Legislative Program
Floor Speech
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I rise for the purpose of inquiring of the majority leader the schedule for the week to come, and I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. McCarthy).
(Mr. McCARTHY asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for that information. I am constrained to observe that, from my perspective, it will be the last year that we will not start creating extraordinarily more debt for our country. But that aside, let me ask the gentleman a couple of questions.
First of all, there has been discussion in the press, certainly, and some discussion in the Congress about a possibility of a rescission package. As the gentleman knows, both he and I, the Speaker, Leader Pelosi, Mr. McConnell, and the White House, worked very, very hard on reaching an agreement so that we could pass an omnibus some weeks ago. That omnibus was the result of some very hard bargaining and negotiations and trade-offs, and certainly, not--I don't think anybody was pleased with everything that was in that bill, or, frankly, that wasn't in that bill.
I am, therefore, very concerned that I now hear talk about we are going to, in effect, go back on the agreement that we reached. It was clear that there were some things in there that I didn't like and others didn't like, and I am sure that was the case with yourself as well, Mr. Leader. But it was an agreement. It was an agreement reached after hard discussions, over months, and it was a very late agreement at that, funding 2018 finally until September 30, not until last month.
So I am very concerned about the possibility that we are going to try to, in effect, relitigate that issue.
Can the majority leader give me some insight as to whether or not, in fact, we will be facing a rescission package at some point in time? And if so, can the majority leader advise us as to what may be in that package?
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments.
The issue is, of course, not oversight. We believe that there ought to be oversight.
The gentleman is correct, I voted ``no.'' The gentleman voted ``yes.'' Many of his colleagues voted ``no'' with me. Many of his colleagues are wringing their hands now and saying too much money was spent.
But this was an agreement that was brought to the floor by the majority. This was an agreement that was negotiated by the majority. We didn't have the authority to put the bill on the floor or not put the bill on the floor.
And it was an agreement. As I say, Mr. Speaker, it was a tough agreement. I didn't particularly like the agreement, but it was an agreement, and that is why I voted ``no.''
But the fact of the matter is that the majority of this House voted ``yes,'' and the majority of the Senate voted ``yes,'' and they voted ``yes'' as the result of an agreement.
And, yes, of course, there have been rescissions in the past; and although I don't know what the rescissions are, there may well be a rescission that I might support. The gentleman is correct. I wouldn't irrationally oppose a rescission which said we have had money lying in an account that has not been spent for 1, 2, 3 years. We shouldn't just have it sitting in that account. The gentleman is absolutely correct.
But very frankly, in my view, Mr. Speaker, this is to, in effect, negate an agreement that was reached and to, in effect, say, no, we really don't want to spend that money. That may be correct, but the majority of the Republicans in this House voted for it.
Nobody said: We are going to vote for it, but days later we are going to come back and say we don't want this, we don't want that, and we don't want the other.
And we think it is a little bit like what we did yesterday, where the majority has offered a tax bill which cuts $1.8 trillion in revenue. I made the point yesterday that it was a little bit like a businessman that has a product to sell. The product costs him $10 to produce, and he charges $7 when he sells it. That businessman does not stay in business very long.
But the Republicans do it the opposite way. They cut the revenues, they create debt, and they vote for more spending. And their constituents seem to be upset about that. I don't blame them.
Therefore, we had a balanced budget amendment offered yesterday, which, of course, did not comport at all with what our Republican friends, Mr. Speaker, have done over the last year, and, very frankly, in my view, over the last decades when they were in power to do so, which is why we have this extraordinary debt and why CBO has just come down and said, as a result of those bills, we are going to create $14 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years, which my kids and your kids and our grandchildren are going to have to pay.
I want to make it very clear that I think we need a serious, disciplined discussion on getting a handle on this deficit. Part of that discussion needs to be revenues.
