[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 110 (Thursday, June 26, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3568-S3570]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL
Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I have come tonight to the floor to talk
about fiscal responsibility and how important it is that we preserve
or, at least, advance a structure in which we engage with integrity in
budgeting, so we don't run up massive debts that affect the
opportunities for the generation to come.
One of the things I have been very aware of during the 17 years I
have been here is that I hear a lot of conversation from my colleagues
across the aisle about fiscal responsibility.
But let's be clear, the majority of the debt run up over the last 20
years has come from the Republican side of the aisle. It has been the
war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. Those alone account for $8
trillion.
And if we turn the clock back just a little bit more, we had the 2001
Bush tax cuts, the 2003 Bush tax cuts, the 2017 Trump tax cut--each of
them producing an ocean of red ink by cutting taxes for the richest
Americans.
Is that any way to run a country? Cutting programs for families to
fund tax breaks for mega millionaires and billionaires? Well,
apparently. And in the process, massive, massive debt.
Now, my Republican colleagues have engaged repeatedly in this myth--
this myth that somehow the tax breaks for billionaires will result in
so much increase in revenue because the economy will hum along. Every
single time, it is a lie. It is a deception. It never happens. Instead,
revenue plummets, and we indebt our country far into the future.
Let's look at another version of the world. Every time there is a
Republican administration, if you look at the first year compared to
the last year, deficits go up. Every time there is a Democratic
administration, first year to the last year, deficits go down.
Here we are at another moment where we are about to make a decision
related to another Republican bill that will create another red sea of
debt--some $3-plus trillion over 10 years, some $30-plus trillion of
debt compared to current law over 30 years.
Now, the very fact that I am mentioning 30 years points out something
new and different being put forward by my Republican colleagues; that
is, that under reconciliation, you have only been allowed under the
rules, in law, under section 313 of the Budget Act, to incur deficits
in the first 10 years but not after the first 10 years. So there was no
need for a 30-year estimate because that simply was not allowed.
As long as we are looking at what has been allowed under the law and
how things have changed, let's look at the structure of what happened
to the fairly magnificent 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act. And
why do I say magnificent? Because all 100 Senators--everyone on the
blue side of the aisle, everyone on the right side of the aisle--said
``We have to get the deficits under control''--1974.
Well, what had the deficits been in the 3 years before? In 1971,
1972, 1973, they averaged $20 billion--$20 billion. Now our deficits
are about $2 trillion a year. But back then, there was seriousness
about getting the budget under control.
So this Budget Control Act had some interesting features. First, it
had a process for regular budgeting, and then it had a separate, very
special track called reconciliation, and reconciliation was designed
only for reducing deficits.
That is why all 100 Senators voted to create a filibuster-free fast
track only to reduce deficits. Picture Robert Byrd of West Virginia,
one of the fiercest defenders of the filibuster, but even he voted for
this special, filibuster-free path only for reducing deficits--1974.
That act also produced the Congressional Budget Office because
another piece of the vision was, let's have honesty in numbers.
You know, every time we would come to a budget, one team or the
other, whoever was in charge, kind of uses some smoke and mirrors to
pretend the impact on the budget is more favorable than it really is.
So we needed an organization that is impartial, nonpartisan, that will
do the modeling and give us the best information for us to be able to
understand the consequences of the provisions in law we are proposing.
Well, that was 1974 that all of that was done. For the 22 years that
followed, that filibuster-free fast track, that special reconciliation
fast track, was only used for deficit reduction because that is what it
was created for.
But in 1996, my Republican colleagues had the majority in the House
and the majority in the Senate, and they undertook some, well, bold,
new initiatives. One of those was to do a line-item veto for the
President. Guess what? The Supreme Court struck that down because the
Constitution says it is the responsibility of Congress, not the
President of the United States of America, to lay out the decisions
about how much is going to be spent on what programs. The Executive
executes the law, but we here write the law.
The Supreme Court said: No, no, no. You can't do that. If you want to
cut a program, you can't ask the President to do that; you have to do
it yourself.
Then there was a second initiative. That second initiative was called
the balanced budget amendment, and the idea was that we would put a new
clause in the Constitution that essentially forced us to do much like a
State government does--you have to balance the budget.
Well, there were those on the Appropriations and Revenue Committee
that said: I don't know that that is the right idea because in a time
of crisis, you need to be able to spend more for national security or
in a time of recession or depression, you might need to spend more to
stimulate the economy.
Well, that amendment needed a two-thirds vote, 67 votes here in the
Senate. It got 66. So it did not pass the Senate of the United States
of America.
So the Republicans at the time--Robert Dole was the majority leader--
said: Well, do you know what we want to do? We want to do a massive tax
bill with lots of provisions that cut taxes for the richest Americans.
