[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 66 (Thursday, April 20, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1275-S1276]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              DEBT CEILING

  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, on the issue of avoiding default, 
yesterday, Speaker McCarthy made it clear how unprepared Republicans in 
the House are to resolve our Nation's default crisis.
  With a default approaching, Speaker McCarthy yesterday capitulated to 
the MAGA right and rolled out a partisan wish list masquerading as 
legislation. This MAGA wish list has no chance of moving forward in the 
Senate, and it doesn't move us any closer than we were yesterday to 
avoiding default.
  To quote one hard-right conservative House Republican:

       The leadership just picked up the House Freedom Caucus plan 
     and helped us convert it into the legislative text.

  That shows you how hard right this wish list truly is.
  Again, let me quote one of the most well-known hard-right 
conservatives in the House:

       The leadership just picked up the House Freedom Caucus plan 
     and helped us convert it into the legislative text.

  Wow. That is what Leader McCarthy is doing--maybe not as a surprise 
after what happened with the many votes he needed to get elected.
  Americans who look at this package will overwhelmingly agree: The 
biggest losers in Speaker McCarthy's agenda are parents, kids, law 
enforcement, small businesses, and countless others who work hard every 
single day to make ends meet.
  Do you want to talk about reducing debt? Wall Street billionaires are 
not asked to pay even a nickel under McCarthy's bill. Hurt the parents. 
Hurt the kids. Hurt law enforcement. Hurt small businesses, but leave 
the billionaires alone. That is what McCarthy is doing over there in 
the House.
  Let me say that again. The biggest losers in Speaker McCarthy's 
blueprint are parents, kids, law enforcement, small businesses, and 
countless others who work hard every single day to make ends meet. Wall 
Street billionaires are not being asked to pay a nickel. Americans will 
not accept this transparently unfair and draconian package.
  If these MAGA cuts become law, it will decimate everything ranging 
from food nutrition programs to funding for mental health, opioid 
addiction, and childcare. Parents who need help buying groceries and 
baby formulas will see their out-of-pocket costs go up. It is so cruel 
and heartless that parents who get $6 a person a day to feed their 
families would see it disappear. Can you imagine? Can you imagine?
  If this MAGA wish list becomes law, untold thousands of clean energy 
and advanced manufacturing jobs could leave our shores and go to China.
  This MAGA wish list will also make Americans less safe by slashing 
funding for the Department of Justice by billions of dollars and 
eliminating tens of thousands of law enforcement positions nationwide. 
We hear a lot of talk from the other side about helping the police.

[[Page S1276]]

This helps defund them, this legislation.
  Donald Trump called for Republicans to defund law enforcement, and 
now Republicans seem to be following through. The wish list will 
further punish middle-class taxpayers and reward tax cheats by slashing 
funding necessary to go after ultrarich tax cheats while raising taxes 
on the middle class by depriving them of many of the new tax credits 
aimed at the middle class that we passed--we Democrats passed--during 
the last Congress.
  You heard me right. This MAGA wish list punishes middle-class 
taxpayers while rewarding ultrarich tax cheats.
  It is clear what is going on here: Speaker McCarthy cobbled together 
all sorts of extraneous measures in order to try and pass something, 
anything, no matter how extreme. But these extraneous measures--and 
they are truly extreme--have no place in a debate about avoiding 
default.
  If Republicans truly wish to sell their extreme agenda to the 
American people, they should not do so in the middle of discussions to 
avoid default. There is a time and place to debate that, not during 
this debate, because what they are doing is dangerous to the country.
  In the meantime, the solution to resolving the debt limit crisis has 
not changed. If Republicans want to avoid causing a first-ever default, 
they should do what we did three times under Donald Trump and twice 
under President Biden: work with Democrats to avoid default without 
brinksmanship, without blackmail, without hostage-taking, and without 
extraneous demands that nobody in America would want to accept, hardly 
anybody at all.
  Speaker McCarthy's wish list is an extreme step in the wrong 
direction. It heads us in the direction of default, and time is running 
out.

                          ____________________