Very frankly, Mr. Speaker, I believe, on their side of the aisle, they want to spend a lot of money. They want to spend it on defense. We increased defense by over 10, 12 percent this year.
Now, very frankly, what was being spent on defense was as a result of Republican budgets over the last number of years, so that it is hard for me to believe that they would vote for budgets and appropriation bills that they thought were undermining defense.
But, in any event, we increased that substantially. And, yes, we increased spending on education, on healthcare--opioids, in particular--other items on emergency relief. The leader and I visited Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Texas, Florida. They needed assistance, and we passed that as well. But, very frankly, we didn't pay for any of it.
We hear about spending. Whatever the spending level is, we ought to pay for it. That would be my position. And if we want to spend the money, we ought to pay for it.
Now, however, I hope these rescissions do not set a precedent whereby future negotiations will be put at great risk, because at least one party will not trust that the negotiations are real.
When Ryan-Murray was agreed to by Speaker Ryan and by Senator Murray, shortly after that agreement was reached as to what spending levels would be, some of my Republican colleagues came back and said: Oh, well, they are ceilings.
It is like my bargaining to buy a house for $100,000, and then I come back at the settlement table and say: Well, I am really going to pay $75,000. $100,000 was just a ceiling on what I was going to pay for that house.
That doesn't make any sense, and nobody would think it makes any sense.
So I will tell my friend, the majority leader, I hope that the rescissions are based upon the sort of example that he gave, and, therefore, it may receive some support. But if they are simply to reverse hard-bargained results, then I think that will put at risk any kind of bipartisan negotiations that might occur in the future.
Very frankly, the budget--and I am going to ask the gentleman about the budget now--is supposed to come down pretty soon. As a matter of fact, it is supposed to be reported out of the Budget Committee by now. It is supposed to be passed by the Congress by April 15 or 17, depending upon which date you use, but sometime this month.
Does the majority leader have any reason to believe that we are going to pass, over the next 2 weeks, a budget--and send it to the Senate-- that is balanced?
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Mr. HOYER. Did the majority leader hear me say that is a reasonable thing to do?
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Mr. HOYER. I have heard that argument, Mr. Speaker. I heard it in 1981. We passed a massive tax cut. The debt increased over the next 7 years 187 percent. That was Ronald Reagan's tax cut. And, frankly, Bob Dole helped raise some revenues to offset that, which is why it was only a 187 percent increase in the debt during the Ronald Reagan years.
I heard that argument in 2001 and 2003: We are going to grow the economy. We are going to have extraordinary growth, creation of jobs, and revenues that will come to the Federal Government as a result of cutting taxes.
And what happened? Six years later, we had the deepest recession we have had since Herbert Hoover. Nobody in this House is over 90 and, therefore, didn't experience the depth of that recession. The recession that we experienced in December of 2007, when you thought those tax cuts that the gentleman talked about would have grown the economy, just as he talked about, he has got a problem in that CBO says it doesn't grow the economy. In fact, it creates $14 trillion of new debt. That is what CBO says, not Steny Hoyer, not the Democrats. That is $14 trillion--with a T, Mr. Speaker--in new debt that our children and grandchildren will be confronted with.
So what do the Republicans do? They had to say, let's balance the budget. Now, balancing the budget means you pay for what you buy. Yes, I am for that.
Very frankly, if you buy an aircraft carrier, I think you can amortize that over 40 years. Why? Like a house, you will use it for 40 years and my grandchildren will get use of that aircraft carrier to defend themselves and our country.
As I am sure the majority leader knows, there are few Members of this Congress who have been any more consistently supportive of the Armed Forces than this Member. I supported much of Ronald Reagan's follow-on to what Jimmy Carter started, and that was building up our military strength so the country would be secure.
