Legislative Program
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I rise for the purpose of inquiring of the majority leader the schedule for next week.
Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), my friend, the majority leader.
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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman. As we go through the bills that may come up next week--of course, we just finished a week bringing some bills to the floor, but as we look around the country, clearly the main concern we are hearing from families are all of the various crises that are facing American families.
You have an inflation crises with goods of all kinds costing dramatically more when people go to buy things at the grocery store. If they try to get a new appliance, they are waiting longer, they are paying more money.
You think about the energy crisis with families paying 50 percent more for gasoline, in some cases, with dramatic increases at the pump and the pain that it causes, especially lower income families.
The border crisis, where every day we see stories of thousands of people coming across our border illegally. The Attorney General was before the Committee on the Judiciary and he couldn't even give a number of how many people have illegally crossed or plan to address it.
The supply chain crisis that we see getting worse and worse with ships backed up, maybe almost all the way to China, because that crisis is not being addressed.
So when you think about all these crises that families are angry about--it is hurting hardworking families, it is costing them, it is taking money out of their paychecks--there has not been a single bill brought to this floor last week. It doesn't sound like any is being brought to the floor next week to address any of those crises.
I would ask the gentleman, would he be open to bringing actual legislation to the floor to address the various, serious crises that families are facing today?
Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland.
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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, clearly, we stand ready to help on all of those issues. But had Washington spending and borrowing money solved the problem, we would not have any of these crises because trillions of dollars have been borrowed and spent under this administration.
In the previous administration, we worked together on those budget deals, every one of them. The Paycheck Protection Program and the CARES Act were all very bipartisan, and it included addressing the debt that went along with it.
There has been nothing bipartisan in any of the debt that has been racked up under this administration. So if the gentleman is concerned about the full faith and credit of the United States, which we all are, then stop borrowing and spending trillions more dollars.
Families get this, by the way. Families know that if spending trillions was going to solve the problem, there wouldn't be a problem because trillions have been borrowed and spent just from January to October. What they know is it is the very borrowing and spending of trillions of dollars in Washington that has exacerbated these problems.
The inflation crisis would not exist if you didn't have Washington borrowing and spending trillions more dollars, making it harder for people to get back into the workforce, making it harder for the supply chain to be addressed.
What was inherited? I think we know what was inherited by the Biden administration. We had energy dominance the day President Biden took the oath of office. Not only were we producing enough energy for our needs, but gas was less than $2 a gallon all across America. We were exporting oil and natural gas to our friends around the world. We were undermining our enemies around the world.
Instead of President Biden begging OPEC and Russia to produce more oil, we were actually shipping oil and gas to our friends because we could produce enough for ourselves. We created great American jobs here at home. We had low-cost energy.
By the way, the technological advances we made here in this country, if there is anywhere in the world where fossil fuel production is going to be done, you want it done here because we have actually lowered carbon emissions. We were lowering carbon emissions in America while producing more energy. Now we have become more reliant on OPEC nations, on Russia.
Not only is that bad for American families, but they are paying more at the pump because of that crisis created by President Biden's actions. He inherited an energy-dominant Nation. Now you have the President of the United States begging OPEC and Russia to produce more oil, which they are not going to do because they want oil to be over $80 a barrel, but they actually emit more carbon to produce the same oil.
Oil is going to be needed to run an economy, any economy anywhere in the world. You want to make it here because we do it better than anybody else. But that is not what is being done. We have an answer for it.
I know, last night, President Biden was asked specifically about this crisis that he created. His response was, ``I don't have a near-term answer'' for high gas prices.
Well, President Biden might not have an answer, but we do. We have a number of bills, and I know the gentleman has pointed it out. We have a number of answers.
Here is one. H.R. 684 green-lights the Keystone pipeline. You want to talk about creating thousands of good jobs, private-sector money, more energy independence for America; this bill would do just that, and it would do it today.
If pipelines were a problem--I know President Biden doesn't want American pipelines, but he green-lighted the Russian pipeline, the Nord Stream II. So, clearly, it is not pipelines; it is American pipelines he doesn't want.
Why don't we bring up H.R. 684 to create jobs and lower energy costs? H.R. 543 and H.R. 859 would both green-light more production in America that President Biden shut down. There was production going on all across America, really good, safe, environmentally sound production. Again, our standards are the best in the world.
For people who want to bash America, go find a country that produces energy that does it better than America. We do it best. Yet, President Biden, through executive action, shut a lot of that production down. These bills would open that back up again. These bills would lower gas prices.
