Providing for Consideration of H.R. Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023
Floor Speech
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Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 456 and ask for its immediate consideration.
The Clerk read the resolution, as follows: H. Res. 456
Resolved, That upon adoption of this resolution it shall be in order to consider in the House the bill (H.R. 3746) to provide for a responsible increase to the debt ceiling. All points of order against consideration of the bill are waived. The amendment printed in the report of the Committee on Rules accompanying this resolution shall be considered as adopted. The bill, as amended, shall be considered as read. All points of order against provisions in the bill, as amended, are waived. The previous question shall be considered as ordered on the bill, as amended, and on any further amendment thereto, to final passage without intervening motion except: (1) one hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Ways and Means or their respective designees; and (2) one motion to recommit.
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Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), my very good friend, the ranking member of the Rules Committee, pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume.
During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only. General Leave
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Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Rules Committee met and reported out a rule, House Resolution 456, providing for consideration of H.R. 3746, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, under a closed rule. It provides 1 hour of general debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking member of the Committee on Ways and Means, and it provides for one motion to recommit.
I rise today in support of the rule and the underlying legislation.
Mr. Speaker, today's legislation has been a long time coming. An agreement like the one we are considering today could and should have been in place much earlier. Instead, President Biden dithered and refused to negotiate with House Republicans, pushing us right up to the very brink of a catastrophic default.
From day one, Speaker McCarthy and House Republicans tried to get President Biden and congressional Democrats to come to the negotiating table, but for months they refused. Over and over again, President Biden refused to meet with Speaker McCarthy to discuss the debt limit and the budget. He insisted, over and over again, that it was his way or the highway, and he told us over and over again that the only thing he would accept was a clean debt ceiling increase. It was that or nothing.
Of course, it is easy to understand why President Biden wouldn't want to talk about cutting spending. Just look at the spending record he has amassed. Since he took office, President Biden and congressional Democrats have increased the 10-year spending trajectory by $10 trillion. They did this by passing a partisan reconciliation bill that spent $1.9 trillion, and then by passing another partisan reconciliation bill that added up to another $600 billion in new spending. President Biden himself issued executive orders that added $1.5 trillion in spending, including his reckless and unconstitutional $400 billion plan to cancel student loan debt.
When you lay it out like that, it is easy to see how we have reached the statutory debt ceiling so quickly, and it is easy to see why President Biden and congressional Democrats wouldn't want any barriers to spending more and more money. They want the gravy train to keep flowing and the spending to keep increasing, which will ultimately lead the Nation further and further into debt.
However, House Republicans disagreed, and last month we acted. We passed the Limit, Save, Grow Act, a bill that responsibly lifts the debt ceiling and changes the trajectory of future spending downward. We agreed that the United States cannot, should not, and will not default on our national debt, but we also put forward clear, commonsense, and responsible savings that will bring reckless spending under control.
What did Democrats do? Nothing; not a thing. Not a single Democrat in the House voted to lift the debt ceiling. Not a single House Democrat voted to save trillions of dollars over the next 10 years. Our friends in the Senate, which is controlled by the Democrats, refused to take up the Limit, Save, Grow Act; and to this day, the Senate has refused to pass any bill lifting the debt limit. Not one.
However, House Republicans have. For all the posturing on the other side of the aisle, I would remind everyone that House Republicans are the only ones who have taken concrete action to avoid default. President Biden's refusal to negotiate for so long was what brought us so close to the brink of a catastrophic default in the first place.
Having said all that, today we are bringing a bill to the floor that will resolve this crisis. This bill is the result of negotiations between President Biden and House Republicans. It is not a perfect bill, but it does represent a compromise between the administration and Congress that is necessary in a divided government. Nobody got everything they wanted, but the end result is a truly historic bill.
Consider what the bill does, Mr. Speaker. It responsibly lifts the debt ceiling through January 1, 2025. In exchange, it also puts in place a series of fiscal reforms that will save taxpayers money. For the first time in history, we are pairing a debt ceiling increase with a year-over-year decrease in spending. We will be spending less in fiscal year 2024 than we are in fiscal year 2023, something that has never happened before in conjunction with a debt ceiling increase. We accomplish that goal while preserving funding for our national defense and ensuring our veterans get the care they need and deserve.