And I continue to be a strong supporter of the military. We need to keep America strong. The gentleman's party, of course, contrary to the almost unanimous--I think unanimous, but I will say almost unanimous-- desire that we repeal the sequester over the last 8 years, your party, I tell the majority leader, Mr. Speaker, wanted to keep the sequester, and did keep the sequester, and we could have done away with the sequester, except they crossed their fingers. They crossed their fingers and said: We will keep the sequester, but Speaker Ryan will make a deal with Senator Murray so that we don't have to live its effects. And we passed those Ryan-Murray deals. And there was not an attempt to reverse that course.
So the sequester argument, Mr. Speaker, is an argument of constraint imposed by the majority party; not by us. We had urged that the sequester be rescinded. And, in fact, we supported the Ryan-Murray agreement. As a matter of fact, I didn't support the first Ryan-Murray agreement. I didn't support it because I thought it was a facade, and it turned out to be, I think, pretty meaningless in terms of what the agreement was.
So we haven't grown the economy. As a matter of fact, we had the worst economy any of us have seen under the Bush fiscal policy supported by my Republican friends. I didn't support that.
CBO says this bill will not grow the economy, but this bill will create substantial debt. I asked the gentleman a question that I want to go back to. And that is: Does the gentleman expect us to have a budget this month?
Before I do that, let me say, the gentleman says--and it was a good strategy--that they passed 12 appropriations bills. They packaged them in two packages. They didn't consider them individually, but two packages. They sent them to the Senate, and they were partisan bills.
Mr. McConnell, the majority leader, did not bring them to the floor. Now, he may say he didn't bring them to the floor because the minority wouldn't agree with them, but he could have brought them to the floor. He didn't want to subject them to amendments and discussion.
Or, they would have had a vote and our people wouldn't have voted to bring them to the floor and he could have pointed to that vote.
So I ask my friend one more time: Do we expect to have a budget here in April when it is due or soon thereafter? And if so, will that budget be balanced? I yield to my friend.
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Mr. HOYER. I did.
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Mr. HOYER. I did.
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Mr. HOYER. Reclaiming my time. I said I had voted for balanced budget amendments in the past when I spoke on the floor, and I said that I rose not to oppose the constitutional amendment, but to deride it. It was such a politically patently dishonest effort to pretend that you are for a balanced budget. And guess who said that? Mr. Massie, a member of your caucus; Mr. Meadows, the chairman of your Freedom Caucus; and Senator Corker from Tennessee. They all said that, that it was not a real item, yet we spent all of yesterday working on a document that you knew, Republicans knew, everybody knew was not a real effort and would not pass.
We spent all day doing that. That is what I said. Yes, I have, in the `90s, supported a budget amendment which would restrain us from acting without paying for what we buy.
Your side of the aisle, in my opinion, does not like to pay for what you buy, but you want to buy things because you spend as much money in your budgets as we spend--maybe on different things.
But this side, I want to tell the majority leader, do not run out that canard--Mr. Speaker, I say to the majority leader--that Democrats do not support national security. We do, and the votes prove it.
You had 90 of your Members vote against the agreement. I voted against it as well. I voted against it because we did not reach an agreement, and I am going to get to that issue in just a second. The gentleman knows I feel very strongly about it. I talked to him about it, and it should have been in that bill, and it wasn't. That is why I voted ``no.'' But 90 of your Members voted against it.
Does the majority leader say to me that those 90 people--including when we established the level of spending, the chairman of your Armed Services Committee who voted ``no''--are you telling me they were not for protecting our military, protecting our men and women in the Armed Forces, protecting the training that we give to our men and women in the Armed Forces? Are you telling me those 90 Republicans weren't supporting that? Is that what you are saying? Yes or no? I yield to the gentleman.
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Mr. HOYER. Reclaiming my time. Mr. Leader, I am not sure. I want to understand. They upheld their word. Ninety people voted against the bill you are saying supported the military, 90 of your people voted against that. The majority of Democrats voted for it. Are you telling me those 90 Republicans who voted against it were against the military? That is my question to you.
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Mr. HOYER. Would the gentleman yield?
