[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 206 (Tuesday, November 30, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8811-S8812]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          LEGISLATIVE SESSION

                                 ______
                                 

   NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2022--Continued

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senate will now resume legislative 
session.
  Mr. KING. Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lujan). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.


                           Build Back Better

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, our Democratic colleagues in the House 
and, to some extent, here in the Senate have talked about how the so-
called Build Back Better legislation is popular, but I think the main 
reason it is popular is because, frankly, many Members of Congress and 
certainly the public at large don't know what is in it. So I would like 
to spend just a few minutes talking about that.
  First of all, there is the size of the bill. Originally, the Budget 
Committee chairman, the Senator from Vermont, floated a $6 trillion 
spending bonanza. This, of course, was on top of about $5 trillion we 
spent last year in a bipartisan fashion dealing with the COVID-19 
pandemic. But, of course, this $6 trillion more was designed to be 
passed with a pure party-line vote through the reconciliation process.
  After some pushback, the $6 trillion figure that Chairman Sanders 
proposed was cut back to 3.5, and now our colleagues in the House and 
elsewhere are touting a new pared-down bill which spends only--and I 
underline the word ``only''--$1.75 trillion. I dare say that is a 
number that none of us can fully comprehend given its magnitude, but it 
has become--sort of rolls off our tongues like everybody understands 
what a trillion dollars is like everybody knows what a million is or a 
thousand or a hundred or ten dollars. But it is an enormous number.
  As our colleagues have slimmed and trimmed this bill to reach a 
pricetag that could get consensus in the House, some of their favorite 
provisions have fallen off the chopping block. They realize that 
programs like free college actually cost a whole lot of money. So to 
live within this new number, which I will talk about in a moment, 
Democrats in the House kept cutting and cutting, but they found--
instead of real cuts, they found another solution to their problem of a 
topline. What they have basically done is to create the illusion of a 
lower pricetag without making any real, substantive, long-term cuts. 
How do you do that? Well, it is the old-fashioned way; it is called 
budget gimmicks.
  Rather than remove these expensive programs entirely, they chose to 
create a number of arbitrary cliffs, sunsets, and expirations. That 
way, they could pretend to pass these bills at a lower cost with the 
tacit promise to continue them at another time and on another day.
  One example of this was the expanded child tax credit. Our Democratic 
colleagues originally crafted this as a temporary measure in their 
partisan bill that became law in March, just 8 months ago. The first 
payments had barely gone out the door when they decided to call for 
making those temporary provisions permanent in the BBB, the so-called 
Build Back Better bill. Our colleagues knew that a permanent extension 
and expansion would have been far too expensive to meet their topline, 
so they pretended to cut it by making it a temporary extension.
  Earlier drafts of this bill would have extended this policy through 
2025. As time went on, the pricetag was still too high, so it was 
scaled back to a 1-year extension. But the truth is, nothing has really 
changed. Calls to make the expansion permanent have not gone away. I 
have seen no indication that our colleagues across the aisle are 
content to let this extension expire after just 1 year.
  The same is true of the earned income tax credit, which also was 
expanded in March. A number of our colleagues have spoken here on the 
Senate floor about the need to make this expansion of the earned income 
tax credit permanent.
  But the not-so-temporary extensions don't end there. This bill 
extends the Affordable Care Act's premium tax credits through 2025, 
which our colleagues claim will enable more Americans to afford 
healthcare coverage. But at the same time, this bill cuts funding to 
safety net hospitals and States that did not expand Medicaid. If their 
goal was to expand access to low-income individuals under the Medicaid 
Program, their bill cuts that funding to safety net hospitals in States 
like mine that did not expand Medicaid. These cuts specifically target 
hospitals that treat underinsured and uninsured patients.
  In short, our colleagues are manipulating the budget process in a way 
that appears to extend access to healthcare while at the same time cuts 
funding to our most vulnerable patients--all in the cause of pushing 
America closer to a single-payer system, something like Medicare for 
All. I have no doubt that our colleagues across the aisle will, if 
possible, not let these temporary provisions expire.
  In the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, though, ``The closest thing 
to eternal life on earth is a [temporary] government program.''
  We have seen this movie before, time and again. It is smoke and 
mirrors. It is budget gimmickry. It is starting new programs and 
claiming to cut them off after a year, knowing that, inevitably, 
Congress will be tempted to extend them much, much longer.
  Well, before this bill comes to a vote in the Senate, I hope our 
Democratic colleagues will agree with me that we need to know precisely 
how much this bill will cost the American people. We know that our 
colleagues across the aisle have struggled to try to make a $6 trillion 
bill appear to be a $3.5 trillion and now a $1.75 trillion bill, but I 
don't think anybody is really fooled or confused. Because they have 
strategically chosen start dates, sunsets, and expiration dates to make 
it appear that these programs cost less, we know that eventually, if 
they have the votes, they will be extended through eternity.
  Our colleagues gamed the Tax Code to partially fund the bill while 
handing out massive tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires. I am 
glad to see the chairman of the Budget Committee say that we really 
shouldn't be focused on tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires in 
blue States and cities like New York or San Francisco, which is exactly 
what the Democratic bill tries to provide--tax cuts to millionaires and 
billionaires in blue States.
  This bill is really chock-full of inconsistencies. It claims to 
extend access to healthcare while cutting off access to Medicaid or 
some of the safety net programs in States like mine. It claims that, 
well, we are going to tax the rich folks while at the same time 
providing