We have also clawed back $28 billion in unspent COVID pandemic relief dollars that are no longer needed, the largest rescission in history. We have cut $1.4 billion that President Biden and congressional Democrats want to give to the IRS for new agents. We will cap future spending at just 1 percent growth per year for the next 6 years. We accomplish all of this without including any new taxes or new government programs, rejecting President Biden's demands to charge hardworking Americans another $5 trillion in taxes.
However, that is not all this bill does. It includes real policy victories, Mr. Speaker, that will improve the lives of everyday Americans. The bill includes the first major reforms to work requirements for SNAP and TANF, ensuring that we can help lift people on these programs out of poverty and into the workforce. The bill also includes major permitting reform provisions, reducing approval time for essential infrastructure and energy projects.
None of this would have happened but for President Biden's decision to come to the table and negotiate. Additionally, none of this would have happened but for House Republicans doing the responsible thing and insisting on fiscal reforms. Together, we are doing something good for the Nation. We are avoiding a devastating default on the national debt, and we are enacting needed fiscal reform to put us on a more sustainable spending path.
I would quickly respond to my friend's statement about the origins of the national debt.
Let me remind him that much of this debt was accumulated in just the last 2 years as a consequence of President Biden and congressional Democrats' reckless spending spree.
Consider this: In the spring of 2021, congressional Democrats, without a single Republican vote, pushed through a $1.9 trillion partisan spending bill.
Last year, they enacted another partisan spending bill, without a single Republican vote, with $600 billion in new spending, partly offset by budget gimmicks and higher taxes.
President Biden himself put forward the unconstitutional and illegal student debt cancellation, which, if allowed to stand, would add another $400 billion to the national debt. This is on top of all regular Federal spending and emergency spending for the COVID-19 pandemic.
As for the military budget, my friends call it bloated. Frankly, I think we should be spending more, but I will remind him we are giving the President what he asked for. If this budget is bloated for the Pentagon, they can ask the White House about it because it is the budget that they proposed.
I remind my friend from California that we actually filed a veterans' bill that increased veteran spending, so that canard is just simply not the case. We, from the very beginning, were going to take care of veterans, and we filed legislation to do that.
Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas for his remarks. I actually voted for that bill in 2008 twice, and I am glad that he is here today. The reality is the bill we are dealing with--it is hard to tell by listening to the debate--is a compromise between House Republicans and the President of the United States.
In that compromise, nobody got everything they wanted. We certainly didn't get everything we wanted, but I think we are acting together, as my friend from Texas suggested, to try and make sure that we don't default; that we don't have a day like we had in 2008. That, at least, is something we can agree on together and celebrate together, and we will continue to try to work together.
However, the preeminent problem we have is my friends on the other side think we can spend forever. President Obama never introduced a budget that balanced--ever--not in 10 years, 20, or 100.
Frankly, President Biden has never introduced a budget that comes into balance at any point. You can't sustain that indefinitely. This effort is to both, one, to responsibly raise our debt ceiling, but to begin to address the underlying spending problem.
I wish we could have done more in that regard, but I am glad we got done what we did, and we will continue to work at this.
Mr. Speaker, just to quickly make a point to my friend, the Democratic Congress didn't produce a budget in 4 years--4 years while they were in the majority, not out of Budget Committee, let alone across the floor of the House. So Democrats left things in quite a mess and it is going to take a while to fix it, but we are working on a budget. I hope we get one.
The reality is, though, the country has allowed itself, primarily under Democratic leadership, to get so deeply in debt, it is pretty tough to write a budget that gets us out of debt in any reasonable time.
This bill is, at least, a step in the right direction. We would have liked to have taken a bigger step. We weren't able to do that given the fact that we have a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President, both of whom seem to think they can spend endlessly, recklessly, and without end indefinitely.
That is not going to happen. Sooner or later that reckoning will come. This is an effort to forestall that and buy some time. I am glad we worked together. I am glad the President came to the negotiating table, despite wasting months saying he wasn't going to. I am glad we made the minimal progress that we did.
