[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 166 (Friday, September 24, 2021)]
[House]
[Pages H5159-H5164]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
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LEGISLATIVE PROGRAM
(Mr. SCALISE asked and was given permission to address the House for
1 minute.)
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I rise to inquire of the majority leader
the schedule for next week.
Mr. Speaker, I yield formally to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr.
Hoyer), my friend, the majority leader.
Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, on Monday, the House will meet at 12 p.m. for
morning-hour and 2 p.m. for legislative business, with votes postponed
until 6:30 p.m.
On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the House will meet at 10 a.m.
for morning-hour and 12 p.m. for legislative business.
On Friday, the House will meet at 9 a.m. for legislative business.
Mr. Speaker, the House will consider several bills under suspension
of the rules. The complete list of suspension bills will be announced
by the close of business today.
Mr. Speaker, the Budget Committee has announced a markup for the
Build
[[Page H5160]]
Back Better Act for tomorrow and Saturday. It is my intention to bring
it to the floor next week.
This legislation will help move tens of millions of Americans closer
to economic security while also making transformational investments in
making childcare more affordable, helping Americans access healthcare,
and addressing climate change with the seriousness that it deserves and
demands.
On September 27, pursuant to the rule passed on August 24, the House
will consider the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This
legislation passed the Senate on a bipartisan basis last month and
would create millions of good jobs all across America by investing in
critical infrastructure.
That bill and the Build Back Better America Act are the essence of
the vision and program that has been proposed by President Biden,
which, as I said, will grow millions of jobs and make the lives of
Americans more secure and safer.
Mr. Speaker, if time allows, the House may also consider three bills
from the Committee on Education and Labor:
H.R. 3110, the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, which amends the Fair
Labor Standards Act to provide workplace protections for mothers to
pump breast milk in the workplace.
H.R. 3992, the Protect Older Job Applicants Act, which allows
applicants to bring a disparate claim under the Age Discrimination in
Employment Act of 1967 when they experience age discrimination while
seeking a job.
In addition, H.R. 2119, the Family Violence Prevention and Services
Improvement Act of 2021, which modifies, expands, and reauthorizes the
fiscal year 2026 Family Violence and Prevention Services program, which
funds emergency shelters and supports related assistance for victims of
domestic violence.
Mr. Speaker, lastly, there may be additional legislative items as
possible and as necessary.
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.
As it relates to the reconciliation bill that the Budget Committee
will be taking up tomorrow, the initial estimates on that bill are that
it would, roughly, add up to be about $3.5 trillion in new taxes and
spending.
There are now estimates that that number will mushroom to well over
$4.2, $4.3 trillion or higher, but we still don't have a CBO score on
the lion's share of that legislation. The word we are getting from CBO,
it may be weeks or months that we would get that score.
Does the gentleman know what the timeline is for getting an actual
estimate from CBO on what the cost of that legislation is and will be,
come tomorrow, when the Budget Committee takes it up?
Mr. HOYER. The Budget Committee is going to take it up tomorrow. They
don't need a CBO score for that. The Budget Committee chairman is
seeking a CBO score as soon as that can be attained, but I don't know
that particular date that that will occur.
Clearly, this bill has been under consideration for a very long
period of time, and the President proposed it a very long time ago, in
the early part of this year. So it is something that the CBO has been
considering, that the committee has been considering. Hopefully, the
CBO can produce a score relatively quickly. But I don't, in answer to
the gentleman's question, have a specific time or date.
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.
Then last week, I think we had about a dozen committees in Congress
that took up different parts of that bill. Unfortunately, it seems that
the cost keeps going up.
Could we get an assurance that before the bill actually comes to the
floor for a vote before this House, we would get a CBO score to know
how many trillions of dollars in new taxes and in new spending would be
included and voted on before the House?
Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, it is my expectation that we will be getting
a score. I want to tell the gentleman it is also my understanding that
the expenditures that will be proposed will be paid for.
Mr. SCALISE. And, obviously, paid for would include new taxes--
Mr. HOYER. New revenue.
Mr. SCALISE.--including things like that are in this bill. There is a
tax on natural gas, which every family in America that uses natural gas
to heat their homes in winter or cool their homes in summer would have
to pay.
