[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 11964-11965]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      THE GOP'S FAILURE TO GOVERN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, it is now 7 months since the start of the 
115th Congress, and 6 months since Republicans have controlled all the 
levers of power of our government, and all we have seen are broken 
promises.
  Donald Trump and our Republican colleagues in Congress ran on a 
platform that included healthcare for everyone, massive investments in 
infrastructure, tax reform, and a dramatic increase in jobs.
  On all four of these, there has been zero progress, zero legislation 
sent to the President, and zero effort to work with Democrats to 
achieve any of those objectives.
  Donald Trump promised voters that he would be ``the greatest job 
President that God ever created.''

                              {time}  1015

  Yet neither he nor the Republican congressional leadership have put 
forward a comprehensive jobs bill. Instead, he and his Republican 
allies in the Congress have proposed budgets that would slash 
investments in education, infrastructure, and research, all areas that 
directly help our economy create jobs.
  In fact, jobs that the President claimed to have saved are going 
overseas. Forecasters are now predicting slower economic growth, and 
manufacturing average weekly earnings have only grown half as fast as 
earnings across the private sector as a whole over the past 6 months.
  When it comes to healthcare, it hasn't just been the broken promise 
of

[[Page 11965]]

insurance for everyone. It has been a nonstop roller coaster of 
legislative proposals, all of which would strip coverage away from tens 
of millions of Americans, raise costs, and deny coverage for those with 
preexisting conditions.
  On tax reform, all we have seen is a one-page outline and a budget 
proposal with reconciliation instructions setting up a process for 
jamming a partisan tax reform bill through Congress. That is a 
nonstarter, because to be successful any tax reform legislation must be 
bipartisan, as was the 1986 tax reform under President Reagan and 
Speaker O'Neill.
  To top it all off, we considered and are considering this week an 
appropriations minibus without even having had a budget on this floor 
some 88 days after it was due. The Republicans promised regular order. 
In fact, they are pursuing no order. Republicans haven't even bothered 
to pass a budget, which is what we are supposed to do in the House 
before moving to appropriations.
  So, Mr. Speaker, at the 6-month mark, we have only seen gridlock, no 
progress, chaos, and broken promises. Even some Republican Members--and 
perhaps many Republican Members--are growing as frustrated as the 
American people their party has failed.
  Representative Steve Womack from Arkansas said late last month that: 
``We'd better get our act together. We're not governing right now. We 
are stuck.''
  And Representative Tom Reed of New York said: ``The fact that we are 
not getting to these issues--healthcare, budget, tax reform--is 
frustrating. We came here to move the needle.''
  So what I am saying has been said by my Republican colleagues as 
well. Perhaps Representative Tom Massie put it most succinctly when he 
tweeted about his Republican colleagues: ``They confuse activity with 
progress.''
  Republicans, Mr. Speaker, have failed to address the challenges 
facing the American people, and they have done nothing to improve the 
lives of those working hard to make it in American.
  We should be considering legislation to create jobs and grow the 
economy. We should be working to improve and strengthen the Affordable 
Care Act, not replace it. That would be consistent with some three-
quarters of Americans who believe that is what we ought to be doing. We 
should be working in a bipartisan way to reform our Tax Code and 
promote competitiveness for our American businesses that are competing 
in world markets.
  Growth, job creation, as well as fiscal sustainability, that is what 
we should be seeking in a tax bill. We should be investing in 
infrastructure that lures jobs back home from overseas. And, Mr. 
Speaker, we should be returning to regular order and an open process 
that Republicans have abandoned to the detriment of legislation and to 
our country. There have been more closed rules in this 7 months than 
have occurred in my 36 years in the Congress of the United States.
  Mr. Speaker, the American people need a better deal, a better deal 
than they have gotten over the last 7 months. Seven months into this 
Congress, it is clear that House Republicans are not on the side of 
working people. In the words of New York Times columnist David Brooks, 
one of the most conservative columnists at The New York Times, last 
week he said this: ``Republicans offer nothing but negativity, 
detachment, absence, and an ax.''
  Democrats, on the other hand, are offering the American people, as I 
said, a better deal, one focused on helping all of our people--Make It 
In America--better jobs, better wages, and, yes, a better future. It is 
what Democrats have always done when Democrats have been entrusted to 
lead. There is a history, a track record to back it up.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to show my colleagues that rhetoric is cheap--or 
talk is cheap, as we say--but performance is really what we ought to 
look to. I want to bring some charts here to the attention of our 
colleagues--and, indeed, to the American people as well--to what 
Democrats have always done.
  This chart, number one, shows that Democrats perform better on 
economic growth. Now, that is easy to say, but this graph shows exactly 
from Truman to Obama, the blue. You can see under Eisenhower, economic 
growth was about a third, or maybe 40 percent. Kennedy-Johnson and 
Johnson much greater than Nixon and Nixon-Ford. Carter, greater than 
either Nixon or Nixon-Ford. And Carter, to the surprise of many, had 
just about the same GDP growth as Reagan, of which my Republican 
friends proudly talk. And then what happened under Bush I? Down. Then 
what happened under Clinton? Up, GDP growth. Under Bush II, down; under 
Obama, up.
  That is not campaign rhetoric. Those are the statistics that show 
that the economy has performed better under Democrats.
  Now, Democrats perform better on the stock market, the stock market 
whom, Mr. Trump, likes to point to today. It is doing well. Why? 
Because the Obama economy, as you just saw, was doing well and the 
expectations were good.
  If you look at this chart, things were better on the stock market 
under the Democrats. Truman, greater growth in the stock market, 
Eisenhower less. Kennedy-Johnson, Johnson up; Nixon down. Nixon-Ford--
Nixon-Ford had negative growth in the stock market, and then Carter, 
growth. And, yes, Reagan and Bush I had growth, but guess what. Then 
Clinton had better growth. And then guess what. Bush II, again, like 
Nixon-Ford, negative growth in the stock market.
  What did that mean? That meant 401(k)s were worth less for retired 
people, and their security was less secure because the stock market 
went in the tank. And then what happened under Obama? The stock market 
went up.
  Now, lastly, I wanted to show this statistic. And this is a stark 
statistic because it shows that, under Democratic Presidents, every 
segment, every wage level in America saw appreciation. Now, this only 
goes back to 1967.
  So if we go to the lowest quintile, it went up higher under Democrats 
than Republicans in every quintile. And guess what. The highest 
quintile did better under Democrats, just as the lower quintile did 
better. But what you see is everybody did better. The only negative, of 
course, was under Republicans, where the second quintile went down over 
their years in office.
  So if you compare all of these, Mr. Speaker, it is not campaign 
rhetoric. It is not rhetoric on this floor, but it is economic facts, 
economic statistics. Economic reports show that, when we promised a 
better deal, we delivered a better deal.
  So as we look back on the past 6 months of Republicans' broken 
promises and failures to govern, let's remember there is, indeed, a 
better deal to be had. Democrats are ready to work with our Republican 
colleagues and with the administration to make progress.
  Mr. Speaker, I have been here 36 years, and one of the things I am 
proudest of, my Republican colleagues, many of them say: ``Hoyer will 
work with us in a way to compromise and make progress for our 
country.'' But if our Republican colleagues continue to be unwilling to 
work in a bipartisan way, we are going to offer a clear and proven 
alternative--a proven alternative.
  I hope my Republican colleagues will return from the August district 
work period ready to ensure that the American people get a better deal 
and work with us constructively to get them that better deal.

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