting on the Constitution to accomplish what our colleagues in the majority simply don’t have the political discipline and will to do. If you want to balance the budget, present a balanced budget and pass it.
And after voting for the most reckless recent increase in federal spending, it’s just, to me, way too little, way too late to have one more hearing on the idea of a balanced budget constitutional amendment—something, by the way, which I think no other country in the world, or maybe it’s a handful, but the vast majority of countries in the world—don’t need this in order to run their fiscal systems.
I yield back to you, Mr. Chairman.