I know that President Biden had committed that nobody making under
$400,000 would pay any new amount in taxes. Clearly, that provision of
the bill would violate President Biden's pledge.
I am not sure if the gentleman anticipates new taxes like that being
removed from the bill so that the President's pledge would not be
violated.
If you have any insight on that, I would be happy to yield.
Mr. HOYER. As I said, the Committee on Ways and Means and the
Committee on Finance have worked on revenues to pay for what we are
going to buy so that we do not create additional debt. That is my view,
that they continue to have that intention.
There are use taxes on a lot of things, and there are also corporate
taxes in that bill. There are some additional revenue items in that
bill as well. But I can't tell you exactly because they have not
offered a manager's amendment, which I expect to have offered at the
Committee on Rules. That does not come out of the Budget Committee, as
the gentleman knows.
The Budget Committee is going to put together the 12 bills and send
them to the Committee on Rules, and then the Committee on Rules will
act on them. I expect a manager's amendment, but I cannot predict for
the gentleman what that manager's amendment will be at this point in
time.
Mr. SCALISE. Does the gentleman know if there is a possibility that
the bill before the Budget Committee tomorrow, because they did
expedite that hearing--just yesterday, there wasn't supposed to be a
Budget Committee on Saturday to take up the reconciliation bill, so,
clearly, it has been sped up. Is that because there is a possibility
that the reconciliation bill could be voted on before the House next
week?
Mr. HOYER. It is possible.
Mr. SCALISE. Does the gentleman have any idea on when we would find
that out?
Mr. HOYER. Well, we have to see what the Budget Committee does
tomorrow.
Mr. SCALISE. Well, I will be watching, for sure.
Mr. HOYER. We all will.
Mr. SCALISE. We all will.
On Monday, the schedule shows that the infrastructure bill is
supposed to be coming up before the House floor. Is that going to be
for debate and consideration, or will there be an actual vote on Monday
night on the infrastructure bill?
Mr. HOYER. We will have to see how the debate goes on Monday, see how
long that takes.
Mr. SCALISE. Well, we will be very involved in that debate as well.
As it relates to the next few weeks, there has been some talk that
possibly the week of October 4 or beyond may be taken back as district
work schedules to come back here.
Does the gentleman have any insight into what the schedule holds from
October 4 and beyond?
Mr. HOYER. I have advised Members that, obviously, we have a lot of
work to do and that we have scheduled a number of workweeks, committee
workweeks--which, by the way, I think have been very successful. We
started those in June of last year, and I think they worked out very
well, giving the committees an opportunity to meet uninterrupted by
having to come to the floor.
With votes, as we know, we continue to have the challenge not only of
COVID but the variant, an additional illness spike, so we are still
having votes longer than we otherwise would have. So I think that those
work periods have worked very well, and there are some scheduled for
October.
But I have also advised Members that we have a lot of work to do, and
if we need more legislative time, we will provide for that, and Members
will get sufficient notice for that. But I did want to put them on
notice that we may have to have more floor time than is currently
provided for by the committee workweek schedule.
But as soon as we have a sense of when those days will be needed, we
will let Members know.
Mr. SCALISE. Well, we know that next week we anticipate, as the end
of
[[Page H5161]]
the fiscal year comes, that there would be the continuing resolution
possibly coming out of the Senate.
I know when it came out of the House, it was very clear that the
Senate was not going to entertain the debt ceiling as part of the
continuing resolution. So, clearly, the Senate is going to have to
resolve what happens with the debt ceiling, although we have been told
extraordinary measures would continue through October. So that is not
as looming of a deadline as the September 30 government funding
deadline that the CR would be involved with.
I know, on our side, we were very disappointed to see when something
had to be pulled out on Tuesday, whether it was going to be the Iron
Dome funding or the debt ceiling. Knowing that the Senate was not going
to process the debt ceiling as part of that instrument, it would have
seemed, to keep that on track, to remove the debt ceiling and deal with
that separately, as the Senate ultimately will have to, and then keep
the CR with the Iron Dome funding moving forward on something that
could be a bipartisan vote.
Obviously, that didn't happen Tuesday. I would expect we will see
something very different happen in the Senate. They may send that back
to us sometime next week.
