Equal Treatment of Public Servants Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 5342, the Equal Treatment of Public Servants Act, which my friend from Texas introduced, which was modeled or introduced similarly to a bill that our fellow Texan, Kevin Brady, introduced, because it is a responsible piece of legislation designed to address a problem head-on.

Here is the problem. Everybody at home watching this needs to understand the joke. We are playing with house money yet again. We are playing with funny money. We are pretending and lying to the American people that the Social Security funds that are extracted from their checks are sitting in a lockbox, sitting in an account for them. It is not. That is a lie.

The money is taken out of your check now, and that money is then given to those people who are retiring now, those who have retired. That is the truth. It is a tax.

What happened here was we messed up because we are government. We mess up almost every single second. Government messed up, and now we are trying to fix the mess up.

In this case, my friend from Texas has introduced a bill that responsibly fixes the mess up. It actually tries to go in and say if you are a firefighter, if you are a cop, if you are a teacher and you have got the situation where you have got another job and that Social Security was taken out of your check but you are not getting the benefit of that because you have a pension, this proportional model, which is $25 billion, according to the Social Security Administration, would responsibly address it.

Now, I wish it was paid for. We don't pay for anything in this town. $25 billion at least addresses it responsibly.

What has happened, this legislation that we are voting on--the gentleman is correct--under suspension of the rules, without going to the Rules Committee, I disagree with that. It should not be being done under suspension. The reason it is being done under suspension is because a majority of people in this body discharged another bill, H.R. 82, which would spend $200 billion over 10 years to reinstate the windfall, to basically take money away from Social Security and make it be bankrupt 6 months earlier. That is what this town does.

My friend from Texas is trying to prevent that. We had to engage in political rulemaking warfare on the floor of the House, which we addressed today to try to fix it and put the genie back in the bottle, to guarantee that we would at least get a vote on this good bill instead of the disaster that is a $200 billion hole in the deficit that will bankrupt Social Security at least 6 months earlier, according to the Social Security Administration.

I thank my friend from Texas. I rise in support of it. We should not have to do this. This should have gone through the Rules Committee. We should have amended the bill. We should have a debate about it. We should pay for it. Instead, we are doing the same crap we always do. I support this bill.

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