Then they said: But, you know, the problem is that we will need 60
votes to move that bill off the floor, and the Democrats are not going
to agree to a plan that gives away the Treasury to the richest
Americans.
So they concocted a plan. They replaced the Parliamentarian. They
replaced the Parliamentarian in order to
[[Page S3569]]
get a ruling that said the filibuster-free track voted by 100 Senators
only for deficit reduction could be used to increase deficits for tax
reductions. Wow. My Republican colleagues who were preaching fiscal
responsibility destroyed this powerful mechanism that all hundred
Senators had agreed to to invoke fiscal responsibility and reduce
deficits.
But out of that carnage of 1996--that nuclear option, if you will--
came two surviving pieces, and one of those surviving pieces was that
any year after the first 10 years in any title, you had to have deficit
reductions or deficit neutrality. So whereas the deficit could be
increased in the first 10 years, it couldn't be increased in any title
in any year following that. So you couldn't even say: Well, a surplus
in 2011 adjusts for--or the 11th year adjusts for a deficit in the 12th
year. No. Every single year, every single title, deficit-neutral.
The other thing that survived was keeping honest numbers--honest
numbers--that we were going to do what section 313 of the law says.
Section 313 says that each provision has to be evaluated in terms of
its outlays--that is the spending impact--or the revenue impact.
So here is a clause in the proposed law. If we follow that clause, if
we enact that law, how will it affect spending and how will it affect
revenue? Well, each and every clause has to be costed out in that
fashion--a combination of work by the Joint Committee on Taxation on
the revenue side and the Congressional Budget Office on the program
side. Every clause.
If the clause in the law, the provision in the law, passes, how will
it affect things? If it is not in the law, what happens? What is the
difference between that? What is the difference between this new
proposal and existing law?
OK. Well, now my Republican colleagues--the party that blew up the
deficit-reducing pathway all 100 Senators agreed to for the first 10
years--want to blow up the remaining two pillars. Now they want to be
able to produce deficits after the first 10 years. That is why CBO is
doing a 30-year estimate of the debt created by their bill. No longer
is it just a 10-year framework, that 10-year framework that their bill
is going to produce some $3-plus trillion of debt compared to current
law, but they have to do a 30-year estimate. Their bill is going to
produce over $30 trillion in debt compared to current law because they
are destroying that second pillar--no deficits after 10 years.
The third pillar was to use honesty in numbers, but folks on the
other side of the aisle said: We are embarrassed by this massive, debt-
creating monster, but we want to pass it because it gives tax breaks to
the richest Americans, and that is what we are all about. We are going
to cut healthcare for 16 million Americans to give tax breaks to the
richest Americans. We are going to leave 4 million children hungry to
give tax breaks to the richest Americans. But that is a little
embarrassing that we are also going to run up a massive debt of the
United States of America to give tax breaks to the richest Americans.
Do you know what? That not only harms citizens today--I mean,
citizens across this country, when they hear about this bill, they go:
That is just wrong. It is absolutely wrong to destroy healthcare or
housing or education in order to line the nest of the already best off
Americans. It is just wrong.
What happened to government by and for the people? Why is the
Republican Party pursuing government by and for the powerful, the
richest?
That is where this nickname comes from for this bill, the ``Big
Beautiful Betrayal.'' Why is it a betrayal? Because President Trump
campaigned on helping families, but the moment he was sworn into
office, who was standing behind him? Was it champions for the people?
Champions on healthcare? No. Champions on affordable housing? No.
Champions on food programs or nutrition? No. Who was standing behind
him? Billionaires. Billionaires were standing behind President Trump.
So it is the ``Big Beautiful Betrayal'' because he campaigned on
helping families, but the bill he is championing instead hurts families
and helps billionaires.
Now, how is it that a law that has been in place for now 51 years can
be corrupted--corrupted--to allow deficits beyond year 10? How is it
that a law that has been in place for 51 years can be corrupted to stop
using the honest numbers that come, evaluating the costs or the revenue
impact of each and every provision? How is that possible?
Well, I will tell you how that is possible, and that is, the chair of
the Budget Committee said: Hey, there is this provision--it wasn't
designed for reconciliation. It was designed to help resolve technical
anomalies in regular bills--not for reconciliation, for regular bills.
But it gave the Budget Committee the ability to provide some
flexibility about evaluating and solving technical anomalies.
So the chair of the Budget Committee has proposed taking that
provision that is there in a section of the bill for regular budgeting,
that gives some flexibility to the Budget Committee to resolve
anomalies, and transporting it over into this other special,
filibuster-free pathway designed to decrease deficits to create a phony
baseline.
