[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 216 (Wednesday, December 15, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9193-S9195]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                     Democratic Legislative Agenda

  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, as the Senate's schedule for this 
calendar year begins to wind down, hopefully with the anticipation of 
spending time with our friends and families during this holiday season, 
I want to look back over some of the deadlines that the majority 
leader, the Senator from New York, has set for Senate action and to ask 
whether these sort of arbitrary deadlines and attempts to do 
legislation essentially along party lines is the right way to actually 
get things done in the Senate.
  We have excellent examples of how to get things done. Today, we 
passed the Defense authorization bill with a strong bipartisan vote. 
But we know that when either political party decides to do things 
unilaterally, especially in a 50-50 Senate, it makes the work 
immeasurably harder, and that is for a good reason.
  The Founders of this country and our Constitution and the creators of 
this Senate looked to the Senate to be a deliberative body and looked 
for us to do what sometimes doesn't come naturally, which is to work 
together to build consensus. But, as I said, when one party or the 
other attempts to do things unilaterally, it usually means what you see 
here, which is one blown self-imposed deadline after another.
  First of all, the majority leader set a July 21 target for Senate 
action on a budget resolution.
  He laid out an August deadline for a partisan election takeover bill, 
which would have preempted State and local laws, which are responsible, 
under our division of responsibility in the Constitution, under our 
Federal system, for conducting elections.
  Then he proudly announced his goal to get two bills to President 
Biden's desk by the end of October. He said those would be joined 
together--a bipartisan infrastructure bill that is the exception to the 
rule--actually like the Defense authorization bill that actually 
enjoyed broad bipartisan support--but the hangup was the other part of 
that proposition, which was the Democrats' multitrillion-dollar 
partisan spending bill.
  Of course, not one single one of these deadlines was met--again, 
because it is hard to do things in a 50-50 Senate when you try to do it 
unilaterally without doing the hard work of building consensus, which 
is the way the Founders wanted this institution to work.
  So our colleague from New York kept setting deadlines and blowing 
right past them, and it looks like he is about to add another one to 
the list. Senator Schumer's latest deadline for the ``Build Back 
Bankrupt'' bill is December 25. That is Christmas. While he has yet to 
make an official announcement, news reports are starting to confirm 
what we have known all along--that the Senate will not vote on this 
bill by Christmas because it is just not ready for prime time.
  Before our colleagues can bend the rules of the Senate to pass their 
partisan, multitrillion-dollar spending bill, they have got a lot of 
roadblocks to overcome. The most obvious is they need a bill to vote 
on. This bill is not even in final form yet. As a matter of fact, the 
Senate Finance Committee, on which I have the pleasure of serving, 
released about 1,100 pages of new text on Saturday, and there are at 
least 20 different issues that have been raised with the 
Parliamentarian which need to be litigated in a deliberative process, 
but the version of the legislation

[[Page S9194]]

