Providing for Consideration of H.R. Build Back Better Act; and for Other Purposes

Floor Speech

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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, we have heard repeatedly from the President of the United States that this bill costs nothing. That is obviously not true, it costs lots of money.

Last night, my very good friend, the Rules Committee chairman, the distinguished Member from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), said it is fully paid for. I know he believes that. Unfortunately, he doesn't know that.

We don't have a Congressional Budget Committee score. We have had five Members of the other party say they would not vote for this bill unless they had a CBO score. I hope they hold true to that.

Madam Speaker, we should simply not proceed until we have a CBO score. We will have our differences of opinion, fair enough. But the American people and all of us in this Chamber ought to know what this bill costs before any of us are asked to cast a vote.

Madam Speaker, I would urge the support of my friend's point of order.

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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I want to thank my friend for yielding, but most of all, I want to thank him for waiting here hour after hour after hour, as our friends who couldn't get their show in order, broke arms, broke knees, did whatever they had to do to bring this to the floor. Thank you for being here and making sure that things were done appropriately in a procedural way.

Madam Speaker, we have purportedly a $3 billion package in two different parts in front of us today. We are not going to talk a lot about the first part of the package, the so-called infrastructure package, but I want to talk about it because it didn't come through the Rules Committee, it didn't need to, and it is not going to be subject to much debate here, but we ought to talk about it.

Now, of the two bills that we are purportedly going to deal with, it is the better of the two. It is abominable. It is unpaid for. The CBO has told us it is $400 billion--$398 billion to be precise.

The Senate process that produced it did not go through the committee of jurisdiction. Worst of all, it is the most egregious surrender of House prerogatives I have seen in my time here. It has not come through any committee. We have not had anything to do with it. We are going to simply accept what a few Senators negotiated and went through and call it a victory and call it bipartisan. It is nothing of the sort.

Worse than that is the bill that this rule is to advance, and that is the so-called BBB bill. Now, my friends call it the Build Back Better bill. I call it the bad bad bad bill. It has been cobbled together in a convoluted process of missed deadlines, broken promises, and legislative sleight of hand. The defects are almost, Madam Speaker, too many to mention.

My friends will say it is paid for. It is not. Quite frankly, they have about $1.5 trillion of revenue as far as we can tell, and they have ``$1.75 trillion'' with expenditures. But they intend to make every program here for 1 year or 3 years or 5 years permanent. So if you add them all together, it is a minimum of $4 trillion with $1.5 trillion of revenues. So it is an outrageously unbalanced bill.

Some of my friends are going to vote for this because it has immigration in it. Really? Immigration, frankly, will not survive the Senate Parliamentarian, and everybody on your side knows it.

Some of them are going to vote for it because it has State and local tax reform, which is a nice way of saying, my gosh, tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires in blue States. That too, by the way, will probably be changed in the United States Senate if you believe Senator Sanders and Senator Warren and look at what they have to say about this thing.

Finally, we have some people who say: Well, I am going to vote for it because it is just the right thing to do.

It is the wrong thing to do for the American people.

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Mr. COLE. This bill, by the way, will not get better in the Senate.

Now, when it was sold to your side, you were told that we are not going to move ahead until we have an agreement the Senate will accept. The Senate won't accept this bill. We are going to send it over there, and a few Senators are going to write it and send it right back. If you don't like it now, you are going to like it less when it gets here.

Madam Speaker, we should defeat the rule; we should defeat the infrastructure package; and when it comes, we should defeat the bad bad bad bill.

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