I know President Biden isn't interested in that because, in his own budget, he specifically blocks the Corps of Engineers from doing infrastructure projects that would lower energy production. President Biden blocks that. You would think OPEC would have come up with that idea or maybe Russia would have come up with that idea. No, that was President Biden in his own budget who said you can't even do infrastructure projects if it lowers energy production. Who would come up with that? Yet, that is in his budget.
Then you go to the border crisis, again, self-created. President Biden inherited a secure border. A wall was being built. You had agreements with South American and Central American countries.
Remain in Mexico was a great policy that President Biden reversed; he blocked it. Did he block it because it was bad policy? No, it was working really well. It was an agreement between two neighboring countries. He just blocked it because President Trump did it. It was working, yet he got rid of it. He could go and reinstate that tomorrow.
We have bills that would solve the border crisis. I will read a few of them off.
H.R. 4828 is a bill I brought to the majority leader's attention back a month ago, in September. This is a bill that deals with a number of problems facing our border today, and it would give more tools to our Border Patrol agents to secure our border.
H.R. 471 is another bill I brought to the gentleman's attention a month ago that would help secure America's border, dealing with the crisis.
None of these bills seem to draw the interest of the majority even though every one of them would address these very real crises facing families that were not around a year ago.
President Biden inherited a secure border; he inherited energy dominance; and he inherited an economy that was recovering from the worst pandemic we have seen in lifetimes. Then, on top of that, there is a proposal to raise trillions more in taxes, more in Soviet-style spending coming out of Washington that would make inflation worse.
The gentleman is correct. We don't support those ideas that would make inflation worse, that would raise gas prices even higher. But we bring a lot of good ideas that would address these crises. We just want to see these ideas brought to the floor.
When you look at the floor schedule and there is nothing last week, next week, a month ago to address any of these crises, these are the things that families are having the hardest time with, and they are struggling.
Inflation is the biggest tax on lower and middle-income families. President Biden promised he wouldn't raise taxes on anybody making less than $400,000. Yet, in the tax proposal that President Biden wants to bring forward by next week so that he can go fly to Europe and talk about other proposals that would make it impossible to produce energy in America, they include, among other things, a natural gas tax. That tax would fall the hardest on lower income families, not the millionaires and the billionaires. It would be people making less than $60,000 that would be hit the hardest by a natural gas tax. Yet, it is in the bill.
You talk about adding 83,000 IRS agents. Maybe some people in Washington think that is job creation. Most people in America have shivers running down their spines at the thought of the Federal Government, which now wants to track every transaction if they make more than $10,000 a year, to track all their transactions with 83,000 new IRS agents. Again, maybe to some that is called infrastructure, but to most people, it is called a nightmare right before Halloween.
Why don't we bring bills to the floor to address these crises? If these aren't the bills that the majority likes, let's work on some other ones. All of these would address these problems, and many of them would get us back to the point where we were, where we had a secure border, where we had energy dominance, where we had jobs being created.
Each of these last few months you have seen jobs created dramatically lower than what the projections were because there are all of these self-created crises by the administration that are making it harder on hardworking families. It is the lowest income families that are being hit the hardest by these failed policies and all the Big Government socialist spending coming out of Washington. We don't need more. We need to actually go and confront the problem that is creating a debt crisis and all the other crises that families are facing.
It is not going to be by spending more money and taxing people more. It is going to be by working to address each of them, starting at the root of the problem and what created them. I yield to the gentleman.
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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I sure hope that the gentleman is concerned not just about making sure the credit card bill is paid but making sure that the spending that maxed out the credit card is being done responsibly.
There are some key facts the gentleman left out in his conversation about how we got here. We got here because in January, one party, the Democratic Party--who is in the majority in the House, is in the majority in the Senate, and has control in the White House--made a decision--I don't agree with the decision--but made a decision that they were going to go it alone on the spending side. They decided that they were going to go max out the credit card. We urged them not to do it. We still to this day are urging not to go and just spend trillions and trillions more dollars.
If my friend wants to work with us on what the responsible decision should be, we are right here. We have been here from the beginning.
Madam Speaker, do you know, to this day President Biden has not met-- we are in October, late October. President Biden has not met with the House Republican leadership on any of these issues--any of them.
The gentleman referenced a number of opportunities where it was described we were there to help President Trump. The majority wasn't just there to help President Trump, the majority was in the meetings when the decisions were being made.