that passed the House started getting picked apart even before reaching 
this side of the Capitol. The committee chairmen here were still 
deciding which provisions to keep, which ones to alter, and which ones 
to throw away.
  It is tough to know how things are progressing because all of these 
conversations happen not here on the Senate floor, with open debate, 
but behind closed doors, completely out of view of the American people. 
That is dangerous because this bill will touch virtually every aspect 
of Americans' daily lives and stick them with a massive invoice--
without any visibility into the process.
  We are told that the Build Back Better bill is immensely popular. 
Well, that may be true until you start looking at the details, at the 
fine print. Right now, we have to rely on vague statements from our 
Democratic colleagues to understand where things stand, and I will tell 
you, right now, it doesn't sound too promising.
  Following severe blowback from the American people after the details 
of this bill began to become public, Finance Committee Democrats began 
making changes to one extremely controversial part of the bill. The 
Washington Post headline says it all: ``The second-biggest program in 
the Democrats' spending plan gives billions to the rich.''
  No wonder they went back to the drawing board. After all, there is a 
sharp contrast from how our colleagues have tried to sell this bill--
really, an effort of false advertising. They have harped previously--or 
some sections of the Democratic caucus--on the need to stick it to the 
rich, to tax the rich, but when given the opportunity, they hand out 
massive tax breaks for the rich.
  It is unclear how long it will take our colleagues to finalize 
changes to the millionaires' tax breaks and the countless other 
provisions that are being retooled, but once they lay down their pens, 
the work is not done. As I suggested, they have the substantial and 
difficult process of vetting a number of the provisions with the Senate 
Parliamentarian to determine whether these provisions can pass the Byrd 
rule.
  The Byrd rule is simply the name given to the process to see whether 
it complies with the 1974 Budget Act, which provides for an expedited 
process and 51 votes for passage because it is limited strictly to 
budgetary matters. When our colleagues try to stick into the bill other 
substantive law changes which require a 60-vote requirement, that is 
where the Byrd rule comes in, and that is where these provisions get 
kicked out.
  According to the chairman of the Finance Committee, the Finance 
Committee's proposal alone has more than 20 different issues to resolve 
with the Parliamentarian in the so-called Byrd bath, and that is just 
one committee. Our colleagues on various other committees are 
presenting arguments on provisions of all sizes. We have heard that our 
Democratic colleagues are trying to make massive changes in our 
immigration law on a party-line vote at 51 votes--50 votes plus the 
Vice President. Well, that has not succeeded on two previous occasions 
for good reason, and now we are awaiting the verdict of the 
Parliamentarian on those immigration proposals on the third try.
  But we know that this massive legislation, once it is written, 
presumably, will go from everything from technical changes to major 
issues like whether the budget rule can be used to legalize millions of 
undocumented immigrants. Again, these conversations are happening not 
out here in the Senate, with an opportunity for full debate and 
amendment; they are happening behind closed doors. So we really don't 
have a good sense--nor do the American people--of what has been decided 
or how long it will take to resolve pending disputes.
  If our Democratic colleagues receive adverse guidance from the 
Parliamentarian, it is still unclear whether they will accept the 
outcome or light the rule book on fire, as some have suggested, and try 
to overrule her. It is tough to imagine a world in which our Democrat 
colleagues would put this Frankenstein's monster on the Senate floor 
before Christmas. Christmas is, in fact, 10 days away. Even if our 
colleagues were able to iron out every issue with the Parliamentarian 
and were able to present finalized text and receive a score on the 
final legislation at that time, Senator Schumer doesn't have the votes 
to pass it. Again, we are an evenly divided Senate, with the Vice 
President casting the tie-breaking vote.
  Colleagues on the other side of the aisle are not on board entirely 
with this proposed massive spending-and-tax bill. Unlike the majority 
of our colleagues who have blindly fallen in line or aired their 
concerns in private, we know that the Senator from West Virginia, Mr. 
Manchin, has consistently expressed his reservations about the bill.
  In September, for example, he wrote an op-ed, titled: ``Why I Won't 
Support Spending Another $3.5 Trillion.'' He has hardly been quiet or 
hidden his concerns. He shared his concerns in that op-ed about the 
scale and scope of this legislation, and he encouraged his colleagues 
in his own political party to take a strategic pause.
  Some of the reasons he cited included the growing threat of 
inflation, which has only increased since September. Inflation, in 
fact, has now reached a 40-year high--just last month. He warned about 
the possibility that the virus might mutate and take a new turn and 
that we ought to really save our powder in case we had to address 
either the public health or economic consequences flowing from a new 
variant. Well, today, all of our eyes are on the Omicron variant, and 
we have yet to know how that will play out. He asked how we could 
respond to another financial crisis like we experienced in 2008 during 
the great recession or, heaven forbid, a terrorist attack or a major 
international conflict.
  If we spend trillions of dollars on unnecessary programs today, we 
will hardly have those reserves available to us should we need them. I 
think the questions and issues raised by the Senator from West Virginia 
were valid then, and they are even more pressing now.

  Over the last several months, the winds haven't shifted in favor of 
this massive tax-and-spending bill. In fact, we now have more reason to 
believe this legislation would add to, not solve, the problems that the 
American people are facing. The Senator from West Virginia told one of 
our Republican colleagues that the score proposed by his own political 
party--$1.75 trillion--is full of gimmicks, and he even acknowledged 
that that pricetag is a form of deceptive advertising.
  We now have an honest score, one that acknowledges that massive 
programs cannot be started and stopped on a dime and that, if you are 
really going to be honest about the cost of the bill, you need to look 
at a score that spans the full 10-year budget window. We now have that 
score, one that avoids the gimmicks that are meant to disguise the true 
cost of the bill. Now we can quantify how disingenuous this so-called 
$1.75 trillion pricetag really is, and it is about as disingenuous as 
the President's claim that the bill costs zero. Nobody believes that. 
It really undermines the President's credibility when he says something 
like that.
  The Congressional Budget Office now says this legislation, if in 
place for a full 10 years, would cost $4.9 trillion. That is on top of 
the almost $2 trillion our colleagues spent unilaterally earlier this 
year. Well, that is certainly higher than the $3.5 trillion redline 
that Senator Manchin drew earlier this year, and it is a whole lot more 
than the $1.75 trillion pricetag that our Democratic colleagues are 
claiming. It makes the repeated claim that this bill costs zero seem 
even more bizarre and out of touch.
  Under this bill, as it is shaping up, we know deficits would increase 
by a staggering $3 trillion over the next decade. Now, last year, when 
we passed COVID-19 relief bills with huge bipartisan majorities, we did 
so because it was a public health emergency and an economic emergency, 
and we did it together. Yet, on top of all of that necessary spending, 
our colleagues are insisting on spending another $4.9 trillion--adding 
another $3 trillion to the debt over the next decade. Our children and 
grandchildren would never have a chance to dig out of the hole that our 
Democratic colleagues are now drilling.
  This legislation doesn't just fall short of solving problems; it 
actually makes them worse. This bill would fuel

