Legislative Program
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I rise to inquire of the majority leader the schedule for next week.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.
As it relates to the reconciliation bill that the Budget Committee will be taking up tomorrow, the initial estimates on that bill are that it would, roughly, add up to be about $3.5 trillion in new taxes and spending.
There are now estimates that that number will mushroom to well over $4.2, $4.3 trillion or higher, but we still don't have a CBO score on the lion's share of that legislation. The word we are getting from CBO, it may be weeks or months that we would get that score.
Does the gentleman know what the timeline is for getting an actual estimate from CBO on what the cost of that legislation is and will be, come tomorrow, when the Budget Committee takes it up?
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.
Then last week, I think we had about a dozen committees in Congress that took up different parts of that bill. Unfortunately, it seems that the cost keeps going up.
Could we get an assurance that before the bill actually comes to the floor for a vote before this House, we would get a CBO score to know how many trillions of dollars in new taxes and in new spending would be included and voted on before the House?
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. And, obviously, paid for would include new taxes--
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE.--including things like that are in this bill. There is a tax on natural gas, which every family in America that uses natural gas to heat their homes in winter or cool their homes in summer would have to pay.
I know that President Biden had committed that nobody making under $400,000 would pay any new amount in taxes. Clearly, that provision of the bill would violate President Biden's pledge.
I am not sure if the gentleman anticipates new taxes like that being removed from the bill so that the President's pledge would not be violated.
If you have any insight on that, I would be happy to yield.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Does the gentleman know if there is a possibility that the bill before the Budget Committee tomorrow, because they did expedite that hearing--just yesterday, there wasn't supposed to be a Budget Committee on Saturday to take up the reconciliation bill, so, clearly, it has been sped up. Is that because there is a possibility that the reconciliation bill could be voted on before the House next week?
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Does the gentleman have any idea on when we would find that out?
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Well, I will be watching, for sure.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. We all will.
On Monday, the schedule shows that the infrastructure bill is supposed to be coming up before the House floor. Is that going to be for debate and consideration, or will there be an actual vote on Monday night on the infrastructure bill?
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Well, we will be very involved in that debate as well.
As it relates to the next few weeks, there has been some talk that possibly the week of October 4 or beyond may be taken back as district work schedules to come back here.
Does the gentleman have any insight into what the schedule holds from October 4 and beyond?
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Well, we know that next week we anticipate, as the end of the fiscal year comes, that there would be the continuing resolution possibly coming out of the Senate.
I know when it came out of the House, it was very clear that the Senate was not going to entertain the debt ceiling as part of the continuing resolution. So, clearly, the Senate is going to have to resolve what happens with the debt ceiling, although we have been told extraordinary measures would continue through October. So that is not as looming of a deadline as the September 30 government funding deadline that the CR would be involved with.
I know, on our side, we were very disappointed to see when something had to be pulled out on Tuesday, whether it was going to be the Iron Dome funding or the debt ceiling. Knowing that the Senate was not going to process the debt ceiling as part of that instrument, it would have seemed, to keep that on track, to remove the debt ceiling and deal with that separately, as the Senate ultimately will have to, and then keep the CR with the Iron Dome funding moving forward on something that could be a bipartisan vote.
Obviously, that didn't happen Tuesday. I would expect we will see something very different happen in the Senate. They may send that back to us sometime next week.
Does the gentleman have a timeline for what we should expect on legislation dealing with the funding of government prior to the September 30 deadline?
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I want to remind the gentleman that if you go back, both Republican and Democrat Presidents, whether it was a Republican Congress or a Democrat Congress, you had budget agreements that involved both agreements on spending and on debt. Bipartisan agreements.
The gentlemen should also recognize that this year there has been no such effort to reach out to the Republican side to get agreements. The gentleman is well-aware that under President Biden, while he promised during the campaign that he would work with everybody, he would work with Republicans, work with Democrats, instead, it has been a go-it- alone strategy on spending and on debt.
Very much to our opposition, we were against the trillions of new spending. We weren't consulted about the debt.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I will yield, but I first need to point out, because the gentleman did mention, that when we cut taxes, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, that cutting taxes reduced revenue to the Treasury. Maybe under a liberal ideology that is the thought process of how economics would work, but that is not how economics worked, and it is not how reality worked.
When we cut taxes, we actually kick-started our economy. We brought millions of jobs back to America, and the Federal Treasury took in more money. Cutting taxes brought in more revenue to the Treasury. In fact, if you go look at States like New York that raised taxes to try to go after millionaires and billionaires and picking winners and losers and dividing people, as they raise tax rates, they see people moving out of their State, less revenue.
In America, when we saw higher and higher tax rates ultimately getting to a 35 percent corporate rate, highest in the industrialized world, what we also saw was great companies moving out of America, out of America to be able to stay afloat, not to avoid paying taxes. They were still paying taxes. They were just moving to other countries where they could remain competitive because they could no longer remain competitive in America.
It was by the hundreds that we would see what are called inversions, great companies moving out of America. Now, on the left, every time they would move they would wring hands and call the company's name. We would call the companies, and say, Why are you leaving? They didn't want to leave. They wanted to stay afloat so that they didn't have to fire the thousands of America workers they had. They wanted to stay viable.
So when we cut taxes, do you know since the day the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law, there has not been a single inversion in America. Not a single American company moved out of America. In fact, the opposite. We saw companies by the droves moving back in. We saw jobs by the millions coming back to America.