Let's not kid ourselves. This is the first step in the right direction, and it is not as big a step as anybody on my side of the aisle would have liked to take.
To my good friend from Florida, what unbalanced the budget was COVID. We all know that. We worked, actually, together on that. That is what spent billions of dollars in a relatively short period of time.
Quite frankly, in terms of where we are today, my friends have never submitted a budget that comes into balance. President Obama didn't. The last President to do that who was a Democrat was President Clinton. We disagreed over how to get to balance, but he actually submitted budgets that came to balance in 10 years. President Obama didn't do that. President Biden hasn't done that.
Until you return to the Clinton era, where we actually did believe in balanced budgets but disagreed on how to get there, I think we are going to have a hard time getting on top of our fiscal problem.
On this bill, we do agree that we don't like every part of it. We would have liked to have done more. My friends would have liked to have spent more. The reality is it does move us in the right direction.
I am happy for the bipartisanship, but I do note it took us a long time.
I also note, for my Democratic friends, remember, so far, to this point, the only people who voted to raise the debt ceiling are on this side of the aisle. My friends have not yet provided a single vote to raise the debt ceiling. The body they control, the United States Senate, has not presented a bill, let alone moved one across the floor. We did.
My friends didn't like that bill. We sat down and negotiated and came to something different, but at least we voted to raise the debt ceiling. My friends who are concerned about it have neither presented a plan to deal with it nor have voted to act upon the problem.
I am hopeful today that many of them will actually join us in that effort because the President of the United States has come to the negotiating table, and we will move forward together.
Rest assured, we are not moving forward as fast as we should; we are not going as far as we should; and we have had to bring you to this point kicking and screaming every step of the way.
My friend ticked through the impressive list of accomplishments in the last Congress. He forgot to mention Democrats also added $10 trillion to the projected debt the United States will have to deal with over the next 10 years.
Mr. Speaker, $10 trillion is a lot of money, but worse than the money was the inflation that they unleashed by their reckless spending. If you care about Americans, you don't push up the price of gasoline, home heating, and interest rates on any purchase they make and what they pay at the grocery store.
My friends managed to unleash the worst bout of inflation in 40 years. I look around this Chamber, and I am probably the only guy on the floor, Mr. Speaker, who can actually remember that. This was an unprecedented disaster that they unleashed on the country.
Everything in the bill that we fought for, the things that are there and the things that aren't there, were to lower the excess spending and to try to tame inflation. My friends act as if it doesn't exist.
I guarantee you, just go to the grocery store and ask any American who hasn't gotten a 15 or 20 percent raise what their life has been like in the last 2 years.
Mr. Speaker, in closing, I urge all my colleagues to support this resolution. With today's bill, we are putting forward commonsense reforms that will save taxpayers money while also preventing an economic crisis.
The reforms included in this bill are historic: the first year-over- year cut in spending in a debt ceiling bill; the large rescission of appropriated but unspent funds in history; the first real reforms to requirements for SNAP and TANF, which will help lift people out of poverty; and real reforms to the permitting process, which will streamline major infrastructure and energy projects and cut the red tape that is holding them back.
Those are reforms, by the way, that my friends did not support. Those were things that were put in the bill by Republicans and negotiated for. Sadly, they weren't willing to work with us on those, and it was only the threat of the debt ceiling that actually brought them to the table.
It is the responsible thing to do to pass this legislation. In the end, the American people will be better off for it.
I do want to be clear on something, Mr. Speaker. This is not the end of House Republicans' fight for necessary fiscal reforms. We have more than $31 trillion in debt. Programs like Medicare and Social Security, which are the bedrock of our safety net, are growing in an unsustainable manner.
For too long, this Congress has seen fit to just allow mandatory programs to eat up more and more of our budget. Indeed, the President himself refused to talk about those programs. Mandatory programs are now more than two-thirds of what we spend in any given year. Without real reforms to those programs, we will have no chance to right the fiscal imbalance the country finds itself in.
Republicans are committed to preserving America's status as the greatest Nation in the world. To do that, we must get serious about the national debt. At the end of the day, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This bill, Mr. Speaker, is that first step.
The previous question was ordered.
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