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Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, 4 months ago, Speaker McCarthy invited President Biden to start negotiating an agreement to preserve the full faith and credit of the United States and to begin to get our Nation's financial house in order.

The Speaker stood ready to discuss a responsible way forward, but for weeks on end, the Biden administration and the Senate Democratic leader insisted that there would be no discussion of reasonable reforms to Federal spending. Washington Democrats wanted a green light to spend more taxpayer dollars with no strings attached. Well, the people's House had other plans.

Speaker McCarthy and his team committed to what I said repeatedly was the only way to get an outcome. Just as with 7 of the last 10 debt limit agreements in recent history, House Republicans focused on reaching a bipartisan agreement to put reasonable caps on Federal spending.

The Speaker's deal secures reductions in discretionary spending. But this top-line achievement is actually just part of the story. House Republicans also succeeded in clawing back $28 billion in unspent COVID emergency funds, they eliminated this year's budget for hiring new IRS agents, and they expanded work requirements to put more Americans on sustainable paths out of poverty. They put an important down payment on permitting reform by imposing a shot clock on the costly bureaucratic reviews that hamstrings infrastructure projects. And they forced the executive branch to start balancing the cost of new regulations with corresponding cuts--a move that would have saved taxpayers $1.5 trillion in just the past 2 years.

Last fall, the American people elected a divided government. After 2 years of total Democratic control--2 years of radical spending and runaway inflation--they decided to send a Republican majority to the people's House. They decided to require that President Biden and Washington Democrats start working with Republicans on the biggest issues facing our country.

Now divided government means negotiated deals. It means nobody gets everything they want. But in this case, it means the American people got a whole lot more progress toward fiscal sanity than Washington Democrats wanted to give them.

Speaker McCarthy and House Republicans deserve our thanks. This spring, they passed the only viable legislation that both preserved our Nation's full faith and credit and made real progress toward getting Federal spending under control.

House Republicans' unity forced President Biden to do his job. It is really just that simple. And now Congress will vote on legislation that locks in that important progress.

Republicans have a tremendous opportunity to take on an existential challenge facing our economy and future generations of Americans. We have a chance to start bringing Washington Democrats' reckless spending to heel. Soon it will be the Senate's turn to put this historic agreement on the President's desk. Let's not pass up our shot.

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