[[Page S8812]]

tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires in blue States by lifting or 
eliminating the SALT deduction--the State and local tax deduction--
which allows taxpayers, these millionaires and billionaires in blue 
States, to deduct their State and local taxes, which means not only do 
they get a tax cut, but the rest of us end up subsidizing them because, 
in order to get the revenue needed, that means regular working folks 
are going to have to pick up the gap.
  The best evidence of this maneuvering is the fact that there is not a 
single year over the next decade in which each tax provision would be 
used at the same time. Let me say that again. Of all of the gaming in 
the Tax Code, the fact is, under the proposal by the House of 
Representatives--that we at some point will consider here--the fact is 
there is not a single year over the next decade in which each of these 
tax provisions would be used at the same time. This is nothing but 
gimmicks and sleight of hand accounting.
  In my previous life, I was the Attorney General of Texas. We had 
something called the Consumer Protection Division. If anybody in the 
private sector would falsely advertise, like the Federal Government and 
Congress are trying to do in this so-called Build Back Better bill, we 
would go after them with a vengeance for defrauding consumers. 
Unfortunately, that doesn't apply to Congress. I wish it did.
  We often talk, at least intermittently, about needing to know what is 
in a bill before we actually vote on it. At one time or another, 
Senators on both sides of the aisle have griped about voting on 
thousand-page bills that were completed just hours before the vote. 
Knowing the true cost of this legislation is no different. Before 
voting on it, we have the duty to understand how it will impact our 
debt and deficits and how big of a bill the American people will be 
stuck with.
  There is also this ugly animal rearing its head called inflation. 
Seventy percent of the public said--I think in a recent public opinion 
poll I have seen--that inflation is eating away more and more of their 
income and is actually reducing their standard of living. It is a 
silent tax on working families. I would think that, if we are concerned 
about the welfare of those families, we ought to be very concerned 
about making inflation worse by pouring more and more money into our 
economy, chasing fewer and fewer goods and services.
  That is part of the problem now. There is so much money sloshing 
around as a result of the spending by Congress--much of it associated 
with COVID-19, but not all of it. Some of it is with the American 
Recovery Act that was passed with the $1.9 trillion in the early days 
of the Biden administration. But the truth is inflation is eating our 
lunch, and we should not be making it worse by spending a lot more 
money, as our Democratic colleagues are proposing we do in the 
Build Back Better bill.

  So we need a cost estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, the 
official scorer of these spending bills, because we know that what we 
have seen so far is full of gimmicks, tricks, phony cliffs, phony 
expiration dates, as I have said, and is, basically, a misleading of 
the public and Congress into knowing what exactly is in this bill and 
how much it will cost.
  Well, the cost estimate provided by the CBO, we know, given these 
phony assumptions, is not an accurate statement of the true cost of the 
bill. This isn't a reflection of the folks who work at the CBO but of 
the scoring rules they must follow. So, despite the fact that our 
Democratic colleagues have explicitly said that temporary programs will 
be extended at the first opportunity beyond the terms laid out in the 
bill, the Congressional Budget Office has to play along and act like 
that is true, but we know it is not true.
  Fortunately, there are groups on the outside that have conducted 
their own analysis. Assuming all of these phony cliffs and expiration 
dates and the 1-year creation of programs that will later be extended, 
they don't have to buy this sort of smoke-and-mirrors approach to the 
budget. These groups have conducted their own analyses and have told us 
what they think the true cost of this $1.75 trillion bill, so-called, 
that passed the House will be.
  For example, the budget experts at the University of Pennsylvania's 
Wharton School of Business have analyzed this legislation as if these 
temporary provisions would be made permanent, which, I think, is the 
safest assumption to make. So, instead of $1.75 trillion, they have 
pegged the cost as close to $4.6 trillion over 10 years--more than 2\1/
2\ times the amount the Democrats have claimed.
  Then there is the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that 
thinks that the number could even be a few hundred billion higher than 
that. They estimate the true cost of this bill, now claimed to be $1.75 
trillion, to be approximately $5 trillion. This is a massive, massive 
jump from what the Democrats have said the cost of this bill will be.
  Even one of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle has 
acknowledged that this is disingenuous--and I would just use the word 
``false''--advertising. The true cost of this legislation is much 
closer to Chairman Sanders' original $6 trillion request than the so-
called scaled-back proposal of the current bill.
  Before this legislation comes to the Senate floor, we need to see a 
true cost estimate based on reasonable assumptions, not a fairy tale 
scenario. It defies all common sense to vote on a bill without knowing 
how much it is going to cost ahead of time.
  To this end, last week, I sent a letter to the leaders of the 
Congressional Budget Office and of the Joint Committee on Taxation 
requesting an updated estimate based on more reasonable assumptions. If 
the temporary provisions of this bill are extended--and I fully expect 
them to be if our Democratic colleagues have the votes to do it--this 
legislation will cost a whole lot more than what the American people 
have been told; and we need to know, as close as we can, exactly how 
much that will be.
  Well, it is obvious what is going on here. These not-so-temporary 
provisions won't expire in a year or 4 years or 10 years. We need to 
operate under rational assumptions that our Democratic colleagues, when 
the chance is provided to them, will make these programs permanent and 
come up with a true and honest score for the bill. If this legislation 
is all of a sound investment as our Democratic colleagues claim, they 
shouldn't have anything to be afraid of.
  We do have a duty, I believe, as Members of Congress, in voting on 
legislation of this magnitude, to know what we are doing before we are 
asked to vote on it. I don't think anybody, really, should have 
anything to be afraid of, unless they are afraid of a true accounting 
as opposed to the smoke and mirrors we see so far on this phony, 
gimmickry bill.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.

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