Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to provide for balanced budgets for the Government.

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Bill ID: 119/hjres/6
Last Updated: January 15, 2025

Sponsored by

Rep. Fitzpatrick, Brian K. [R-PA-1]

ID: F000466

Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law

Track this bill's progress through the legislative process

Latest Action

Referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.

January 3, 2025

Introduced

Committee Review

📍 Current Status

Next: The bill moves to the floor for full chamber debate and voting.

🗳️

Floor Action

âś…

Passed House

🏛️

Senate Review

🎉

Passed Congress

🖊️

Presidential Action

⚖️

Became Law

📚 How does a bill become a law?

1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.

2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.

3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.

4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.

5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.

6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.

7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!

Bill Summary

(sigh) Oh joy, another bill that's about as likely to balance the budget as a patient with a terminal case of fiscal idiocy is likely to survive without a miracle.

Let's dissect this farce:

**Total Funding Amounts:** The bill doesn't even bother to specify actual numbers. How convenient. It's like asking me to diagnose a patient without any test results or medical history. I'm supposed to just take their word for it? Please.

**Budget Allocations:** "Total outlays shall not exceed total receipts." Wow, what a revolutionary concept. Too bad it's about as enforceable as a promise from a politician on the campaign trail. The loopholes are already built-in: Congress can waive this provision with a simple rollcall vote (Section 3-5). Because, you know, emergencies and wars and natural disasters... yadda yadda yadda.

**Key Programs and Agencies:** None specified. How nice of them to keep it vague. I'm sure the pork barrel projects will magically appear once this bill is passed.

**Notable Increases or Decreases:** Who knows? The bill doesn't say. It's like trying to read a medical chart with all the numbers redacted.

**Riders and Policy Provisions:** Oh boy, where do I even start? This bill has more escape clauses than a Houdini act. Congress can waive the balanced budget requirement for wars, national emergencies, natural disasters... you name it. It's like they're trying to create a perpetual motion machine of fiscal irresponsibility.

**Fiscal Impact and Deficit Implications:** Don't make me laugh. This bill is a recipe for disaster. The deficit will continue to balloon, and our esteemed lawmakers will just shrug and say "oops." After all, who needs accountability when you can just print more money?

Diagnosis: Fiscal Fantasy Syndrome (FFS) - a chronic condition characterized by delusions of budgetary grandeur, coupled with an inability to grasp basic arithmetic. Treatment: a healthy dose of skepticism, followed by a strong prescription of fiscal responsibility.

Prognosis: Poor. This bill will only serve to further enrich the special interests and perpetuate the cycle of debt and deceit that has become the hallmark of our esteemed Congress. (shakes head)

Related Topics

Civil Rights & Liberties Transportation & Infrastructure National Security & Intelligence Congressional Rules & Procedures Criminal Justice & Law Enforcement Small Business & Entrepreneurship State & Local Government Affairs Government Operations & Accountability Federal Budget & Appropriations
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đź’° Campaign Finance Network

Rep. Fitzpatrick, Brian K. [R-PA-1]

Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle

Total Contributions
$136,000
12 donors
PACs
$0
Organizations
$2,000
Committees
$0
Individuals
$134,000

No PAC contributions found

1
SANTA YNEZ BAND OF MISSION INDIANS
1 transaction
$1,500
2
STATA FAMILY OFFICE
1 transaction
$500

No committee contributions found

1
EVANS, ROGER
4 transactions
$26,400
2
ASHER, ROBERT B.
2 transactions
$20,000
3
LEVY, EDWARD JR
2 transactions
$13,200
4
CROTTY, THOMAS
2 transactions
$13,200
5
LEACH, RONALD
2 transactions
$13,200
6
MCCLAIN, MARK
2 transactions
$13,200
7
MERINOFF, CHARLES
2 transactions
$13,200
8
MCKNIGHT, AMY
2 transactions
$10,000
9
ROSE, DEEDIE
1 transaction
$6,600
10
BORCHERT, TRICIA
1 transaction
$5,000

Donor Network - Rep. Fitzpatrick, Brian K. [R-PA-1]

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Organizations
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Showing 13 nodes and 22 connections

Total contributions: $136,000

Top Donors - Rep. Fitzpatrick, Brian K. [R-PA-1]

Showing top 12 donors by contribution amount

2 Orgs10 Individuals

Project 2025 Policy Matches

This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.

