Return of 'Contract with America'?

GOP lawmakers offer alternative budget to restore 'dream'

Seeking to revive the once-heralded Republican "Contract with America," a group of GOP lawmakers is offering an alternative budget that allows American families "to keep more of their own money and spend it on their own priorities rather than Washington's."

Yesterday, in front of the Canon House Office Building, 25 members of the Republican Study Committee, or RSC, presented a package they call "Contract with America: Renewed."

"We believe it is time to protect the family budget from the federal budget," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas.

The lawmaker anticipates critics will deride it as uncompassionate.

"We believe the tough and heartless budget is the status quo budget" that ignores mounting debt that future generations will be forced to bear, he countered.

Hensarling, chairman of the RSC's Budget & Spending Taskforce, co-signed an introduction to 74-page 2007 budget proposal with Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., chairman of the RSC.

The budget alternative, the lawmakers said, "is about freedom and opportunity," which "can only be accomplished through less government, lower taxes, less federal spending, and economic prosperity."

The 1994 "Contract With America," introduced six weeks before the congressional election, was touted as a "detailed agenda for national renewal" designed to "restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives."

At that time, Pence and Hensarling recalled, Republicans nationwide "embraced a legislative platform of freedom and opportunity, of getting spending under control, reducing the tax burden, and shrinking the size of the federal government."