GOP lawmaker: Elderly Senate stayed up too late to vote on 'fiscal cliff'

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said this week that most senators are far too old to be staying up past midnight, and should not have voted on the "fiscal cliff" legislation just before 2 a.m. on New Year's Day.

"At 1:30 in the morning, most folks of that generation really need to be asleep," Brooks told Alabama Live. "But unfortunately, [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid, about 1:30, gave our senators a bill. At 1:45, they were expected to vote on it. It was a $4 trillion increase-in-our-debt decision. It was a bill, related to the fiscal cliff, that was going to increase spending rather than decrease spending."

More than half of the Senate is older than 60; one senator, Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), is 88 years old.

Brooks, 58, was one of 151 House Republicans who voted against the fiscal-cliff deal, which allowed income tax rates to remain the same for most U.S. residents but increased them on annual incomes above $450,000. It also delayed for two months a $109 billion spending cut known as the sequester.

Brooks said he and other Alabama Republicans voted against the bill in part because the Senate rammed it through without first seeing a Congressional Budget Office score. CBO said the bill would increase the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years.

"[W]e're dealing with an issue this weighty in a haphazard way in less than 20 hours because Sen. Harry Reid and the U.S. Senate sat on their thumbs for five months, because it was five months ago the House passed the bill they later sent back to us on New Year's Day," Brooks said.

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