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Mr. HOYER. But the gentleman says that I shut down the government. Can you tell him that the Senate didn't adopt the budget? With all due respect, I don't vote in the Senate.
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, the Budget Act is not the problem. The problem is a lack of discipline, not the Budget Act. I said yesterday on the constitutional amendment, if you want to balance the budget, do it. Do it. Offer a balanced budget.
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Mr. HOYER. You had that opportunity to do it. You won't do it. I guarantee you that you won't do it. You can say whatever you want.
Mr. Speaker, they won't do it. They haven't done it. There will not be a balanced budget on this floor from either side because we have dug such a deep hole. To balance the budget tomorrow or 2 years from now would decimate Social Security and Medicare. Now, maybe that is what is in store. Maybe that is what is contemplated.
But when I hear, Mr. Speaker, the majority leader talking about the Budget Act, first of all, the American public does not know what the Budget Act is. They do know who we are, and they sent us here to be responsible and have discipline and have the courage of our convictions.
The reason I say pay for it is because the constraint we have abandoned, and we have pretended that we could cut taxes and magically things would be paid for. They have not been, and what we buy today we are expecting our children to pay for it tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
I suggest that is an intellectually bankrupt policy, and it is also an immoral policy. And to pretend that somehow we can fix that either by an amendment--which, by the way, could be waived--or by amending the Budget Act--is the Budget Act perfect? Could it be perfected? I am sure it could be. But that is not the problem.
The problem is the pretense that somehow we are going to grow ourselves magically without discipline and without paying for what we buy, whether that is defense or nondefense.
Now, Mr. Speaker, we need to get on to some other issues, and I want to explain to the majority leader why I didn't vote for the bill.
The President of the United States did something I think was bad judgment and put millions of people at risk. It is called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Eighty-six percent of the American people think that we ought to protect those children who came here not of their own volition but as children.
The majority leader, myself, the minority leader, and the Speaker of the House met with leaders of the Hispanic community, leaders of the African-American community, and leaders of the Asian Pacific Islander community. When I say leaders, the three chairs of those caucuses. We talked in late September about a week and a half after the President had withdrawn DACA protections and said we need to solve this.
Now, Mr. Speaker, let me quote the Speaker of the House, Mr. Ryan: My commitment to working together on an immigration measure that we can make law is a sincere commitment.
Let me repeat: My commitment to working together on an immigration measure that we can make law is a sincere commitment. We will solve this DACA problem, said the Speaker, once we get this budget agreement done.
This was not the omnibus. This was the precursor to the omnibus which set the level of spending.
He said: We will solve this DACA problem, and we will get this done no matter how long it takes us to stay here. We will focus on bringing the debate to this floor and finding a solution.
I voted ``no'' on the omnibus because they did not follow through on that commitment, so everybody understands. However, I am the whip. I count votes, and I certainly think the majority leader has had enough evidence and has enough respect for my ability that if we had worked to defeat that bill, we would have defeated it with the 90 Republicans who voted ``no'' on the bill the Republicans brought to the floor, which was an agreed.
But that bill needed to pass. But, yes, I voted ``no'' because from September--and the Speaker told me: Oh, March 5 is coming, we have got time to fix it. We have got time to take care of these 700, 800,000 young people that 86 percent of the American people think ought not to be sent to a country that is not their home, they don't know, and they have not been there for the overwhelming majority of their lives.
So, yes, I voted ``no'' because, on their behalf, I was concerned that that commitment that the Speaker enunciated in February, approximately a month before DACA was to terminate, had not been met.
It is now a month after March 5, Mr. Speaker, and that commitment has not been met to this day, notwithstanding the fact that Speaker Ryan urged the President not to do what he did, and the President turned around and said: Fix it by legislation. And the Speaker committed in that meeting to which I referred just weeks after the President acted as saying: We will get that done.
