This week I have been out talking to people around Texas and what I’ve been hearing over and over again is “when is Washington going to stop spending?”

The short answer is, “when we get a new attitude and new leadership in Congress.”

I recall a few years ago I was fighting my party’s President, my party’s Speaker, and my party’s other leaders over spending because I thought they were spending too much.  Eventually they got the message and a new conservative agenda has begun to evolve in the Republican ranks.

A lot of that agenda can be found in the Republican’s Pledge to America.

We’re offering America an alternative to business as usual in Washington.  Every Republican voted against the stimulus bill that has helped cost us an additional 3 million jobs lost and has done nothing but stimulate additional debt and brought us the first two back-to-back $1 trillion-plus deficits in our nation’s history.

The American people are more conscious of the national debt and have a greater anxiety about it than ever before.  Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her party have us accelerating down the road to national bankruptcy, so the first thing we have to do is throw the brakes on, reverse the car and get it back on the road to fiscal sanity, economic prosperity and economic freedom.

We’ve put forth a plan that would, number one, roll spending back to the pre-bailout, pre-stimulus era.  Our plan would actually, for the first time ever, give us a binding budget, as opposed to a Democrat Congress that has given us no budget and no plan to get spending under control.  Congressman Paul Ryan and I, along with other Republicans, have already offered spending cuts of over $1 trillion.

Another novel idea we have is instead of having votes every week to increase spending, we will have votes every week to decrease spending. So there is a new agenda for America, and these are all things we could do today to get our country back on the road to fiscal sanity, economic prosperity and economic freedom.