Reduce Exacerbated Inflation Negatively Impacting the Nation Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Madam Chair, I thank the great Representative from St. Louis, Ms. Bush, for yielding time.

Madam Chair, I rise today to speak against H.R. 347, the REIN IN Act, and I will start my remarks today by saying how ironic it is that Republicans spent the entire first week of this session entangled in a fight in order for them to get the votes to secure a Speaker of the House, and the whole crux of that entanglement was rules to maintain regular order in the House.

Just as we go back to Schoolhouse Rock, Republicans introduce a bill and it is supposed to go to committee, get a markup in that committee, a hearing in that committee, and a vote in that committee. If that bill can survive a committee vote, it comes right here to the floor of this House.

We spent a whole week tied up in the beginning of this term trying to reassert that order. And then, today, one of the first acts that we have from this Committee on Oversight and Reform is to subvert that because perhaps they knew that this would not survive their own committee. So it goes straight to the floor for a vote, subverting all of those arguments that Republicans were making about restoring order to this House.

But let's get into the substance of this bill. Ironically, if they had gone through regular order, they may have caught that this bill does nothing to rein in inflation, in part, because in their haste to put it together, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle committed an incredibly basic drafting error that makes this bill completely unenforceable.

Even if we agreed on their ends, the haste and the rush to put this together and skip committee has created a drafting error that doesn't even make this bill enforceable. But even putting that error aside, my colleagues and I seem to have wildly different definitions of what actually is considered inflationary.

While Republicans have labeled virtually any Federal spending during the pandemic as inflationary--while railing against the child tax credit that helped babies continue to be fed and diapers on their bottoms, that helped families stitch things together, while they railed against the eviction moratoriums and the Paycheck Protection Act-- Moody's Analytics found that the American Rescue Plan prevented this country from slipping into a double-digit recession.

Because of the American Rescue Plan and the actual Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats passed last year, our country's inflation rate is now lower than in the U.K., Canada, and 20 other European Union member states.

Yet Republicans have introduced legislation to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which would immediately raise the price of insulin along with other critical prescription drugs.

Tell me how that is fighting inflation when they are proposing to raise the cost of prescriptions.

Not only did Republicans vote to raise prices on prescription drugs, but they also voted against measures to drive down the price of gasoline last year.

Last year, Democrats presented a bill to penalize companies who were price gouging during the middle of Putin's war on Ukraine. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle voted against that, too.

So which one is it?

Republicans have controlled this body for almost 2 months and have not passed a single bill that would actually address inflation or cut costs for working families.

But you know what Democrats did?

In January, we capped the price of insulin at $35 so that everyday working families can actually get a little bit more ahead. And we have a lot more to go.

But we don't even see a carefulness and a thoughtfulness from the other side of the aisle to even draft the language in this bill properly. It is not even ready for a vote, so why should we.

Madam Chair, for that reason, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this so-called REIN IN Act.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source