Legislative Program

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the majority leader, for the purpose of inquiring about next week's schedule.

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for giving that update on the schedule.

I know that we have been in talks on a budget caps agreement. I met with the Vice President earlier this morning, talking through some of the things that may be included.

Obviously, there is no final agreement. We would hope that those talks go on, and we, hopefully, reach an agreement where we can give real certainty, especially to our Department of Defense, that we will look at what sequestration would do to defense. We have been able to rebuild our defense over the last 2 years. We would like to see that progress continue.

A lot of other issues are at stake there, and we encourage those talks to move forward. We will be ready to move if there is an agreement reached between all the parties, including the White House.

I did not hear mention of anything regarding the BDS legislation. We have heard that there might be some movement on standing up against the BDS movement.

I know that when we looked at a number of bills, there are some resolutions that are out there, some good, some bad. As we know, there is time for talk, and then, there is time for action. The resolutions are only talk.

The legislation, H.R. 336 by Mr. McCaul, is the only bill out there. S. 1 moved through the Senate with a large, overwhelming bipartisan vote. It is similar legislation that would actually have teeth, not just words, which are important, but words followed up with action, real teeth to help not only this country but our States that are also standing up against the BDS movement, to give them some muscle, some ability to stand up to the BDS movement.

Madam Speaker, I would ask the gentleman, is there any indication that there might be movement on H.R. 336, to follow up the words with real action against the BDS movement?

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, specifically, if I could ask my friend, H.R. 336 was not one of those bills that was marked up. The only bills that were marked up were resolutions.

Again, while some of those resolutions might have some good language in them, there are no actual teeth. There is no policy. There is no change in law to give us more tools as a country to stand up to the BDS movement, to defend our friend Israel.

As we know, the BDS movement really is rooted in anti-Semitism to undermine Israel's economy, which none of us should want to see. I know my friend doesn't want to see Israel's economy undermined, but there is a movement to do that. If we are going to truly stand up against it, words are not enough. We need action.

H.R. 336, again, reflects similar legislation that passed the Senate with an overwhelming vote, Republicans and Democrats coming together to give real tools to stand up to this movement and support our friend Israel.

Madam Speaker, I would inquire of the gentleman, would that bill be considered? It was not part of the package of bills that were brought up in committee this week. I yield to the gentleman.

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I would encourage that we go back and look. This committee can do better. If we are going to stand up against this movement and support our friend Israel against this attempt to undermine their economy, we need real tools.

H.R. 336 is the only instrument out there. It is similar to S. 1. We would love to see S. 1 passed. There have been questions about whether or not it has an origination problem, so that is why H.R. 336 was filed.

But, again, H.R. 336 has the same language that passed with 77 votes in the Senate, overwhelmingly, Republicans and Democrats coming together. I would encourage us to follow that lead of bipartisanship, standing with Israel.

I am disappointed that it is not included in the package. It moved out of committee. I would hope we would go back and consider bringing that bill to the floor.

Again, words are nice, but words without action don't give us the tools we need to stand with our friend Israel against this undermining attempt known as BDS.

I yield to the gentleman from Maryland.

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Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, clearly, if there are issues that need to be worked out, differences that might exist between the chairman and the lead Republican on the committee, that work needs to be done. There have been no indications given to us of some counteroffer, some different way to do it, some better way to do it, than what is in H.R. 336.

But again, the language in H.R. 336 is the same language that was in S. 1, which passed the Senate with a 77-23 vote. It doesn't mean that the Senate has the best idea, but it shows there was a way that Republicans and Democrats could come together to stand with Israel against this movement.

If there is a better way to do it, we would be more than happy to work through those better ideas. None of those better ideas have been presented to us. They just shut down that bill. They shut down the ability to have a bill come to the floor to actually put teeth in law to give us more tools.

I would urge that if there is a better alternative, that the chairman of the committee or the leadership on your side has, please present that and let's negotiate it, but none of that has been presented up until now.

