WASHINGTON - In a July 14 opinion piece in "The Hill," Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., suggested there will be "horrific consequences" for America if Congress doesn't get a handle on federal spending.

"Each day we take one more step toward a day of financial Armageddon, yet we're sleepwalking our way there in Washington," he wrote.

If the nation's $19 trillion debt isn't worrisome enough, these doomsday predictions from congressional leaders - the very people who have the power and responsibility to fix the problem - only add to the concerns.

And Sanford is not alone in his dismal view. Here are a series of comments made by members of Congress and witnesses during recent hearings on the federal budget process:

April 20 - Senate Budget Committee

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.: "I lobbied to be on this committee. After being on it, I have to say our budget process is the biggest hoax cast upon the American people and Congress that I've ever been a part of. To vote for the budget challenges one's integrity and certainly one's intellect. The fact is we only say grace over about 32 percent of spending to begin with, we put in place assumptions that have no basis in reality and we have no policies whatsoever to back them up. It's a shame the American people even believe there's a budget process that has something to do with fiscal discipline."

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine: "Inside the beltway, a dollar saved 10 years from now is equal to a dollar spent today, which any business person will tell you is absolute nonsense."

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.: "I was surprised there's no debt management policy. The whole notion of debt as a straight dollar amount is economically unsophisticated. We'd be much better off having a debt limit expressed as a percentage of GDP (gross domestic product). The raw number itself is meaningless - but that's part of the hoax we're perpetrating. We're managing by meaningless numbers and refusing to develop meaningful measures."

April 27 - Senate Budget Committee

Chairman Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.: "The president's budget is over 2,600 pages long. Much of it is full of spin, talking points and proposals that everyone knows are dead on arrival. In many ways, this document has become a giant press release, rather than a serious plan focused on addressing the challenges facing the nation. The congressional budget resolution is similarly irrelevant. One of Washington's dirty little secrets is that the amount our government spends in any given year almost never matches the amount contained in the resolution."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. : "Right now, the president and leadership go into a room and they wheel and deal, and God knows what side deals are cut. Then they come out, we have three hours to look at it and then we vote. I think a huge majority of members in the House and Senate think that's a crummy way to do business. Our constituents' voices are completely eliminated from the process."

May 25 - House Budget Committee

Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J.: "I'm bemused. We're now well past the deadline for passing a budget resolution, but the House has yet to even discuss it on the floor. The budget process hasn't stopped us from developing a responsible budget; the Republican majority has done that all on its own. Republicans like to talk about the failed process as if it's divorced from the players, but the stalemate we have is a result of our deep divide on policy and the view by some that compromise is another word for failure. There are no changes to the budget process that can by themselves change these dynamics."

Stan Collender, a former staffer for the House and Senate budget committees: "The premise of this hearing is that the White House has usurped Congress' power of the purse. This is completely false. Congress has willfully and shamefully ceded its power. In reality, you've been running away almost at full speed from your legally required budget responsibilities.

"In spite of a steady stream of budget process failures, Congress is once again considering a variety of changes. This makes no sense. You will accomplish nothing - unless what you're trying to do is fool people into thinking you're doing something. Congress is as certain to ignore, refuse to implement and use gimmicks to evade whatever new procedures you implement as it has all those that came before."

Matthew Spalding, Hillsdale College: "Congress has a constitutional obligation to take responsibility for the level of spending and consider it in a budget process. The fact that (mandatory spending) isn't being considered and that more and more activities are being determined by agencies that aren't under your control just underscores that Congress has lost control of the budgeting process."

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash.: "We're holding this hearing to hide the fact that Republicans can't pass a budget. I'm reminded of that old cartoon where Pogo stands up and says, 'We have met the enemy, and he is us.' The fact is this place has stopped functioning as an institution."

June 15 - House Budget Committee

Rep. Pascrell: "We've made debt into this huge dinosaur and act like nothing good can come of it. But all debt is not bad. We use it in our own families; we buy things on credit or we don't have them. So I'm tired of presidential candidates and congressional candidates always talking doomsday. We don't have to go into the weeds to move America forward."

