Paul Ryan on Government Reform Republican nominee for Vice President; U.S. Rep. (WI-1)

We don't belong to government; the people are sovereign

I don't know about you, but I've never thought of government as something I belong to. As a matter of fact, on the seven occasions I've been sworn in as a Member of Congress, I have never taken an oath to the government. The oath that all of us take is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, under which government is limited and the people are sovereign.

Say things like this, and our opponents will quickly accuse you of being "anti-government." We Americans give ourselves to every kind of good cause. We do so for the simple reason that our hearts and conscience have called us to work that needs doing, to fill a place that sometimes no one else can fill.

End the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners

Now when I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey, where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself. That is what we do in this country. That is the American dream. That's freedom and I will take it any day over the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners.

Budget Boondoggle Award: expose worst wasteful spending

Inspired by efforts of the late Senator William E. Proxmire, I have unveiled the Budget Boondoggle Award to highlight examples of wasteful spending. Sadly, with so much waste in Congress, finding recipients is never difficult. I recently "honored" our US farm policy with the Budget Boondoggle Award for handing out farm subsidies to wealthy urban dwellers in New York City, including billionaires and venture capitalists. I will continue to expose the worst examples of government waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars. I hope to embarrass my colleagues into becoming better stewards of your tax dollars.

Limited government has evolved into centralized solutions

Well, after spending trillions of dollars on these centralized solutions, we have found that many of the problems we sought to solve with Washington money and Washington policy have actually worsened.

Pledges no new earmarks; and Line Item Veto against them

Government should not solve every social problem

The answer to this question dictates the size of government. If you believe government should be doing more to solve every social problem, you cannot also believe in limited government

FactCheck: all-time high government was 1943, not 2009

Ryan's spokesman said that the congressman was measuring size of government by spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. Federal spending as a percent of GDP was 24% in 2009--not even close to the real "all-time high" figure of 44% in 1943.

Ryan was closer with his claim about public skepticism of government, but still not quite right. Only 22% of those surveyed said they trusted the federal government "almost always or most of the time," according to the source poll for Ryan's claim. But other poll conducted over the years showed slightly lower percentages. In 1994, just 17% of respondents said they trusted the government most or all of the time.

The poll also found that the level of government trust and size of government are not connected.

Individual liberty requires limited government

We believe that the government has an important role to create the conditions that promote entrepreneurship, upward mobility, and individual responsibility. We believe, as our founders did, that "the pursuit of happiness" depends upon individual liberty; and individual liberty requires limited government.

Limited government also means effective government. When government takes on too many tasks, it usually doesn't do any of them very well. It's no coincidence that trust in government is at an all-time low now that the size of government is at an all-time high. The President and the Democratic Leadership have shown, by their actions, that they believe government needs to increase its size and its reach, its price tag and its power.

Our nation is approaching a tipping point. We need to chart a new course.

1990s Republican majority succumbed to the earmark culture

It was this relentless pressure to bring home the bacon that was the undoing of the Republican majority that came into office in 1994. They allowed their limited government principles to be overtaken by the pressure to appease voters and donors. The Republican majority succumbed to the earmark culture.

They continued to get reelected until the corruption of the process caught up with them; until the people got wind of the Bridge to Nowhere and rightly asked why they were being asked to pay for such things; and until their colleagues and associates started going to jail.

Create a constitutional version of the line-item veto

Pres. OBAMA: I think there's not a President out there that wouldn't love to have it. And I think that this is an area where we can have a serious conversation. I don't like being held up with big bills that have stuff in them that are wasteful but I've got to sign because it's a defense authorization bill. One thing that you have to acknowledge, is that the earmarks problem is not unique to one party and you end up getting a lot of pushback when you start going after specific projects of any one of you in your districts. But I am willing to have a serious conversation on the line-item veto issue.

Voted NO on Senate pay raise.

Makes appropriations to the Senate for FY2010 for:
1. expense allowances;
2. representation allowances for the Majority and Minority Leaders;
3. salaries of specified officers, employees, and committees (including the Committee on Appropriations);
4. agency contributions for employee benefits;
5. inquiries and investigations;
6. the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control;
7. the Offices of the Secretary and of the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the Senate;
8. miscellaneous items;
9. the Senators' Official Personnel and Office Expense Account; and
10. official mail costs.

Proponent's argument to vote Yes:Rep. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (D, FL-20): We, as Members of Congress, have responsibility not just for the institution, but for the staff that work for this institution, and to preserve the facilities that help support this institution. We have endeavored to do that responsibly, and I believe we have accomplished that goal.

Opponent's argument to vote No:Rep. SCALISE (R, LA-1): It's a sad day when someone attempts to cut spending in a bill that grows government by the size of 7%, and it's not allowed to be debated on this House floor. Some of their Members actually used the term "nonsense" and "foolishness" when describing our amendments to cut spending; they call that a delaying tactic. Well, I think Americans all across this country want more of those types of delaying tactics to slow down this runaway train of massive Federal spending. Every dollar we spend from today all the way through the end of this year is borrowed money. We don't have that money. We need to control what we're spending.