So, I would just encourage us to do better as we try to give more support to our friend Israel against this growing movement.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask about the agenda as we have seen it so far in the decorum. The agenda we have seen this week alone, multiple pieces of legislation--whether it is targeted at the President, we had a resolution on the President's tweet. There was a resolution filed to impeach the President of the United States. There was a resolution to hold Trump officials in contempt of Congress with no basis for that contempt. There were multiple resolutions just this week to target and harass different policies of the administration-- there is so much legislation we ought to be on this floor debating to do things that would actually help real families.

There is a crisis at our border, and there has been no bipartisan legislation. The bills that are going to be coming to the floor next week, that the gentleman mentioned, dealing with homeland security are known by many in the homeland security field as the open borders bill, not a bipartisan approach to solving our problem at the border. We need a secure border. We need to solve the crisis at the border.

Fix our broken asylum laws. We want to encourage asylum to work. There ought to be a way to apply for asylum. But, in all honesty, if somebody goes through other countries and turns down asylum in those countries and comes here and just reads a script, because they know there is a loophole in our law, we ought to work together to fix those broken loopholes and the things that are causing an overwhelming crisis at our border. That has not been done.

Bills to lower drug prices. We had a bipartisan agreement in the Committee on Energy and Commerce, to lower drug prices, and yet that was abandoned when that bill came to the floor and sent in a way that became a partisan bill. These shouldn't be partisan issues.

I would hope that we would move away from the harassment agenda and get back to an agenda that is focused on Republicans and Democrats working together, not in a partisan way to say, hey, we passed some bill out of the House, that everybody knows is going nowhere because it was a partisan approach.

Look at what the Senate has done to move bipartisan bills through their Chamber. We can do the same. We can do better than the Senate, but we are not.

When the Speaker breaks the House rules, when you see this break down, it just raises the ire because there is not that attempt to work in a bipartisan way to solve these problems. And there are a lot of good ideas that are bipartisan to solve these problems. The disappointment is that we don't see those coming to the House floor.

The bills that deal with real policy coming to the House floor are only brought, by and large, from a partisan perspective, and the bipartisan approaches are being discarded.

BDS is one clear example where there is a way to solve the problem, where Republicans and Democrats came together. Even from the gentleman's acknowledgement, there is no indication that it is going to move out of committee any time soon. It ought to be out of committee and it ought to be on the House floor, so that we can not only debate it, but pass it, and get a bill to the President's desk to allow us to stand up more against the BDS movement in support of Israel.

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, there is clearly a lot to cover there. Let's start with the big debate, and that is what the gentleman alluded to, and that is government control versus freedom, because that is going to be the debate over the next year where there is already a Presidential primary debate process going on.

When you see every candidate for President on one side saying that they want to give free healthcare benefits to people who are here illegally, yet many of them embrace a plan that would literally end private insurance for families that enjoy the healthcare plans they have in the private marketplace, the Medicare for All proposal, there are so many different areas where we see this debate about government control versus freedom.

And, yes, to the gentleman, there are some on his side who refer to themselves as socialist Democrats. And so if they want to call themselves that, then at least own the things that go with socialism and recognize the damage that is done by socialism.

To think that any one party has some kind of ownership of capitalism in the free market system, I would be more than happy to see us engage in a debate about capitalism, because there are some on the other side that attack it on a regular basis.

But if you look at how Republican policies have gotten us to where we are with the most booming economy in the world, our economy is the envy of the world. People's wages are rising. Low-income people, in fact, are benefiting the most. And we are seeing the increase in the rebuilding of our middle class that was evaporating.

For 8 years in a row under the previous administration, every single quarter, our economy had less than 2 percent growth. The economy wasn't even that bad during the Great Depression that the gentleman cited.

So when we came in with the Republican majority and the Republican President, we were able to pass actual policies like the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, like reversing so many of the radical regulations that we saw that had nothing to do with health and safety but had to do with carrying out an agenda to shut down industries in this country like the fossil fuel industry and so many others that are providing not only jobs, lower carbon emission, dominance in the world, helping our friends around the world, and lowering energy prices for families in America.