Now, Mr. Speaker, there is a rule that has been filed by a Republican Member of this House. It now has, I think, 44 Republicans on it. If it doesn't have yet, it will have 190-plus Democrats on it, which will mean that 230 Members of this House will have signed on to a document that says: Let's fix DACA now.
Yes, I voted ``no.'' I voted ``no'' in protest and in dismay that we had not addressed this issue. I hope I have explained to the majority leader why I voted ``no'' but at the same time why a majority of my party, including the leader of my party, Ms. Pelosi, voted ``aye.'' They voted ``aye'' because they knew we had made an agreement. They knew it was an agreement reached by both sides. They didn't like everything in it any more than Republicans liked everything in it, but it was an agreement, and so it passed handily.
I will tell my friend I hope he does not doubt--perhaps he does--that that would have happened without a perception and belief on this side that we had an agreement and it ought to pass, and it did pass with 90 Republicans voting ``no'' and the overwhelming majority of my party voting ``yes.''
I hope the leader will tell me, Mr. Speaker, whether or not the commitment that was made in September, the commitment that was articulated by the Speaker of the House in February when he was urging us and his own Members to support the legislation which sets the level of spending on which the omnibus was based, I hope he can assure me that, before the end of this month, that we will have the opportunity to do what we think is extraordinarily fair to do.
Mr. Goodlatte of the Judiciary has a bill. I don't like the bill, but it is a bill that came out of the majority committee. There is another bill called the Dreamer bill. That is a bipartisan bill sponsored by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Florida, and Lucille Roybal- Allard, a Democrat from California. Bring that bill to the floor.
Then there is a third bill, Mr. Speaker, sponsored by Mr. Hurd from Texas, a Republican, and Mr. Aguilar, a Democrat from California, that I believe has the support of over 218 Members of this House. I have asked the majority leader and we have asked the Speaker: Bring those three bills to the floor. Bring those three bills to the floor and let the House work its will.
The Speaker is leaving, but the Speaker has on numerous occasions said: We will not duck the tough issues. That is a direct quote, Mr. Speaker. We will take them head-on. We should not hide our disagreements. We should embrace them. We have nothing to fear from honest disagreements honestly stated.
Bring those three bills to the floor, Mr. Speaker, I implore the majority leader. Let the House work its will. Face the tough issues.
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, will the majority leader tell me when I voted to shut down the government? Does he have a cite there?
I yield to my friend.
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, the majority leader and I serve in a coequal branch of government. We don't serve at the pleasure of the President, nor should we go hand in hand to the President of the United States and say: Can we do this?
The majority leader, of course, did not answer my question. He wants to continue to talk about who voted for or against the omnibus as opposed to responding to are we going to have a balanced budget on the floor. We can have amendments on the floor; that sounds good. We can articulate that we are going to grow ourselves out. But doing it, just do it.
Yes, temporarily, the courts have said the President didn't do the right thing in the right way, so there has been a stay. And the gentleman is correct that the DACA students are not at risk as of March 5. I say ``students.'' Some of them are students; some are not.
Words do, in fact, mean something. The leader says that all he wants is border security. Well, border security, and he wants to restrict the ability to unify moms and dads and their children in the United States of America.
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Mr. HOYER. I yield to the gentleman from California.
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, is the gentleman saying that, when we had discussions in your office and you wanted to eliminate the option to sponsor mothers and fathers by their children, was not that not part of the offer that you discussed in your office, Mr. Leader?
I yield to the gentleman from California.
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Mr. HOYER. I'll be glad to hear the explanation.
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Mr. HOYER. Currently.
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Mr. HOYER. Currently.
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, we go round and round on that.
Obviously, when we talked about family reunification, you had an offer that you said you were making on behalf of the President that clearly undermined the ability to sponsor, by some, their mothers and fathers. We can go round and round on that. That was my perception of it. We will get the record, and I think that is pretty accurate, Mr. Leader.