The Paycheck Protection Program was not a partisan exercise. In fact, it was one of the most successful bipartisan exercises I have seen Congress come together and do. Everybody was in the room making those decisions. They were all very important decisions and big decisions that involved a lot of money, and we all made those decisions together. We all voted for those bills together, and then, ultimately, the spending that went along with it, the debt that went along with it was part of that negotiation and we voted for it together.
There has not been a decision made this year where the majority has negotiated with the minority to figure out if we could come to an agreement, so the majority did it on their own and look, the majority had the votes to do it.
But when the majority maxes out the credit card on their own, don't come and chide our side and say: Well, you need to be there to pay the bill when we weren't included in the decision to max out the credit card. And now that the credit card is maxed out, it is not as if there is an effort to slow down, in fact, it seems like it is full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes, spend trillions of dollars more on additional things like, again, 83,000 more IRS agents.
Madam Speaker, do you think anybody on this side supports that?
That is not something we support. It will rack up more debt, by the way. We don't support it, but I guess the gentleman expects we should pay for it even if we don't support it. Maybe if there was a negotiation where both sides were part of it.
Sam Graves, who is the ranking member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has not been included in any of these decisions on infrastructure. Yet, I am sure the gentleman would expect him to vote for whatever comes out of a partisan exercise. That is not how things work, and I know the gentleman knows that.
Again, if the President wants to work with us--
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Mr. SCALISE. Of course, those are true.
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Mr. SCALISE. We all negotiated on the three different debt ceiling increases that happened under the Trump administration, including CARES and the Paycheck Protection Program. They were very bipartisan.
Does the gentleman disagree with that?
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Mr. SCALISE. Those are the facts. And so when the gentleman looked at those facts, the gentleman talked about jobs and COVID. Before COVID happened, we had the hottest economy maybe in the history of our country. Wages were up for every demographic group. Those are facts. The gentleman saw small businesses up and women-owned small businesses were up over 20 percent. African-American unemployment was at its lowest level, Hispanic unemployment was at its lowest level, and then COVID came along.
Maybe there is a reason why the majority won't hold a hearing on the origin of COVID, but if the gentleman wants to just say because of COVID all of that is Donald Trump's fault, clearly the economy shut down, and we worked to get it back going again, and it is coming back. Frankly, some of the efforts to pay people not to work--and it is not just enhanced unemployment, it is a whole list of things--are hurting the recovery.
But those things were happening before COVID hit a year and a half ago, and it was because of good, sound policies that got us a secure border and that got us energy dominance, and, frankly, it was things like that that helped us get the economy going again because it was creating good jobs.
Keystone pipeline was moving forward. Those are good union jobs, by the way, and that was ended by President Biden unilaterally. He never even tried to have a meeting and a conversation with us to see if we could come to an agreement.
Again, I guess it is the prerogative of the majority. If the gentleman is in the majority, then the majority doesn't have to talk to the minority. But just because the majority didn't talk to the minority and they made decisions on their own about what they wanted to do, they didn't try to reach an agreement with us, to come to us after the fact when the majority has spent trillions of dollars, it has wreaked havoc through our economy, it has led to inflation we haven't seen in generations and gas prices we haven't seen in decades, then the majority wants to come and not ask us how to fix it--we have got ideas on how to fix it--the majority asks us to pay the bill.
Why don't we work together on the front end and not rack up trillions more in spending?
Because the things the gentleman talked about would rack up trillions more in spending which created these problems, and we were not a part of those conversations. I wish we were a part of the conversations and it was done in a bipartisan way. But, again, President Biden, 10 months into his administration, has yet to sit down and meet with House Republican leadership to talk about any of these ideas and solutions we could come up with together which is how it should be done.
Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.
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Mr. SCALISE. No one is being threatened.
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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I would be happy to answer the question. It might not be the answer the gentleman wants, but I would be happy to be part of an actual bipartisan negotiation on how to solve our country's debt. That has not happened.
But if you look at the bill that the gentleman brought to this floor to deal with the debt over a month ago, it absolutely dealt with spending, not that already happened, but that will happen in the future, including the trillions of dollars of debt-laden bills that spend more money in Washington.
It picked a date, and the date that the gentleman put in the bill that was brought to this House floor was December 31, 2022. That is not spending we have already done. That is spending that the majority plans to do in a very partisan way, not just through this year but through all of next year.
When we are not even included in those decisions, then you come and say, well, you should just be expected to pay for whatever we want to spend, trillions more, between now and the end of a year, over a year from now, that is not a negotiation. That is not even an attempt to want to work with the other side.