Voted YES on requiring lobbyist disclosure of bundled donations.

1. file a quarterly report with Congress; and
2. notify the recipient.

Proponents support voting YES because:

This measure will more effectively regulate, but does not ban, the practice of registered lobbyists bundling together large numbers of campaign contributions. This is a practice that has already taken root in Presidential campaigns. "Bundling" contributions which the lobbyist physically receives and forwards to the candidate, or which are credited to the lobbyist through a specific tracking system put in place by the candidate. This bill requires quarterly reporting on bundled contributions.

We ultimately need to move to assist the public financing of campaigns, as soon as we can. But until we do, the legislation today represents an extremely important step forward.

Opponents support voting NO because:

This legislation does not require that bundled contributions to political action committees, often referred to as PACs, be disclosed. Why are PACs omitted from the disclosure requirements in this legislation?

If we are requiring the disclosure of bundled contributions to political party committees, those same disclosure rules should also apply to contributions to PACs. Party committees represent all members of that party affiliation. PACs, on the other hand, represent more narrow, special interests. Why should the former be exposed to more sunshine, but not the latter?

The fact that PACs give more money to Democrats is not the only answer. Time and again the majority party picks favorites, when what the American people want is more honesty and more accountability.

Voted YES on granting Washington DC an Electoral vote & vote in Congress.

Proponents support voting YES because:

This bill corrects a 200-year-old oversight by restoring to the citizens of the District of Columbia the right to elect a Member of the House of Representatives who has the same voting rights as all other Members.

Residents of D.C. serve in the military. They pay Federal taxes each year. Yet they are denied the basic right of full representation in the House of Representatives.

The District of Columbia was created to prevent any State from unduly influencing the operations of the Federal Government. However, there is simply no evidence that the Framers of the Constitution thought it was necessary to keep D.C. residents from being represented in the House by a voting Member.

Opponents support voting NO because:

The proponents of this bill in 1978 believed that the way to allow D.C. representation was to ratify a constitutional amendment. The Founders of the country had the debate at that time: Should we give D.C. a Representative? They said no. So if you want to fix it, you do it by making a constitutional amendment.

Alternatively, we simply could have solved the D.C. representation problem by retroceding, by giving back part of D.C. to Maryland. There is precedent for this. In 1846, Congress took that perfectly legal step of returning present-day Arlington to the State of Virginia.

Voted YES on protecting whistleblowers from employer recrimination.

Proponents support voting YES because:

This bill would strengthen one of our most important weapons against waste, fraud and abuse, and that is Federal whistleblower protections. Federal employees are on the inside and offer accountability. They can see where there is waste going on or if there is corruption going on.

One of the most important provisions protects national security whistleblowers. There are a lot of Federal officials who knew the intelligence on Iraq was wrong. But none of these officials could come forward. If they did, they could have been stripped of their security clearances, or they could have been fired. Nobody blew the whistle on the phony intelligence that got us into the Iraq war.

Opponents support voting NO because:

It is important that personnel within the intelligence community have appropriate opportunities to bring matters to Congress so long as the mechanisms to do so safeguard highly sensitive classified information and programs. The bill before us suffers from a number of problems:

1. The bill would conflict with the provisions of the existing Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998, which protecting sensitive national security information from unauthorized disclosure to persons not entitled to receive it.
2. The bill violates the rules of the House by encouraging intelligence community personnel to report highly sensitive intelligence matters to committees other than the Intelligence Committees. The real issue is one of protecting highly classified intelligence programs and ensuring that any oversight is conducted by Members with the appropriate experiences, expertise, and clearances.
3. This bill would make every claim of a self-described whistleblower, whether meritorious or not, subject to extended and protracted litigation.

Voted YES on requiring photo ID for voting in federal elections.

Proponents support voting YES because:

The election system is the bedrock that our Republic is built on and its security and oversight is of paramount concern. Only US citizens have the right to vote in Federal elections, but our current system does not give State election officials the tools they need to ensure that this requirement is being met.

This bill is designed to increase participation by ensuring that each legitimate vote will be counted and not be diluted by fraud. There are many elections in this country every cycle that are decided by just a handful of votes. How can we be certain that these elections, without measures to certify the identity of voters, are not being decided by fraudulent votes?

Opponents support voting NO because:

There is something we can all agree on: only Americans get to vote, and they only get to vote once. But what we are talking about in this bill is disenfranchising many of those Americans. It is already a felony for a non-American to vote. We had hearings and what we found out was that the issue of illegal aliens voting basically does not occur.

The impact of this will disproportionately affect poor people and African Americans, because many are too poor to have a car and they do not have a license. We have no evidence there is a problem. We have ample evidence that this will disenfranchise many Americans. This is the measure to disenfranchise African Americans, Native Americans. It is wrong and we will not stand for it.

Voted YES on restricting independent grassroots political committees.