Mr. Speaker, the answer to the question, though, has not come, and that is: Will the majority leader bring to the floor three bills and let them be voted on by this House and express the will of the American people?
One of those bills is a Republican bill. One is probably perceived by the Republicans as a Democratic bill, although Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is a cosponsor of that bill. And one, clearly, is a bipartisan bill, negotiated by Mr. Hurd, a Republican from Texas, and Mr. Aguilar, a Democrat from California, that has at least 44 Republicans who have signed on to a rule to bring that particular bill to the floor. All 193 Democrats will be for that bill, to bring it to the floor, which is over 230 Members of this House.
I am asking the leader: Will he bring those three bills to the floor? Because what the President said--and the leader says words matter. What the President said on TV for all of America to see: We will solve the DACA issue. You send me a bill, and I will sign it.
That is what he said, Mr. Speaker. But what happened? The Senate had four bills. Unlike the House, Mr. McConnell brought those four bills to the floor so the Senate could work its will. And there were some 25 Senators, Republicans and Democrats, had come together and put a commonsense bill on the floor, contrary to what the President of the United States said in that meeting on television--not my words. Just go back to the video. Replay it: I will sign a bill.
And then he said, beating--he didn't beat his chest literally: I will take the heat.
What did he do when the commonsense bill came to the floor? He said: I will veto it if it is sent down here.
It had $25 billion in authorization for the President's wall and border security, and he said: I will veto it.
As a result, it only got 54 votes. It needed 60 votes. Had he not said he would veto it, it would have passed. I am absolutely convinced of that.
That was four bills. Why, Mr. Speaker? This is the people's House. The Speaker said: We will take the tough issues head-on. We will not shrink from that responsibility.
All we are asking is to bring those bills to the floor.
Recisions, we can argue about the recisions. And when they come down here substantively, the leader mentions frequently about money that is not going to be spent anyway. None of us are going to oppose that if that is, in fact, what it does. That is an obfuscation of the issue that we are talking about.
We had an agreement. We think that agreement upset a lot of the majority leader's party, and that is why this is happening. They are going to try to correct that political problem they have, just like the balanced budget amendment is trying to correct a political problem.
So I would hope, Mr. Speaker, that the leader would assure me at some point in time that they will do what they said they will do from September to now: address solving the DACA issue. And then what the President said, Mr. Speaker, was then we will go to comprehensive immigration reform.
We ought to do that. The Senate passed a bill some 5 years ago. We asked and have asked over the last 5 years: Bring that bill to the floor.
Now, that bill doesn't exist now because, in the Congress in which it was sent to us, it wasn't brought to the floor. The Republicans were in charge, and they didn't bring it to the floor. We asked for it over and over and over again so we could solve what everybody knows is a broken immigration system.
But, at least in the ambit of these three bills, there is a solution to one small part of that that the President, on national TV, said he wanted to solve and would sign the bill--right up until the time he said he would veto the bill.
The President is a very flexible individual, as we have all seen. I hope he would sign any one of these bills.
And I think the Senate would pass the Aguilar-Hurd bill. If it were brought to the floor, I am convinced it would pass. I think it would pass the Senate, and I would hope the President would sign it and solve a problem that the President of the United States, when he rescinded the protections, asked us to legislate on and send him a bill. I would hope he would do that. I hope the majority leader would do that.
I yield to my friend.
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I will look at those references.
I did vote to shut down, certainly, I think in--I am not sure of the January date. When we had the majority, won that vote, the majority leader came back to the floor within a few hours. We had a vote. We voted to open up the government. Almost every Democrat voted for that. The government opened, and then we got a deal.
So the issue that I asked the majority leader about he still has not responded to, notwithstanding our meeting in September, notwithstanding the representations made by the President of the United States, notwithstanding the fact that the court has said what was done was done incorrectly, and notwithstanding the President's request to solve this issue and send him a bill and he would sign it and take the heat for it.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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