Now, again, the gentleman is in the majority. In the Senate, they are in the majority, and the gentleman very well knows that both sides have the ability, if you want to do the spending on your own, to address the debt that would be created by all of that spending on your own. It doesn't take 60 votes. The gentleman is well aware that there is a legislative instrument that if all the spending wants to be done in a partisan way--and I am talking about the trillions that are still laying in front of us that the gentleman said may come to the floor next week, not necessarily will, might come to the floor, might come to the floor a month from now, might come to the floor a year from now. And we won't even be included in those negotiations, but we ought to be expected to vote for the debt that would be racked up by it?
If the other side were being asked to do that, you know your majority wouldn't go for that. But we wouldn't do it. We would at least include you in a negotiation. If we didn't want to, then we would be responsible for doing it on our own if we did the spending on our own. And the tools are there to do just that.
Threatening to default on the Nation's debt when legislative instruments are included in this majority to not have default is irresponsible. That threat keeps being thrown out there by the majority, even though the majority knows they could, with a majority vote in the House and a majority vote in the Senate, address the debt that wants to be racked up between now and next December.
Again, I would urge that all of that new spending doesn't happen, that we come together and negotiate what budget limits should be like we have done in the past under Republican and Democrat Presidents. Those were bipartisan deals. There has been no bipartisan attempt to do that this year.
Why is there opposition to infrastructure? Well, first of all, if there was a desire to do bipartisan infrastructure, you are going to find a lot of takers over here. I know the gentleman made an assertion--probably not realizing it--but there would have been no threats, no threats made on our side of the aisle on a bill.
Now, I see people being followed into bathrooms on the other side and all kinds of other things being done. There are no threats on this side. What we said is, we want an infrastructure negotiation. But the day that the deal was reached in the Senate with the President, he turned around about an hour later and undermined that deal by tying it, linking it, to the tax-and-spend bill.
That is when it became a problem because taxing and spending trillions more dollars would be a problem to this country. It would hurt middle-class families and lower income families to have that natural gas tax, to have all the additional inflation on top of the inflation they already see. It became a problem for all of those reasons, that package, not the individual bill.
As the President himself has said multiple times, as the Speaker herself has said multiple times, it is not a standalone bill. It is not two standalone bills. It is a package. They are married together at the hip.
That is where the opposition comes from. By the way, there is a really good bipartisan infrastructure bill that is out there. S. 3011 came over from the Senate unanimously. $500 billion of infrastructure is authorized in this bill. If the gentleman would bring this up for a vote, it would probably fly overwhelmingly. It would allow for, again, about $500 billion immediately that could be spent on infrastructure all across this country, plus an additional large sum next year--maybe $100 billion next year--on top of the $500 billion.
It just passed out of the Senate unanimously; every Republican, every Democrat supported this bill. This is real infrastructure. This is not tied to some tax-and-spend bill that maybe the gentleman might think is a good idea. We surely don't. We know how damaging it would be to our country and to our economy and to middle and lower income families.
This is a very bipartisan bill that could be bipartisan here, where we could be a part of a negotiation on something really good, where States wouldn't have to wait months. They have the money ready to go today. This gives them the flexibility to make their own decisions on what is best for the infrastructure in each of these States.
Maryland would be able to control their own destiny on over $1 billion. Louisiana would be able to control their own destiny on over $1 billion today if this bill passed.
So, absolutely, we support real infrastructure. If it is tied together and married to something that would be devastating to the economy, of course not. Maybe if the majority would look at delinking those two and abandoning the bill that would raise taxes--and even internally in the Democrat Caucus those discussions have been going on. That is not just Republicans asking for that. There are a number of Democrats asking for that, too. That would be a bipartisan initiative to say we are jettisoning this idea that we are going to raise hundreds of billions, if not multiple trillions--whatever the number--if it is $1 trillion, $5 trillion it would be devastating to our economy and middle-class families.
Let's abandon that and go work on something that would actually be real infrastructure that we could all rally behind. It would pass overwhelmingly. It would be good for the country. President Biden would get to sign it into law. We would support that.
I ask the gentleman to look at S. 3011, and if he is not a supporter of that plan that passed with 100 Senators, maybe there is a better idea. But this one is a really good one that got every Republican and every Democrat in the Senate earlier this week to say yes. We would be happy to say yes to it as well if we are given that opportunity. I yield to the gentleman.
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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman again for his comments.