Does the gentleman have a timeline for what we should expect on
legislation dealing with the funding of government prior to the
September 30 deadline?
Mr. HOYER. Well, obviously, the government funding authority ends on
September 30 at midnight, the end of the fiscal year, and it would be
our intention to deal with whatever bill the Senate sends back to us--
if, in fact, they do not take our bill--as soon as it comes to us.
We believe that it is absolutely essential not to shut down
government, which is costly, disrupts the lives of the American people
and those who are expecting services, and is irresponsible.
Even more irresponsible is not increasing the debt limit. I have been
saddened on a regular basis that our Republican colleagues are prepared
to vote for debt limits when you have a Republican President and not
when you have a Democratic President, as if somehow it is the President
that creates the debt.
The President doesn't create the debt. The Congress creates the debt.
This is not for debt that we may create in the future. It is for debt
that we have already created, either by cutting taxes, therefore
cutting revenues, or by spending money.
As you know, the debt limit was substantially increased under the
Trump administration in a bipartisan way. But unlike this year,
Democrats joined with Republicans to ensure that the full faith and
credit of the United States of America was not put at risk. And the
President of the United States signed that legislation, a Republican
President.
So it is, I think, very sad that our Republican friends did not join
every Democrat in saying we will not put at risk the full faith and
credit of the United States for debts that have been incurred.
Now, I have been here for some time, and just in terms of the public
debt going up, under Bush 1, it went up 55 percent; Clinton, 37
percent; Bush 2, 86 percent; Obama, 88 percent; Trump, 39 percent.
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Now, obviously, those figures all are based on a lower base than
their successor had, but it is interesting that under Ronald Reagan,
the debt went up 189 percent, and he signed every one of those. And he
also urged us not to put the credit at risk.
In addition, on September 8, 2017, the Republican-controlled House
voted 316-90 to suspend the debt limit through December 8, 2017, under
a deal endorsed by President Trump. The ``yea'' votes included Majority
Leader Kevin McCarthy, Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, and
Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
Again, on September 8, the Republican-controlled Senate voted 80-17
to suspend the debt limit through December 8, 2017. The ``yea'' votes
included Majority Leader McConnell, Majority Whip Cornyn, Finance
Chairman Hatch, and GOP Conference Chair John Thune all voting in favor
of that.
In addition, on February 9, 2018, a year later, the Republican-
controlled House voted 240-186 to suspend the debt limit through March
1, 2019. Voting ``yea'' were Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Majority
Whip Steve Scalise, Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, GOP
Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, all voting for the measure.
Leader McConnell has stated that it would be irresponsible not to
extend either the date or the amount of the debt limit. The business
roundtable has said this: Failure to let the U.S. Federal debt limit to
meet the U.S. obligations would produce an otherwise avoidable crisis
and pose unacceptable risk to the Nation's economic growth, job
creation, and financial markets. Goldman Sachs has essentially said the
same thing, the American Bankers Association, and numerous other
organizations that I can mention.
So I am sorry that earlier this week the Republicans voted
unanimously against keeping the government open and making sure that we
did not compromise the full faith and credit of the United States of
America. But I will assure the gentleman, as soon as a bill is sent
back from the Senate, that we will take that up. I hope it is a
responsible bill.
I hope it does what Senator McConnell, under President Donald Trump,
said ought to be done. Perhaps now that we have a Democratic President,
somehow the fiscal responsibility does not seem as important as it did
when Donald Trump was President, and I think that is unfortunate.
I, personally, by the way, think that the debt issue is a phony
issue. There are only very, very few countries that have a debt limit.
The debt limit is decided when we spend money or cut revenues, not in
some other venue. And once we do that, the assumption ought to be, and
I think has been, that we are going to pay our debts as a country.
And the only time we came close to not doing that was about a little
less than 10 years ago, and for the first time since I have been a
Member of Congress, which is over 40 years, the rating of the United
States was reduced, minisculely, but nevertheless reduced. A shocking
consequence of playing games with the debt limit.
So I would hope that my friend would urge his party to not treat this
as either a political issue or partisan issue, and would treat it as
the issue it is, an issue of the fiscal responsibility and full faith
and credit to the United States of America.