So, again, to give an economics lesson, when we cut taxes the Federal Treasury actually took in more money, not less, because people created more jobs in America. They brought jobs back to America.
Companies increased wages. In fact, the biggest wage earners--and you can go look at the Department of Labor statistics--the bigger wage earners were lowest-income workers. All that goes away if this bill coming before the Budget Committee tomorrow is to pass. I hope it doesn't. But if it does, every economics expert that looks at the success of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has also recognized that it will lead to millions more jobs leaving America if they raise those rates.
If you put a natural gas tax on families, estimates are over a 12 percent increase in household electricity rates on families which, by the way, would hit lower-income people the hardest. That is the reality of tax increases and tax decreases.
So that brings us to the debt ceiling. The reason we voted against it were many. One was that, for whatever reason, the majority party decided to gut the Iron Dome funding that was initially in the bill; a billion dollars to allow Israel to replenish the Iron Dome missiles that were used defending themselves against terrorist attacks from Gaza, fueled by terrorist organizations, and backed by proxies like Iran. That is one of the driving reasons that you saw all of those ``no'' votes.
But if you also look at where the debt came from, it came from very partisan policies. There are 14 different bills this year where the majority party waived the PAYGO rules. PAYGO was a policy that said, you pay as you go. You want to pass policy, you want to spend money, pay for it.
It is a pretty commonsense idea, except on 14 different pieces of legislation this year, the Democrat majority waived PAYGO, racking up trillions in new debt. We didn't vote for this spending. If the majority party wants to go it alone and have a partisan spending spree that jacks up trillions of new spending and debt, then it is incumbent upon the majority party to go address the debt ceiling consequences that were created by this reckless spending.
Fourteen different times your party waived PAYGO. We didn't vote for that. But then you want us to pay for it? That is not how this works. If the majority party wants to work with us on a budget agreement, we are right here. We have never been asked to be a part of a budget agreement. We surely weren't consulted about the spending because we opposed those levels.
There were things we wanted to do, including on some of the relief packages where we felt, let's focus in on helping people who are struggling, not paying people not to work, not bailing out States that are flushed with multi-billion dollar surpluses, while sending that bill to our kids.
That is not responsible, but that is what the majority party did. And as they jacked up all that spending, they jacked up debt and bumped us against the debt limit. We are not going to be a part of that because we didn't agree with the spending. We weren't consulted on the spending.
If your party wants to spend money, your party ought to be responsible enough to deal with the consequences of it. We are more than happy to work with you on how to solve this spending and debt problem in a bipartisan way, and I yield to the gentleman.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.
I do need to correct the Record because the gentleman implied that the relief packages from 2020 were part of the debt ceiling that is being raised in the current legislation that is moving forward. That is just not accurate.
I have seen talking points out there, but Mr. Speaker, if you look at the trillions that my friend and I supported that were good policy, that was included in the debt ceiling negotiation from last year. It was in there. It was part of the debt ceiling negotiation from last year. That was passed on a bipartisan basis.
What we are talking about for this year, including the $1.9 trillion that was not a bipartisan package, is new debt. What is being anticipated in the $4 trillion, $5 trillion-dollar-package that the Budget Committee is taking up is going to be new debt that would be included in the debt ceiling negotiation that my friend would expect us to vote for.
We don't support that new spending and that new debt. We did support the spending and the debt from last year in the relief packages that we all supported--and we paid for it--in the debt ceiling negotiations from last year. The gentleman might have different talking points, but that is a fact. It was legislation that was voted on in a bipartisan fashion.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. It was voted on on a bipartisan basis and was passed by Congress. Where the debt ceiling is today is ultimately going to be negotiated in the Senate, but it won't be in the bill that was sent over to the Senate on Tuesday.
The Senators have made it clear. They don't have 60 votes for that bill. It is a 60-vote bill. They might have to take it up under a reconciliation package. That is for the Senate to decide. Maybe in the next few days the Senate will decide that and send it back, but that was not something that anybody expected the Senate to pass when it left the House on Tuesday.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Again, this will continue as we see whatever comes out of the Budget Committee that will be trillions. We know it is trillions. We just don't know how many, maybe 4, maybe 5 trillion in new debt that the date that was put in the legislative text--it wasn't an amount, it was a date that the majority party included--in December of 2022 that maybe that changes in the Senate, but it would include the trillions, not only that were included in the $1.9 from earlier this year that was partisan, but also on this tax-and-spend bill that is moving through Budget tomorrow.
I would like to ask one final question about other potential legislation for next week. I know the gentleman and I have had conversations in the past about bills that maybe aren't currently scheduled that could be, some of them have been added to the schedule, not all.
We know there is a crisis at our southern border. There are a number of legislative instruments that have been filed to try to confront it. I haven't seen any of those come to the floor. They are surely not listed for next week, but there are a number I would at least like to bring to the gentleman's attention to see if they could--as we are watching the border get even more out of hand--potentially give tools to the President to address it in a way where he is not addressing it today.
We know there has been a bill by Ms. Herrell, the number of that bill is H.R. 471, the PAUSE Act, which would allow for enforcement of Title 42 in a way more clear than the administration has expressed their abilities.
We also have H.R. 4828 by Mr. Katko which gives even more additional tools to help secure the border.
I would hope the gentleman would look at those legislative instruments. As there are maybe more days we will be here than there are legislative instruments anticipated, these could be other bills that we could take up that would deal with very pertinent and serious problems that our country is facing that aren't being addressed.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that, and I look forward to having those conversations with the gentleman from Maryland on that and all the other issues that will come before us next week.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source