So instead of taking a provision in the proposed law and saying
``Well, this provision is here; how much cost would it add?'' instead
you say ``Well, let's take this provision and pretend that if it wasn't
here, there would be some other provision, maybe an extension of
something that is actually expiring.''
So we will create these phony numbers to try to pretend this doesn't
create the debt it creates. Here we are, section 312, the chair's
authority on regular budgeting being transported into reconciliation.
Stay with me here.
This has never been used in this fashion because the entire law, as
written, the instructions for reconciliation say you have to cost out
each provision. If the clause is in the proposal, what would it cost
compared to the clause not being in the proposal?
Here we are back in regular budgeting, this power that is in section
312 for the chair--that actually says the Budget Committee, not the
chair--to resolve an anomaly. Has it ever before been used in a
partisan fashion? No. Here are the times it has been used. Never before
has it been a partisan thing. It has been Democrats and Republicans
together saying we have a knotty little technical problem, for example,
like a program that has a new name. Is that costed as a new program?
But it is actually an existing program. It has a new name. How do we
resolve that? It is that type of little technical difficulty that was
always worked out--used in a bipartisan fashion. Again, that power was
assigned to the committee, not to the chair.
How else does 312 differ in the past from the present? Well, it has
never been used on a broad bill. It has been used to resolve
individual, small, narrow issues, things like the Crime Victims Fund,
things like the Power Marketing Administrations, things like double
counting of a dairy program--little narrow provisions, not on a
systematic billwide basis, not at all. No, never done. Again, only done
in a bipartisan fashion on very narrow provisions.
How else does it differ? Well, it has always been used to resolve
this technical ambiguity challenge, some little anomaly that occurs in
a bipartisan fashion on a narrow bill. But here, it is being used
systemically across an entire bill to create a fake baseline to pretend
that those provisions that cost money don't actually cost money because
instead of comparing that provision to the provision not being in the
law, we will compare it to pretending the provision would have been in
the law even if we didn't put it into the law. That is as phony as it
could possibly get. It destroys integrity completely.
Has it ever been used in a reconciliation bill? No, because there are
special instructions for the reconciliation bill. They are laid out in
sections 310 and 313. In 312, for regular budgeting, power is to the
Budget Committee--not the chair but to the committee--to resolve
ambiguities.
Finally, let's just look at the type of money that was associated
with these narrow programs. Crime Victims Fund, $73 million. Sounds
like a lot. The largest provision it has ever been used for is
adjustments in the Fiscal Responsibility Act--again, on a bipartisan
basis, on a contained program--$2.8 billion.
[[Page S3570]]
What are we talking about now? We are talking about trying to hide
$37 trillion in debt, new debt.
Wow.
To every colleague on either side of the aisle who has back home said
we need to get our deficit under control, this is not the bill for you.
This bill creates over $3 trillion in debt compared to current law over
just a 10-year period. Our debt is already over 100 percent of our GPD.
I talked to a number of colleagues, and they said: Well, we have to
hold it to 100 percent of our GPD. We are already, like, 120 percent,
meaning the debt is in the high thirties--about $36.5 trillion--and our
gross domestic product, our entire economy, everything it creates in a
single year, is about $28 trillion.
So the debt is now much larger than everything our economy produces
in a single year. That is the danger zone, folks, because you start to
enter a debt vortex. And the debt vortex means the debt has gotten so
high that the interest rates are starting to eat up the budget. So to
fund our military security and our basic healthcare, housing, and
education programs, well, we have to borrow more money. That is what
this bill does. It borrows, borrows, borrows as far as the eye can see.
Again, colleagues on both sides of the aisle--my Democratic
colleagues, my Republican colleagues--if you have ever said a word
about fiscal responsibility, do not accept this corruption of allowing
a provision to be used to create a fake baseline. We solved that
together--100 Senators. We solved it 51 years ago by creating the CBO,
the Congressional Budget Office, to give us honest, nonpartisan
estimates. Don't create phony baselines.
In the future, which other party will it be? Maybe it will be this
side of the aisle that wants to use a phony baseline.
We agreed together not to do this. This was not just a handshake.
This was a vote. This is the law. Do not corrupt it and work with us
for a different vision, not a vision of families lose because that is
what happens in this bill--16 million people losing healthcare, 4
million children go hungry to fund tax breaks and giveaways for the
richest Americans. That is not a vision.
Join us and rewrite this bill. Let's reduce the deficit it creates.
Let's reduce the total debt it creates. And, certainly, let's not
create provisions that allow there to be deficits beyond the 10-year
window. Let's keep the honesty of using nonpartisan numbers, not phony
baselines. Let's create the integrity of sticking with the no deficits
after 10 years. Let's do that with the vision of families thriving and
billionaires paying their fair share.
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