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I want to remind the gentleman that if you
go back, both Republican and Democrat Presidents, whether it was a
Republican Congress or a Democrat Congress, you had budget agreements
that involved both agreements on spending and on debt. Bipartisan
agreements.
The gentlemen should also recognize that this year there has been no
such effort to reach out to the Republican side to get agreements. The
gentleman is well-aware that under President Biden, while he promised
during the campaign that he would work with everybody, he would work
with Republicans, work with Democrats, instead, it has been a go-it-
alone strategy on spending and on debt.
Very much to our opposition, we were against the trillions of new
spending. We weren't consulted about the debt.
Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I will yield, but I first need to point
out, because the gentleman did mention, that when we cut taxes, the Tax
Cuts and Jobs Act, that cutting taxes reduced revenue to the Treasury.
Maybe under a liberal ideology that is the thought process of how
economics would work, but that is not how economics worked, and it is
not how reality worked.
When we cut taxes, we actually kick-started our economy. We brought
millions of jobs back to America, and the Federal Treasury took in more
money. Cutting taxes brought in more revenue to the Treasury. In fact,
if you go look at States like New York that raised taxes to try to go
after millionaires and billionaires and picking winners and losers and
dividing people, as they raise tax rates, they see people moving out of
their State, less revenue.
In America, when we saw higher and higher tax rates ultimately
getting to a 35 percent corporate rate, highest in the industrialized
world, what we also
[[Page H5162]]
saw was great companies moving out of America, out of America to be
able to stay afloat, not to avoid paying taxes. They were still paying
taxes. They were just moving to other countries where they could remain
competitive because they could no longer remain competitive in America.
It was by the hundreds that we would see what are called inversions,
great companies moving out of America. Now, on the left, every time
they would move they would wring hands and call the company's name. We
would call the companies, and say, Why are you leaving? They didn't
want to leave. They wanted to stay afloat so that they didn't have to
fire the thousands of America workers they had. They wanted to stay
viable.
So when we cut taxes, do you know since the day the Tax Cuts and Jobs
Act was signed into law, there has not been a single inversion in
America. Not a single American company moved out of America. In fact,
the opposite. We saw companies by the droves moving back in. We saw
jobs by the millions coming back to America.
So, again, to give an economics lesson, when we cut taxes the Federal
Treasury actually took in more money, not less, because people created
more jobs in America. They brought jobs back to America.
Companies increased wages. In fact, the biggest wage earners--and you
can go look at the Department of Labor statistics--the bigger wage
earners were lowest-income workers. All that goes away if this bill
coming before the Budget Committee tomorrow is to pass. I hope it
doesn't. But if it does, every economics expert that looks at the
success of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has also recognized that it will
lead to millions more jobs leaving America if they raise those rates.
If you put a natural gas tax on families, estimates are over a 12
percent increase in household electricity rates on families which, by
the way, would hit lower-income people the hardest. That is the reality
of tax increases and tax decreases.
So that brings us to the debt ceiling. The reason we voted against it
were many. One was that, for whatever reason, the majority party
decided to gut the Iron Dome funding that was initially in the bill; a
billion dollars to allow Israel to replenish the Iron Dome missiles
that were used defending themselves against terrorist attacks from
Gaza, fueled by terrorist organizations, and backed by proxies like
Iran. That is one of the driving reasons that you saw all of those
``no'' votes.
But if you also look at where the debt came from, it came from very
partisan policies. There are 14 different bills this year where the
majority party waived the PAYGO rules. PAYGO was a policy that said,
you pay as you go. You want to pass policy, you want to spend money,
pay for it.
It is a pretty commonsense idea, except on 14 different pieces of
legislation this year, the Democrat majority waived PAYGO, racking up
trillions in new debt. We didn't vote for this spending. If the
majority party wants to go it alone and have a partisan spending spree
that jacks up trillions of new spending and debt, then it is incumbent
upon the majority party to go address the debt ceiling consequences
that were created by this reckless spending.
Fourteen different times your party waived PAYGO. We didn't vote for
that. But then you want us to pay for it? That is not how this works.
If the majority party wants to work with us on a budget agreement, we
are right here. We have never been asked to be a part of a budget
agreement. We surely weren't consulted about the spending because we
opposed those levels.
