Endless Frontier Act-- continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCOTT of Florida. Mr. President.

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Mr. SCOTT of Florida. Mr. President, I join my colleagues today to make a simple request: Let the people see the bill.

Too often, this body acts without due time given to hear from all of the ones we represent: the American people. That has absolutely been the case this year as Congress has rushed through massive, 1,000- or 2,000-plus-page bills, spending billions or trillions of tax dollars without valuable input.

Now you ask us to vote on a massive bill compiled just this evening. That is wrong, and the American public know it is wrong. We haven't had the time to read this. No one has, in fact. This entire bill as it sits here before us has only been under consideration for a little over 2 weeks, with thousands of pages, and it has been amended numerous times, including many times today. It spends hundreds of billions of tax dollars.

As my colleagues know well, I am as vocal an opponent of Communist China as anyone. America must take decisive action to protect our interests and combat the threats posed by China's Communist regime. If the purpose of this legislation is to address that urgent issue, it should do that with input and feedback from the public.

We should table this vote, let the Members return to our States, hear from constituents, and then move forward in a timely manner with the legislation after we have heard from our constituents. This is a simple and reasonable request. Therefore, I ask the Senator to modify her request to delay further consideration of S. 1260 until the week of June 7.

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Mr. SCOTT of Florida. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleagues for their concerns about this bill.

You know, I have been up here a little over 2 years. I originally ran for office because I had the same concerns about where the State of Florida was going as I have concerns about where our Federal Government is going.

I ran for Governor in 2010, and in the 4 years ending at the end of 2010, the State of Florida had lost 832,000 jobs. Home prices dropped in half. We had I think close to a million people on unemployment, and we had I think a little over 1.1 million homes in foreclosure.

If you looked at all the articles, they said that opportunity for the Sunshine State was over. And I didn't believe it. I believe that if you run government in a responsible manner, you have unbelievable opportunities for individuals. The reason I believe this is, it is the life that I have had the opportunity to live in this country.

I grew up in the--I was born in the great State of Illinois. We lived in public housing. I had a single mom, and she told me that I could be anything. She said: If you will study hard, if you will go to church all the time, if you are an Eagle Scout and you go figure out how to work, there is no limitation. You can build a company. You can do anything you want.

I actually believed her, and I had the opportunity to do that. I built companies, employed a lot of people, and had a lot of opportunity.

So I ran for Governor in 2010 with the belief that you could turn around the State of Florida. At the time, I believe there was--you know, the way the country and the State of Florida were going, it was not a great place for families like mine growing up. So I ran a campaign of 7 steps to 700,000 jobs over 7 years. You know, all the economists said, well, we couldn't get 700,000 jobs in 7 years. It was not doable. Most of them said we couldn't even get single-digit unemployment in 7 or 8 years. People wouldn't move to the State.

So I shocked everybody, and I won a primary and I won a general election, and I set about to do exactly what I said we could do.

We reduced taxes. Every year, we watched how we spent the money. We allocated our dollars where we could get more jobs. We added 1.7 million jobs--not 700,000 jobs; we added 1.7 million jobs. When we did that, what happened was, our revenues grew, and we were able to have record funding for education, for the environment, and for transportation. We ended up becoming No. 1 in higher education; I guess generally about the top five in K-12 education; 47-year low in our crime rate; and record funding for things like the Everglades.

So I believed you could do the same thing up here, and that is why I came up here. I came up here with the belief that if you start looking at how you spend the money--and the way we did it in Florida was, we had--there are about 4,000 lines to the budget, and we went through every line in the budget every year, and we said: Do we get a return? What do we get for that? If we didn't get a return, then we didn't do it the next year. So my goal is to do the exact same thing up here.

Now let's look at where our country is right now. We have almost $30 trillion of debt. We are running multitrillion-dollar deficits. That is not sustainable.

And, by the way, who are we going to hurt long term? It is not going to be the rich. It is going to be the poor. It is going to be the people on fixed income. You can look at the numbers.

Look at inflation numbers right now. Inflation is caused by reckless spending. That is what it is caused by. The spending we have done this year is unbelievable--$1.9 trillion. It was supposedly for COVID, but it has very little to do with COVID--less than 10 percent--and 1 percent for vaccines.

Let's look at what has happened to inflation. In the 12 months that ended in April, the Consumer Price Index was up 4.2 percent. It is pretty surprising that we are up over 6 percent. Milk in 12 months, up over 5 percent; bread over 7 percent, and gas over 51 percent.

Now, if you have a lot of money, that is not going to change your life. But if you are struggling for food or you are struggling to put food on the table, a 5-percent or 7-percent increase has a pretty big impact. When you see that when the cost to fill up your gas tank to go to work dramatically increases, it has a pretty big impact. All this is caused by government spending--reckless government spending--excessive government spending.

You can't run trillion-dollar deficits. You can't have a Federal Reserve that continues to buy treasuries every month without ending up with inflation. And that is exactly where we are.

The only way out of this is to start watching how we spend our money. In this bill, there might be some good things in this bill, but we are spending money recklessly.

So, I have a real concern. Why are we rushing through this? Why don't we take the time--take the time so all Americans have a chance to read it, know what is in it, tell us what they like, what they don't like? Why rush through it, where nobody in this Chamber knows everything that is in this bill? It is impossible. It has gone way too fast with all these amendments. There is no way this could even happen.

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