Harry Stein, Center for American Progress: "It's political polarization, not the budget process, that stands in the way of these attempts to change fiscal policy. We've never had a shortage of ambitious fiscal goals - we've had a shortage of compromise. Rigid fiscal rules haven't succeeded in forcing compromise."

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, American Action Forum: "The problem with the federal budget is mandatory spending. We never had a problem with chronic deficits until we invented these big, auto-pilot spending programs."

Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va.: "Eighty percent of Americans think we should have a balanced budget (constitutional) amendment. That seems like a good place to start - with what the American people think is reasonable."

Rep. McDermott: "The reason we don't have a balanced budget amendment is because (members of Congress) don't really want it. They want to be able to keep borrowing money and do all sorts of stuff. Nobody is really serious about this (balancing the budget), I don't think."

Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Ala.: "We talk about debt, but we're not able to do anything about mandatory spending. That's what worries me. If you look at total debt and add in some of our unfunded entitlement liabilities, it's (more than 200 percent) of GDP. That's money we have to come up with in a relatively short amount of time. We talk about being in trouble in 10 years; I think we're in trouble now."

Maya MacGuineas, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget: "Much of the problem is because Congress likes to spend and also likes to promise to spend more in the future. It doesn't seem appropriate for you to commit more resources in the future than taxpayers are willing to pay today."

Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Ga.: "I don't understand how we lost the argument that it's OK to borrow $544 billion in 2016, when it's not OK to raise taxes by $544 billion. Every dollar we borrow is a tax increase on future generations. I wish we could spend more time focusing on the next generation, instead of the next election."

June 22 - House Budget Committee

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.: "If we're going to reduce long-term deficits, we need to do it in a balanced way. You can't tip the playing field by capping Medicaid or Social Security spending and not doing anything on the revenue side. That's been the major impediment to achieving progress in this area for a very long time."

William Hoagland, Bipartisan Policy Center: "Unfortunately, over the last several years budget resolutions have simply become extensions of the political party platforms. To make the resolution meaningful, you need to move from a party platform mentality to a governing mentality."

July 6 - House Budget Committee

Scott Lilly, Center for American Progress: "The problem we're seeing with the president's budget is one of top-down decision-making. The people who have day-to-day expertise in programs are being told what their views are going to be before they're asked (for input). That's not unique to this president; it's been going on for decades and has gotten steadily worse. Thousands of people who ought to be adding their expertise to the decision-making are being muted by the process, so Congress never gets a true picture of what's going on inside the agencies."

Lilly: "There's been a huge abdication in power in the way Congress operates. One big factor in this is the schedule. If you look at the House, it only has 56 full days in session this year, out of more than 250 weekdays in the year. You simply can't do the work of keeping up with the bureaucracy, with its needs and its failures, by meeting so few days in a year."

(Note: The House is scheduled to be in session 111 days this year. However, that includes Mondays, Fridays and other partial work days when members are traveling to or from their districts. Although some votes and/or committee hearings may take place, Lilly excluded these days from his count. The Senate is scheduled to be in session 149 days, including 62 travel days.)

Rep. Pascrell: "I'm not opposed to performance testing for our programs; I just think we ought to test our tax expenditures first. How much bang for the buck do we get for the incentives we have for retirement, home ownership or charitable giving, just to name a few? Is the $1.3 trillion we spend annually through the tax code achieving its desired purpose? Waste and abuse are there, just as they are in a welfare program."

Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., to Lilly: "The federal debt will increase by more than $1 trillion this year. If we balanced the discretionary budget today, it would still increase by about $700 billion because of mandatory spending increases. Is our current budget process straining out gnats while we swallow a camel?"

Lilly: "Over the last 30 years, three programs have accounted for more than 100 percent of the (inflation-adjusted) growth in the federal budget: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. If we don't decide how to pay for those programs or reduce benefits, we're just fiddling in the dark."

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Spence may be contacted at bspence@lmtribune.com or (208) 791-9168.