There were things we wanted to do, including on some of the relief
packages where we felt, let's focus in on helping people who are
struggling, not paying people not to work, not bailing out States that
are flushed with multi-billion dollar surpluses, while sending that
bill to our kids.
That is not responsible, but that is what the majority party did. And
as they jacked up all that spending, they jacked up debt and bumped us
against the debt limit. We are not going to be a part of that because
we didn't agree with the spending. We weren't consulted on the
spending.
If your party wants to spend money, your party ought to be
responsible enough to deal with the consequences of it. We are more
than happy to work with you on how to solve this spending and debt
problem in a bipartisan way, and I yield to the gentleman.
Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.
It is hard to respond, Mr. Speaker, to a not-responsive issue on why
we are not voting to extend the debt limit. McConnell said he wasn't
going to vote for the debt limit long before there was anything about
Iron Dome. In fact, we passed Iron Dome. We passed it overwhelmingly
with over 420 votes. It is now over in the Senate, and I hope they pass
it immediately, which would, by the way, be faster than they would have
done the CR.
Having said that, the gentleman voted for $5 trillion of debt in
2020. It wasn't paid for. We were confronting a great crisis called
COVID-19. And in a bipartisan way, we passed $5.4 trillion of spending,
the largest amount of spending, I think, in any year that I have been
in this Congress.
We did it in a bipartisan way with the expectation that we would
borrow that money to meet the emergency that confronted us, and that we
would pay for that debt. It didn't have anything to do with politics.
It didn't have anything to do with who was President of the United
States. And all that verbiage was to mask the fact that, frankly, my
Republican friends don't like voting to pay the bills.
They do like to cut revenues, whether or not they balance the budget.
And the good news, from their standpoint, was they inherited an economy
that was going up incrementally every year.
The gentleman talks about jobs on his tax bill. Under President
Obama, who inherited a tanking economy from George Bush, not
withstanding the tax cuts that they had effected, during the Obama
administration we created 10,838,000 jobs. During the Trump
administration 6,688 net jobs. About 35 percent less. But that is
irrelevant, it is a smokescreen. It is to distract.
The fact of the matter is we have incurred debt, we have incurred it
in a bipartisan way. Whether the objective was defense or whether it
was domestic or tax cuts, we created the debt on behalf of the United
States of America. We borrowed money and we said to our creditors: we
will pay you back.
It had nothing to do with Iron Dome. The Republicans had said if the
debt limit was in there, they weren't going to vote for it. They were
not going to take responsibility for the debt that they, in a
bipartisan way, $5.4 trillion last year, incurred, signed by Donald
Trump.
Donald Trump could have stopped every nickel of that money from being
spent. He did not. It was a bipartisan agreement.
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I believe, although I don't have the figures in front of me, that Mr.
Scalise voted for every one of those bills. He can correct me if I am
wrong on that.
But the debt limit is a pretense that somehow if you vote against
raising the debt limit you will somehow, Mr. Speaker, solve the debt
problem of the United States.
No. The way you solve that is paying your bills.
I would urge the gentleman--I don't know what is going to come back
from the Senate, but I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, my experience has
been, particularly over the last, about 15 years, it has been Democrats
who have responded to the fiscal responsibility call of Republican
Speakers--Mr. Boehner and Mr. Ryan--who couldn't get the majority of
Republicans in their own party to vote for their bill exercising fiscal
responsibility. I am proud to say that Democrats were there on behalf
of bills sponsored, essentially--I don't know the name of the sponsor
on the bill--but supported by both Speaker Boehner and Speaker Ryan. I
don't have those figures in front of me, but I can bring them up
perhaps next time we talk.
So I would urge my friend, let's get off this political Biden this
or--I don't even know if any of those bills have passed because I don't
know what list he is reading from, but, Mr. Speaker, he lists the names
of bills in Congress.
We passed the rescue plan but got no Republicans on that.
Why?
Because we were over having a Republican President. So now a
Democratic President was trying to make
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sure that this country didn't fall through the floorboards, that our
small businesses didn't fall through the floorboards, that our families
and individuals didn't fall through the floorboards, and that our
childcare providers didn't fall through the floorboards. So they were
through voting for those bills. They were voting for them when Trump
was President but stopped voting for them when Biden was President. I
get that. But the debt limit is about all of us. It is about our
country.
