Cloture Motion
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, after months of--well, I won't call it infighting; I will call it intraparty negotiating, our Democratic colleagues are still trying to reach an agreement on their multitrillion-dollar tax-and-spending spree legislation. They have yet to decide how much money they want to spend. I think they started--the Senator from Vermont started at $6 trillion, and then we heard it was $3.5 trillion. Now we are hearing that it may be more on the order of what the Senator from West Virginia said was his cap of $1.5 trillion. We still also don't know how much they are willing to raise taxes to cover the cost or how far they want to move America into a European welfare state.
Still, our colleagues are trying to reach a deal in a matter of days. Our colleagues are rushing to compile the largest peacetime tax hike in American history and see just how much government overreach those hard- earned tax dollars can buy.
Some Members experienced buyer's remorse before even swiping the taxpayers' credit card, so our colleagues are trying to scale back this massive spending bill. We read, but we don't know, but it is reported that they have cut certain programs, like free college, which, despite the name, we know that free programs actually cost money because somebody has to pay for them. We also read that they are scaling back other plans, including paid leave and the expanded child tax credit, to reduce the short-term costs and hope for more money down the line.
I think, if truth be told, once these policies are established, many times they are very difficult to repeal later on, which is why they are trying to establish a toehold even for a short period of time. But even with these pared-down proposals, there is still plenty of government overreach to go around.
One of the biggest dreams of our Democratic colleagues is government- run healthcare. We have heard the left embrace Medicare for All as its rallying cry. Well, the Senator who popularized that policy is now chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Senator Sanders, and he wields a lot of power when it comes to this particular tax-and-spending bill. It is no surprise that his top priority is a dramatic expansion of Medicare.
Initially, we read that our colleagues wanted to lower the age of Medicare eligibility by 5 or 10 years, making tens of millions of younger Americans eligible for this benefit. This, of course, comes at a time when Medicare is in financial trouble already. In just 5 years, the trust fund for Medicare Part A is scheduled to go insolvent.
It hardly seems right, while your boat is in danger of sinking, to add more and more people into the boat. Instead of fixing those problems or providing stability for Medicare, our colleagues want to spread those waning dollars even thinner.
The sky-high cost of expanding eligibility seems to have eliminated that provision. Again, this is based on reporting since no one has actually seen the documents, but a massive expansion of benefits apparently is still being discussed. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that this expansion would cost more than $350 billion in the first 10 years. We will see if the chairman of the Budget Committee is able to keep this provision off the chopping block.
But this is only part of the plan to put the government in greater control of our daily lives--of all Americans' daily lives. Another big- ticket item which certainly must poll well is free childcare. Again, nothing is free; it just means somebody--not you--is having to pay for it. But free programs, as it turns out, don't come cheap. In this case, the original pricetag was pegged at $450 billion.
The American people won't just pay more in taxes to cover this program; many families will end up spending more on childcare. One left-leaning think tank analyzed the impact of this free childcare bill and found that it is likely to have a devastating impact on middle- class families. According to the People's Policy Project, the Democrats' childcare plan would cause middle-class families to pay more than $13,000 more a year in childcare. That is not just a price increase for the top 1 percent; that is for people who earn more than their State's median income, which in Texas is just under $62,000. It is hard to imagine a family of four who brings home $62,000 a year having an extra $13,000 to spend on childcare, especially when they are already being pummeled by inflation and rising costs.
We will see all the ways that President Biden was wrong when he said that ``my Build Back Better agenda costs zero dollars.'' Of course, nobody believes that, but the President keeps saying it over and over and over again. But the American people are pretty smart, and they understand when the wool is being pulled over their eyes or when they are being sold a bill of goods by saying: Yeah, we are going to spend $3.5 trillion, but it is actually going to cost zero. It is really an insult to their intelligence.
Our colleagues across the aisle have also proposed a litany of tax increases on families, workers, and small businesses to cover part of the costs of this massive spending bill, and they hope the increase in the size and power of the Internal Revenue Service will make sure that Big Brother doesn't miss anything.
The administration wants to double the size of the Internal Revenue Service by increasing the number of agents by 15 percent every year for the next decade. Well, we have already seen what a politically motivated IRS can do. We know about the leaking of taxpayer information recently, and we remember the IRS targeting controversy during the Obama administration. IRS bureaucrats subjected conservative groups to a double standard when it came to scrutiny compared to left-leaning nonprofit groups, and it looks like the Biden administration may want to dust off that old playbook.
The administration also wants to give the IRS unprecedented power to snoop in your bank account. The administration proposed requiring banks to give the IRS data on accounts with more than $600 in annual transactions. So that means every time you bought a washing machine or a refrigerator, you paid your rent, maybe paid your mortgage, maybe bought a car, that information would be reported to the IRS. The IRS already knows how much you earn because that is reported, but that is apparently not enough for the IRS surveillance. They want to make sure that the IRS, like Big Brother, knows everything you do, everywhere you go, and who you associate with.
Well, this was a $600 annual transaction minimum, and, of course, that is for an entire year. It is easy to see how that would swoop up virtually everybody in this new government surveillance program. This obviously is not designed to catch billionaires evading their tax responsibilities. It is tough to imagine somebody who wouldn't get caught up in that threshold over the course of an entire year. A single month of rent is higher than 600 bucks in most Texas cities.
Well, we know what happened. The blowback was so fierce that our Democratic colleagues said: Well, it is not going to be $600 a year. We will up it to $10,000 a year. But, yeah, we will continue the surveillance of your personal private financial information just so we are sure we don't miss anybody.
Well, even at a threshold of $10,000, a widow who gets a monthly stipend from Social Security for $1,500 a month would obviously be a target of IRS snooping under this proposal.
It is pretty obvious this is a huge violation of personal privacy, and people are rightfully angry about it. I think people are angry because they don't want to be presumed to be a tax cheat by their own government. I have received letters from nearly 60,000 of my constituents who are opposed to such massive government overreach and invasion of their privacy.
We know it is also an incredible financial and paperwork burden on financial institutions--community banks, credit unions, and the like. Imagine the time and the people and the hours necessary to comply with this new surveillance by your own government. Transmitting the sensitive financial information of almost every customer of a bank or financial institution to the IRS would involve a lot of time and a lot of money that these banks or credit unions may or may not have.
I have cosponsored a bill with Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina to prevent the IRS from monitoring American citizens' private financial information, and I was pleased to see our colleague from West Virginia, Senator Manchin, cast doubt on the future of this controversial and unnecessary provision.
The truth is, it doesn't matter if the pricetag of this bill is $5.5 trillion, $3.5 trillion, or $1.5 trillion; the goal is the same: to permanently transform America and the role that government plays in our everyday lives. Whether that is through the healthcare system, childcare, or through the IRS, there is no line too sacred to cross in pursuit of this ideological nirvana. Our colleagues continue working behind closed doors to determine just how much socialism they want to force on the American people.
We still don't know how much this bill will cost--again, nobody has seen it yet outside of the small group of Democrats who are actually negotiating--or how much harm it will actually inflict. But we do know one thing: This is not what the American people bargained for in the last election. The American voters elected a 50-50 Senate, reduced the Democratic majority in the House, and took President Biden at his word when he promised to work in a bipartisan fashion across the aisle. This is not what the American people bargained for. They did not vote to make Joe Biden the next FDR, and they did not vote to have this Build Back Better bill be the next New Deal.
We will continue, once we are able to find out precisely what is in this bill, to do everything we can to fight against this irresponsible taxing-and-spending bonanza.
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