There is clearly a bipartisan bill on infrastructure that we would be happy to support, S. 3011. Nobody in the House on the Republican side was included in any of those negotiations, including the ranking member of the Transportation Committee who he himself has been urging a large bill. $450 billion was put on the table, which, by the way, if that were passed, it would be the largest infrastructure bill in the history of the United States. He was pushed out of the negotiations.
Again, the majority has that ability because they are in the majority, but they surely never tried a bipartisan negotiation, as well the gentleman knows, on those prior budget agreements.
It wasn't just voted for or against because of who was in the White House. It was voted for by both parties because the negotiation on what that spending limit was was agreed upon by the leadership of both sides.
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Mr. SCALISE. The House, Senate, Republican, Democrat, we came to agreement on those budgets, and that is why the gentleman voted for it. That is why I voted for it, because it was a negotiated agreement. There was give and take on a number of items but ultimately agreed by a date certain but under a budget agreement.
There is a date certain of December 31 of 2022 that has no bipartisan agreement. We know what a lot of the spending will be, because trillions have already been spent that we were not included in and we strongly opposed. The gentleman knew that when he brought the bills to the floor, but he wanted to bring them to the floor anyway because you had the votes. I get it. That is the way majorities work.
But if you decide to exclude one party from negotiations and go spend the money anyway and then have a whole list of trillions more in spending down the road and include that in a bill, I don't really think anybody expects the people who were pushed to the curb to vote for the credit card limit being increased with all the spending that is going to continue to be racked up--not that has already been racked up--that will be racked up between now and December 31 of 2022 is going to be done in a partisan way. That is what the record has been so far this year on the trillions that have already been added by bills passed by this majority. They weren't bipartisan. Again, that is the prerogative of the majority.
We have stood here ready. We have listed bill after bill to address crisis after crisis, none of which have been brought to the floor. We are still ready to go to solve these problems. We have talked about a bipartisan bill on infrastructure that we can support. Ultimately, the majority makes that decision.
I yield to the gentleman.
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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, we need to do this in a bipartisan way, which hasn't happened. But partisanship is not patriotism, and we have seen a lot of partisanship.
I have served in leadership under three different Presidents now. When we had to negotiate how to come together on the priorities of our government, how to properly fund things and deal with our debt, under President Obama, we had those bipartisan meetings in the White House. When President Trump came in, we had those bipartisan meetings in the White House. Still to this day, late October, 10 months into his Presidency, there has not been a single time where President Biden has brought a bipartisan group of our leadership together.
I understand he has met with Democrat leadership many times in the White House. Again, that is his prerogative. He is the President; you are in the majority. If you want to do all of this in a partisan way, I don't suggest it is healthy and I don't suggest it is the right way. Every President I have served under in leadership has had bipartisan meetings to have these conversations and come to an agreement. That has not happened under this President.
He ought to go and live by the words that he promised during the campaign, that he would work with both parties in a bipartisan way. To not have met with House Republican leadership once during his Presidency, 10 months in, is not an acceptable way to run this government.
Then all of a sudden, things end up partisan, and everybody throws their hands up and goes: How did this happen? Just reach out. He is the President of the United States. If he says let's go tomorrow, we will be there tomorrow. But he won't do that. We have asked for meetings. At some point they have to have them.
Again, if he doesn't want them to happen, that is his prerogative, because the same party controls all levers of government. But if the same party controls all levers of government and wants to just toss aside the other party in either Chamber--oh, we worked with Senators. Even some of those Senators that were mentioned are not supporting what is happening with debt, because there has been no negotiation with both parties on the debt, on the spending that gets us to the debt. So there can be proposals for trillions more in spending. If we oppose it, we have been very clear why we have that opposition.
It wasn't us that married those bills together. President Biden came here just two weeks ago. They said he was going to be closing the deal. He was going to be the closer. We were going to have a vote on the House floor. The Speaker promised there would be a vote on the House floor.
Instead, at that meeting, it has been reported that he said the two bills are tied together. Since then, he said: I want both of them coming to me. He has tied them together. I wish he wouldn't. That is the President's prerogative. He has made it very clear. The Speaker has made it very clear. It has not been our side that has done that. We want to separate those as a package, but they have been kept together as a package. Until then, at least we have been looking for other opportunities, and we found one in S. 3011 that passed the Senate unanimously. That would be $500 billion in real infrastructure today. Every Governor of every State would have the ability to start doing $500 billion in new infrastructure projects. We think that would be really good for our country. We support it. We are ready to negotiate.
Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.
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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, we stand ready to work, if there is bipartisan efforts made. We will see if that develops.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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