Very frankly, as Goldman Sachs and the Business Roundtable and others
have said, it is about the global economy. It is about jobs. It is
about working men and women having jobs and America being competitive
with the rest of the world. That is what the debt limit is about, and
that is what the Business Roundtable is saying, not one of our spokes-
organs. That is what the Chamber of Commerce is saying.
So, yes, we can argue the specifics, the 4 million less jobs were
created under Trump than were created under Obama. We can talk about
that. We can talk about a larger debt under Trump in terms of actual
dollars. I am not going to talk about that.
Why?
Because we incurred them together because we needed to do so because
our country was in trouble and our people were in trouble.
So I will tell the gentleman we are going to--his question was, in
case we all forgot it, we probably did--that we are going to deal with
the bill that comes back because we are absolutely committed to making
sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is not put at
risk.
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.
I do need to correct the Record because the gentleman implied that
the relief packages from 2020 were part of the debt ceiling that is
being raised in the current legislation that is moving forward. That is
just not accurate.
I have seen talking points out there, but Mr. Speaker, if you look at
the trillions that my friend and I supported that were good policy,
that was included in the debt ceiling negotiation from last year. It
was in there. It was part of the debt ceiling negotiation from last
year. That was passed on a bipartisan basis.
What we are talking about for this year, including the $1.9 trillion
that was not a bipartisan package, is new debt. What is being
anticipated in the $4 trillion, $5 trillion-dollar-package that the
Budget Committee is taking up is going to be new debt that would be
included in the debt ceiling negotiation that my friend would expect us
to vote for.
We don't support that new spending and that new debt. We did support
the spending and the debt from last year in the relief packages that we
all supported--and we paid for it--in the debt ceiling negotiations
from last year. The gentleman might have different talking points, but
that is a fact. It was legislation that was voted on in a bipartisan
fashion.
Mr. HOYER. I have different facts.
Mr. SCALISE. It was voted on on a bipartisan basis and was passed by
Congress. Where the debt ceiling is today is ultimately going to be
negotiated in the Senate, but it won't be in the bill that was sent
over to the Senate on Tuesday.
The Senators have made it clear. They don't have 60 votes for that
bill. It is a 60-vote bill. They might have to take it up under a
reconciliation package. That is for the Senate to decide. Maybe in the
next few days the Senate will decide that and send it back, but that
was not something that anybody expected the Senate to pass when it left
the House on Tuesday.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.
Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
I will not characterize the substance of that argument. However, I
believe it has no merit, Mr. Speaker, none, zero, zip.
It is as if we Democrats, when we voted three times to assure that we
didn't violate the debt limit under Donald Trump, as if we would say:
Well, this is not our debt, this was, after all, the debt of the tax
cut of 2017, so we shouldn't pay this.
In fact, the debt, of course, like family debt, is not necessarily
for the car, for the mortgage, or for the clothes that we bought for
our children to go back to school. It is a cumulative debt, a
cumulative debt that--by the way, under Democratic Presidents since
President Truman--were increased 24 percent; under Republicans since
Truman, 45 percent.
It would be ridiculous, Mr. Speaker, for me to say: Well, I am only
going to pay for this debt, that debt, and this debt that I agree with.
Of course, the $5.4 trillion that Mr. Scalise and I voted for in 2020
is a part of the debt that we need to have to service now. In fact,
what we of course did, we didn't increase the debt limit per se because
politically that was very controversial because people demagogue it. So
what we did was we changed the date, which is a ruse, which is a
political sleight of hand. It has the same exact effect.
So, Mr. Speaker, with all due respect, the argument that it is not my
debt and your debt and this--in fact, most of those bills haven't
passed and haven't created any debt yet. I don't know the list, so I
don't know whether they have been passed or some have passed. I
presume, obviously, the rescue plan did pass, it wasn't paid for. Of
course, it was approximately 30 percent of what Mr. Scalise and I voted
for in 2020.
But, nevertheless, the debt is the debt; and not to support making
sure that America legally can pay that debt is irresponsible.
