Bipartisan Congressional Reform Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I thank Chairman Enzi. I am delighted to join Senator Enzi on the floor today to talk about our bill. An enormous amount of work has gone into preparing for it, including, I want to say, more than a dozen hearings that Chairman Enzi led in the Budget Committee to build the factual predicate for the work we were doing.

I will, as the Chairman has mentioned, also drop a word of appreciation to Chairman Womack and Chairman Lowey, who ran the Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform, which gave us a chance to work through some more of these issues.

The fundamental problem we are trying to address is that, in the Senate, no committee actually looks at the deficit, the debt, and the borrowing in any kind of a comprehensive way. In theory, the Budget Committee is supposed to, but in practice, the Budget Committee has become two things: one, a vehicle for the majority to drive a political budget limited to appropriated spending through, with no bipartisan compromise. We have seen over and over how that has ended up. It has never been of any use. Even if you get it done, you break through the budget by getting to 60 votes, and we do most things around here by getting to 60 votes. It is a fence that is basically a line painted on the ground. It is a fence with no fence to it.

Moreover, we do reconciliation. That is usually a way to bust around the budget. Both parties have used it. The Republicans have used it for the so-called tax reform. We used it for one segment of the Affordable Care Act. That is what the Budget Committee is boiled down to--a partisan proposal on appropriations that means nothing and a vehicle for getting around the 60-vote filibuster on a regular basis through reconciliation. That is it. There is no serious look that is taken at the debt or at the deficit.

What does this bill do? It does some things for which there is very broad agreement. First of all, it was pretty much unanimous that the way you look at debt is in terms of a debt-to-GDP ratio, and this takes us down that path. Second, you have to do the arithmetic correct. You don't get to a proper debt-to-GDP ratio unless you look at the things that add up to the deficit, which are appropriated spending, healthcare spending, revenues, and tax spending.

For one quick word on tax spending, for 2018 the latest report I saw was that we spent $1.4 trillion going out the back door of the Tax Code. That is more than we spend on Social Security. That is more than we spend on Medicare and Medicaid combined. That is more than defense and nondefense discretionary spending combined. You can't not look at tax spending and still have your math right. We address those.

We provide a reasonable timeframe to get to a debt-to-GDP target and some warnings about whether or not you are on that glide slope. There was pretty much unanimous consent agreement among all of our witnesses in the committee and in the select committee that that was the logical way to address debt and deficit.

There are also some sidebar things that are important that we get rid of here, such as, we move to biennial budgeting, which I think has broad bipartisan support. We deal with what I call ``the bear trap in the bedroom''--the debt ceiling--which is a very dangerous thing if you should ever step on it and trigger it. To disarm that bear trap is very valuable to our efforts, and we do that.

Vote-arama is one of the most undistinguished, useless, humiliating, and embarrassing spectacles that the Senate presents. We solved, I believe, vote-arama.

So that is a pretty good package of good, useful reforms to get going in the right direction.

There is a very significant concern, mostly on my side of the aisle, about the special reconciliation process. In this bill you alternate between regular reconciliation and a special reconciliation process, and then, in the next biennial cycle, back to regular reconciliation and then special reconciliation. There is concern that the special reconciliation process might be used to jam things we don't like through--things like cuts to Medicare, things like very one-sided spending cuts that don't address the problem of tax spending.

We need to work to solve that. I pledge to Chairman Enzi that I will put my best efforts to try to come up with a way where we can get through that problem and move on to passing this bill, which I think will be very significant and very valuable once we iron out what I think is probably, actually, the last real gasp that we have in terms of objection to it.

I will also add that the bipartisan pathway that we have been working on for when the two parties can come together and agree to those things is in there. If we really want to do this in a bipartisan pathway, that is in this bill. I appreciate very much that Chairman Enzi included that in the bill. That provision passed the bicameral select committee unanimously--Republicans, Democrats, House Members, Senators, unanimously. That is a pretty good base to work off of.

I will close by quoting a phrase that I have heard usually from business folks from time to time. That is that in business, ``debt doesn't matter, until it does.'' But then it is the only thing that matters. At the moment, with interest rates where they are and with the world situation the way it is, one can make the case that debt doesn't matter. But when the day comes that it does matter, when interest rates pop up and the cost of servicing our debt begins to squeeze out other priorities, it gets very hard to go back and try to solve that problem then.

This is the kind of problem you have to head off in advance. So to the extent we can solve in a sensible way dealing with our debt and deficit during the calm period when debt doesn't matter, we will position ourselves to avoid the calamity that can come when it is the only thing that matters.

I pledge to use my best efforts to try to bring my side into agreement on this bill and to try to find a measure that solves our concern about what I think is really the only point of significant disagreement in this bill, which is what is behind the special reconciliation process, what mischief that might be got up to. I think if we can defang this, we can move forward.

Again, much appreciation to Chairman Enzi for his extraordinary leadership in the budget committee on this subject. I am determined to try to get this done in this Congress while he is with us to see it through.

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