[[Page S9195]]

the red-hot inflation that is already burning up the paychecks of the 
American people. People who are on fixed incomes are finding their 
purchasing power shrinking by the day because of the threat of 
inflation. We know this bill would also hurt our energy security. It 
would give massive tax breaks to the wealthy while increasing taxes on 
the middle class. It would literally cut funding for safety net 
hospitals and drive the national debt to unimaginable heights. Finally, 
and maybe most importantly, it would hand to the Federal Government 
decisions that should be made by families.
  I hope our colleague from West Virginia will continue to hold strong 
against the dangers of this bill. At a minimum, we need to tap the 
brakes and take what he called a ``strategic pause.''
  So it seems the Democratic leader is on track to miss yet another 
deadline. For the country's sake, I hope this bill does not arrive 
after Christmas. I hope it never comes at all.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Ossoff). The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I appreciate my friend from Texas and his 
comments, but I have trouble following some of them.
  When he came to the floor after the deserved credit for the Trump 
2017-2018 tax cut for the rich--70 percent of the benefits went to the 
1 percent--he did take credit for his work in the Finance Committee. He 
should take credit for that, but that is what drove this hole in the 
deficit where the rich got richer.
  I remember during that--and the Presiding Officer was not here at the 
time, but he can still see it here.
  You can look out the window, and you can see Senator McConnell's 
office there and the lobbyists lined up. You should have seen it back 
when Senator Cornyn was talking about this tax cut--this tax cut for 
the rich--when they made these promises: You know, if you give tax cuts 
to really rich people and corporations, it will trickle down, and we 
will all do better. They will hire more people, and they will raise 
wages.
  Well, we know what they did. In fact, they just announced another 
round of it--a whole bunch of stock buybacks for the executives. So we 
know what happened during those years. Profits went up for 
corporations, and stock markets soared. Executive compensation exploded 
through the roof, and wages for most people in Mansfield, GA, and 
Mansfield, OH, and Marietta, GA, and Marietta, OH, stayed flat. We know 
that. That is why Build Back Better makes sense. It begins to put money 
in people's pockets.
  And what my friend from Texas--and we sit across from each other in 
the Finance Committee and work together on some issues, and I 
appreciate what he has done on some other bills. But what he didn't 
explain is why every one of them opposes the child tax credit. On the 
child tax credit, we know a number of things. I have been working on 
this since 2013. It started with not a lot of support, but it built 
huge support by this year, early this year. Sitting at this desk, on 
March 6, I voted--as did the Presiding Officer from Georgia in the 
first really big vote he cast as a Member of the Senate, in the 
majority--for the child tax credit.
  Two different times, every single Republican voted no. Every single 
Democrat voted yes. Do you know what that meant? It meant that starting 
in July, when we got it set up, 90 percent of the families in Georgia, 
90 percent of the families in Ohio who have children under the age of 
18 got at least a $3,000-a-year tax cut.
  Think about that. There are families who struggle with paying rent. 
Twenty-five percent of renters in this country before the pandemic paid 
more than half their income in rent. Think of the pressure those 
families are under if, at the end of every month, they cobble together 
$700 to pay their rent. They get a $3,000 tax cut. The family who is 
struggling to pay for diapers or childcare, especially--the cost of 
childcare has exploded.
  Whether it is Metro Atlanta or Metro Columbus, OH, or whether it is 
smalltown Milledgeville or smalltown Shelby, OH, families struggle with 
childcare, and this $300 a month per child--or $250, depending on the 
age of the children--makes a huge difference in those families.
  One father said: You know, for the first time, I have money now to 
buy my daughter fast-pitch softball equipment.
  A mother said to me: I have money now. For the first time, I can send 
my son for a week to summer camp and buy school supplies in the fall.
  And, as I said, for diapers and other expenses for infants, it makes 
all the difference in the world.
  I expect the Presiding Officer, I hope, has a long career in this 
body. I don't know if he will ever get the opportunity to vote on 
anything as big as what we did in March with the recovery act and what 
we are about to do with Build Back Better. For me, they are the 
highlights of my career.
  I hope the Presiding Officer has a lot of years in front of him, but 
this is the most consequential thing this Congress has done, not just 
to fight poverty, lift poor kids and struggling parents who are working 
so hard to raise kids and balance two jobs and all that, not just to 
help kids get out of poverty but to make life easier.
  As I said, 90 percent of the families who have children under 18 in 
Georgia, in Ohio, and every State in between are going to get a $3,000-
a-year tax cut. That alone is so important.
  I wish my colleague from Texas would address why they all vote no. 
They have had two chances. It sounds like they are going to take their 
third chance and vote no again.
  I don't understand it. Is it that the lobbyists who line up in 
Senator McConnell's office have some weird philosophy that markets 
always know better? Is it just that they don't really care about 
helping kids? I don't know what their logic is. I just know what our 
logic is, and it will make our country better.