Introduction

Moderate 65.6%
Pages: 40-42

— 7 — Foreword Instead, party leaders negotiate one multitrillion-dollar spending bill—several thousand pages long—and then vote on it before anyone, literally, has had a chance to read it. Debate time is restricted. Amendments are prohibited. And all of this is backed up against a midnight deadline when the previous “omnibus” spending bill will run out and the federal government “shuts down.” This process is not designed to empower 330 million American citizens and their elected representatives, but rather to empower the party elites secretly nego- tiating without any public scrutiny or oversight. In the end, congressional leaders’ behavior and incentives here are no differ- ent from those of global elites insulating policy decisions—over the climate, trade, public health, you name it—from the sovereignty of national electorates. Public scrutiny and democratic accountability make life harder for policymakers—so they skirt it. It’s not dysfunction; it’s corruption. And despite its gaudy price tag, the federal budget is not even close to the worst example of this corruption. That distinction belongs to the “Administrative State,” the dismantling of which must a top priority for the next conservative President. The term Administrative State refers to the policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal government’s departments, agencies, and millions of employees. Under Article I of the Constitution, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.” That is, federal law is enacted only by elected legislators in both houses of Congress. This exclusive authority was part of the Framers’ doctrine of “separated powers.” They not only split the federal government’s legislative, executive, and judicial powers into different branches. They also gave each branch checks over the others. Under our Constitution, the legislative branch—Congress—is far and away the most powerful and, correspondingly, the most accountable to the people. In recent decades, members of the House and Senate discovered that if they give away that power to the Article II branch of government, they can also deny responsi- bility for its actions. So today in Washington, most policy is no longer set by Congress at all, but by the Administrative State. Given the choice between being powerful but vulnerable or irrelevant but famous, most Members of Congress have chosen the latter. Congress passes intentionally vague laws that delegate decision-making over a given issue to a federal agency. That agency’s bureaucrats—not just unelected but seemingly un-fireable—then leap at the chance to fill the vacuum created by Congress’s preening cowardice. The federal government is growing larger and less constitutionally accountable—even to the President—every year. l A combination of elected and unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency quietly strangles domestic energy production through difficult-to-understand rulemaking processes; — 8 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Bureaucrats at the Department of Homeland Security, following the lead of a feckless Administration, order border and immigration enforcement agencies to help migrants criminally enter our country with impunity; l Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms; l Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists; l Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend “training” seminars about “white privilege”; and l Bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about “intersectionality” and abortion.3 Unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening. Nearly every power center held by the Left is funded or supported, one way or another, through the bureaucracy by Congress. Colleges and school districts are funded by tax dollars. The Administrative State holds 100 percent of its power at the sufferance of Congress, and its insulation from presidential discipline is an unconstitutional fairy tale spun by the Washington Establishment to protect its turf. Members of Congress shield themselves from constitutional accountability often when the White House allows them to get away with it. Cultural institutions like public libraries and public health agencies are only as “independent” from public accountability as elected officials and voters permit. Let’s be clear: The most egregious regulations promulgated by the current Administration come from one place: the Oval Office. The President cannot hide behind the agencies; as his many executive orders make clear, his is the respon- sibility for the regulations that threaten American communities, schools, and families. A conservative President must move swiftly to do away with these vast abuses of presidential power and remove the career and political bureaucrats who fuel it. Properly considered, restoring fiscal limits and constitutional accountability to the federal government is a continuation of restoring national sovereignty to the American people. In foreign affairs, global strategy, federal budgeting and pol- icymaking, the same pattern emerges again and again. Ruling elites slash and tear at restrictions and accountability placed on them. They centralize power up and away from the American people: to supra-national treaties and organizations, to left-wing “experts,” to sight-unseen all-or-nothing legislating, to the unelected career bureaucrats of the Administrative State.

Introduction

Moderate 65.6%
Pages: 40-42

— 7 — Foreword Instead, party leaders negotiate one multitrillion-dollar spending bill—several thousand pages long—and then vote on it before anyone, literally, has had a chance to read it. Debate time is restricted. Amendments are prohibited. And all of this is backed up against a midnight deadline when the previous “omnibus” spending bill will run out and the federal government “shuts down.” This process is not designed to empower 330 million American citizens and their elected representatives, but rather to empower the party elites secretly nego- tiating without any public scrutiny or oversight. In the end, congressional leaders’ behavior and incentives here are no differ- ent from those of global elites insulating policy decisions—over the climate, trade, public health, you name it—from the sovereignty of national electorates. Public scrutiny and democratic accountability make life harder for policymakers—so they skirt it. It’s not dysfunction; it’s corruption. And despite its gaudy price tag, the federal budget is not even close to the worst example of this corruption. That distinction belongs to the “Administrative State,” the dismantling of which must a top priority for the next conservative President. The term Administrative State refers to the policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal government’s departments, agencies, and millions of employees. Under Article I of the Constitution, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.” That is, federal law is enacted only by elected legislators in both houses of Congress. This exclusive authority was part of the Framers’ doctrine of “separated powers.” They not only split the federal government’s legislative, executive, and judicial powers into different branches. They also gave each branch checks over the others. Under our Constitution, the legislative branch—Congress—is far and away the most powerful and, correspondingly, the most accountable to the people. In recent decades, members of the House and Senate discovered that if they give away that power to the Article II branch of government, they can also deny responsi- bility for its actions. So today in Washington, most policy is no longer set by Congress at all, but by the Administrative State. Given the choice between being powerful but vulnerable or irrelevant but famous, most Members of Congress have chosen the latter. Congress passes intentionally vague laws that delegate decision-making over a given issue to a federal agency. That agency’s bureaucrats—not just unelected but seemingly un-fireable—then leap at the chance to fill the vacuum created by Congress’s preening cowardice. The federal government is growing larger and less constitutionally accountable—even to the President—every year. l A combination of elected and unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency quietly strangles domestic energy production through difficult-to-understand rulemaking processes;

About These Correlations

Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.