Those policies have actually been increasing wages for lower income people, not government-controlled prices as passed today where the government is going to try to come in and set artificial rates for what people ought to make as opposed to letting this great market that is working incredibly well raise wages for families.

We have seen the studies. We have seen the University of Washington study, which was cited today, where we can look at real examples of communities that have had artificially high minimum wages, like Seattle, where they put in place a $15 minimum wage. It sounds great. The government is going to set everybody's rates and tell everybody how much they are going to make, and what it resulted in is over 5 million hours lost for workers.

In fact, the lower income families in Seattle were hurt the most by that policy by a margin of 3 to 1. It damages low-income families.

Again, it might sound good that the government is going to tell everyone what they can make, but most of us who believe in the free market system reject that idea that we should set policies that are crushing jobs in America.

There is a bar in New York that was closed because of the increase in the minimum wage that one of our colleagues used to work at. It was closed because of an artificially set price, minimum wage, in the city of New York.

So when you look at jobs that are fleeing some communities and going to other communities, that ought to tell you how those policies are working.

But we have a growing economy, not because we had a lot of government control out of Washington, but, in fact, because we allowed freedom. We allowed people to keep more of what they earned. We allowed people to make their own choices. And it is a successful formula. We want to see more of it.

Now, if we can get into the issue of the harassment agenda, the subpoenas, the finding people in contempt, let's talk about Secretary Ross and the work that was done to comply with the committee's request.

If you look, and this is reading from a document sent by Secretary Ross and Attorney General Barr to the committee, it says:

The Department's engagement with the committee is a good faith accommodation process, rooted in the separation of powers. As part of that process, both Departments have made multiple witnesses available for voluntary, transcribed interviews and have produced more than 30,000 pages of documents to the committee.

Before the committee abruptly and prematurely terminated the accommodation process last month, the Department of Justice intended to provide a significant number of additional documents identified as responsive to the committee's subpoena.

They go on to talk about how they were complying with the committee, producing over 30,000 pages of documents just related to the Census. And then the committee abruptly decides they just want to hold him in contempt because there were some documents they wanted that the Attorney General would have actually broken the law if he turned them over.

So you saw a Department complying and going overboard to ensure that the separation of powers and the oversight that existed would continue.

Of course, when we were in the majority and the previous administration of the other party was there, we had a lot of oversight hearings, exercising our Article I powers as we all should, but we didn't go week after week.

Just this week alone, there was a resolution condemning the President's tweets, an impeachment resolution, a resolution to hold two Cabinet Secretaries in contempt, and three resolutions of disapproval on policy. That was just this week.

The American people don't want to see us fighting over power. They want to see us fighting for their needs, the needs of hardworking families.

Again, I identified so many things.

Just to finish up on the resolution that was discussed earlier, the gentleman said we need to respond to things that violate this country's principles.

First of all, we reject racism wholeheartedly. We reject hate. We reject anti-Semitism.

There have been comments made by Members of the gentleman's party that have not been addressed on this floor that violate those principles.

We can all bring resolutions broadly stating things, but if the intention is to identify people by name, it is, to us, rather conspicuous that, when people of the other party say those things, they are not addressed on this floor by name. And so we know that happened.

Again, the way that the Speaker violated the rules of the House, and then a vote was brought to this floor to basically say that those rules don't apply to the Speaker.

If the rules don't apply to the Speaker, then who do they apply to? They ought to apply to all of us equally.

If any of us break the rules of the House and are called out on it and are found by the Chair to be in violation of the rules, then we ought to accept that. We ought not have the vote on the House floor to say, well, the rules apply to some people, but not everybody.

If the rules are in place, they ought to be in place to be enforced equally, not that some in power have an exemption and have a free pass to break those rules.

So if we are going to talk about what we reject, let's be fair and equal about it.

I yield to the gentleman from Maryland.

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Mr. SCALISE. If I could interject, we share that. That is not an us versus them issue. We agree with those. Obviously, there are some that we disagree with. The ones that the gentleman mentioned are things that we agree with.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.