Mr. SCALISE. Again, this will continue as we see whatever comes out
of the Budget Committee that will be trillions. We know it is
trillions. We just don't know how many, maybe 4, maybe 5 trillion in
new debt that the date that was put in the legislative text--it wasn't
an amount, it was a date that the majority party included--in December
of 2022 that maybe that changes in the Senate, but it would include the
trillions, not only that were included in the $1.9 from earlier this
year that was partisan, but also on this tax-and-spend bill that is
moving through Budget tomorrow.
I would like to ask one final question about other potential
legislation for next week. I know the gentleman and I have had
conversations in the past about bills that maybe aren't currently
scheduled that could be, some of them have been added to the schedule,
not all.
We know there is a crisis at our southern border. There are a number
of legislative instruments that have been filed to try to confront it.
I haven't seen any of those come to the floor. They are surely not
listed for next week, but there are a number I would at least like to
bring to the gentleman's attention to see if they could--as we are
watching the border get even more out of hand--potentially give tools
to the President to address it in a way where he is not addressing it
today.
We know there has been a bill by Ms. Herrell, the number of that bill
is H.R. 471, the PAUSE Act, which would allow for enforcement of Title
42 in a way more clear than the administration has expressed their
abilities.
We also have H.R. 4828 by Mr. Katko which gives even more additional
tools to help secure the border.
I would hope the gentleman would look at those legislative
instruments. As there are maybe more days we will be here than there
are legislative instruments anticipated, these could be other bills
that we could take up that would deal with very pertinent and serious
problems that our country is facing that aren't being addressed.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.
Mr. HOYER. I don't know the status of those bills. I will check on
the status of those bills.
Let me say, Mr. Speaker, there is a tragedy occurring at our border.
There are people in grievous circumstances and in unbearable danger in
their home countries. That has been a case for some period of time, and
we have some very bad people taking advantage of that and promising
them a free route to America, taking advantage of that pain, that
suffering, and that fear that so many people have, in this case
Haitians who fled their own country, presumably many of them after an
extraordinary earthquake and they are living in places that are not
their homes.
We all talk about it, and we all believe that America is the greatest
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country on the face of the Earth. It is. Therefore, it is not
surprising that people who are in pain and grieving and are concerned
for the future of their children want to come to the United States of
America. But, clearly, we cannot take all of the people who would like
to come to America.
Therefore, we need a system because America is made up of immigrants.
It has been made strong by immigrants. It has been made successful by
immigrants. It has been made a great country by immigrants.
My own father came from Denmark at the age of 32 in 1934. Almost
everybody who serves in this House, some are immigrants themselves who
came themselves to the country. Some at 2 years of age and some at
other ages.
The gentleman is correct. We need to deal with this. We need to deal
with it in a humanitarian way, in a way that honors our values and
respect for individual lives and individual persons. That is one of the
great, great differences that we celebrate in America, the importance
that we put on the individual.
We said that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are
created equal--today we clearly would say all men and women--and
endowed not by us, not by our Constitution, and not by our laws, but by
God. We have some of God's children who are fearful, scared, and
running, running to a safer place. And that place for almost all the
world is America.
So we have a responsibility, Mr. Speaker, to adopt a rational,
comprehensive immigration reform regime where people will know the
rules of coming to America. They will know the rules of how you apply,
how you are processed, and how you are vetted. Whether you are coming
here because you just want to come to America to succeed and to make
your family live in a better neighborhood called America, or you are
coming because your family and your are unsafe in the country in which
you then reside, we need comprehensive immigration reform.
I would be glad to work very closely with my friend, the Republican
whip from Louisiana, on seeing if we can get to that place because we
have all been talking about it, all of us.
I think there is not a person in this room--I don't know about in
this room, but over the years--who hasn't said our immigration system
is broken, who hasn't said we need secure borders, who hasn't said we
need secure borders and reveled in the fact that we are a nation of
immigrants who have made us stronger so that we can get to a place
where we pursue a rational policy for implementing that concept.
So I will tell my friend, I will look at those two or three pieces of
legislation he mentioned and talk to the committee chairs about their
status and let the gentleman know.
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that, and I look forward to
having those conversations with the gentleman from Maryland on that and
all the other issues that will come before us next week.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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