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Mr. SCALISE. Clearly, Madam Speaker, if we talk about what makes this country great, it is the freedoms and the economic success that we have seen for families, businesses, and everybody. It is the reason people come here from all around the world. What we have done to create this great free market system has unleashed potential for anybody to come here and be anything they want to be.

I have been proud to help pass policies that have actually increased wages for families not through government price controls but through economic growth and through giving people more of their money back instead of their having to come to Washington to get an amount or come to a union boss to get the amount that they can earn. They can actually go do it on their own.

It is playing out in reality, not in theory, but in reality, where we are seeing the lowest-income workers benefiting the most from our policies of cutting taxes, not by telling people how much they can make but by letting them go out and make even more on their own.

They are doing it. It is the lower-income people who are benefiting the most from those policies. We ought to encourage more of that.

The unemployment rate amongst African Americans and Hispanics is at the lowest rate in our country's history not through government controls but by cutting taxes and letting them have more of their money, by seeing businesses grow, and by hiring more people.

We are seeing more job openings today than there are people looking for work. That is what is so exciting.

We see that women-owned businesses are up 20 percent over the last few years because of these conservative policies that I have helped pass.

Yes, when I support right-to-work laws, if a person wants to go work for a company that happens to be in a union-based industry or a union- based State, and they say they don't want dues forced out of their paychecks, to give dues to somebody who believes in things that they don't agree with, they shouldn't be forced to do that. In many places, they are.

I want more individual freedom. I want more ability for people to go out and live that American Dream, to start up their own business in their garage and then one day maybe become a billionaire because there was that opportunity provided to them, not our telling them how much they can make, but our allowing them, in a safe way, the ability to go be the best they can be.

I will use an example because I know the gentleman and I share the belief that people need to be safe in the workplace, and we need to do all we can to ensure that. Look at deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, which is based out of parts of my district. Port Fourchon in Louisiana is the hub of all that deepwater drilling that we saw.

There was the horrible tragedy, the Deepwater Horizon. People died, and the environment was polluted. That was done not because there weren't enough laws in place but because a company broke the laws. A company went around those safety standards that we put in place.

We went and hammered them. We fined them. I passed a bill out of this House in a very bipartisan way called the RESTORE Act that ensured that they pay billions of dollars back to fix the damage that they had done and to hold that company accountable for what they had done. Its purpose was not to shut the whole industry down, because every other company that was out there had done things the right way.

What we saw from the previous administration was a rule that came out called the Well Control Rule that wasn't rooted in safety. After industry did an even better job to put well containment in place so that, if something like that ever happened again, they could quickly move to stop it, instead of government working to help expedite that process, government sat back and waited until industry came up with a better way to solve that problem on their own. Then, it came up with a rule that actually would have undermined the new safety standards they put in place. It would have made it difficult because Washington would have been able to tell them how to manage a well in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico instead of understanding that pressure changes instantly and that they have to be able to respond to it.

Government was setting a standard that would have undermined safety. Luckily, we reversed that Obama-era rule that would have made things less safe.

Let's not think that every regulation is about increasing safety. We ought to stand together to support safety standards and strengthen them where we can. There may be rules and regulations that undermine safety because some people just don't want drilling for oil, and some people support the Green New Deal kind of approaches that I and many don't. But don't try to undermine safety just to shut an industry down because people don't believe in it.

After September 11, our government came together in many ways, politically and policy-wise, to address what had happened. We didn't shut down the entire airline industry. We made safety standards at airports better so that people who get on a plane feel more comfortable that somebody doesn't have box cutters, guns, or knives that can undermine the safety of those people and of our country. Then, we got planes back up and running very quickly.

Safety standards are something we both share. But when government gets in the way just because they don't agree with what somebody is doing, that is a different story. That is the kind of government control versus freedom battle that we are seeing play out and will continue seeing play out, I am sure, over the next year and a half between now and next November.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman's comments. I respect our ability to have these disagreements but, again, to disagree in a civil way where we can at least talk about the policy and keep it focused that way and, hopefully, one day address those areas of concern that we both share and that we can both solve working together.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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