Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I thank my dear friend from the great State of Texas, the chairman of the House Committee on the Budget, for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this resolution and in moving this process forward. Let's keep in mind that we worked incredibly hard, especially here in the House, for months to negotiate all the details of what needs to happen in this budget reconciliation. It is all laid out in this House budget. We also need to get started with the reconciliation process.

The process is where eleven of our committees in the House will go to work to start making improvements in so many areas to get America back on track. Ultimately, Mr. Speaker, that is why we all come here. We come here to solve big problems.

We deal with small issues, too. It is not often, but every now and then we deal with a big issue that can actually improve the lives of families all across this country. We can solve problems that have been going unanswered for years and decades. Mr. Speaker, we can address that in this resolution.

Let's go through some of the things that this resolution allows us to do because this resolution doesn't do any of those things, it just opens the door to start that reconciliation process.

The product front and center that most people talk about and that is a big piece, but surely not the only piece, is to make sure that Americans don't face a massive tax increase.

Mr. Speaker, if we listen to our friends on the other side of the aisle, they brag that they want these tax rates to go up. They want the 2017 tax cuts we passed with President Trump to expire. They don't mince any words about that. In fact, it was even talked about during the campaign.

The voters surely had a say on what they wanted when President Trump said he wanted to keep tax rates low on hardworking families and his opponent said she wanted those cuts to expire so those tax rates would go up on those hardworking families.

The hardworking families of America said where they wanted to go. In fact, the majority of all Americans said they don't want their taxes to go up.

Think about which tax rates will go up. On the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, my colleagues love to talk about class warfare as if that is something Americans should celebrate. I think it is insulting to any American who believes in the promise of the American Dream to try to insult and separate our country based on how much money they make.

Whatever a person makes today, the greatest thing about America, the greatest country in the history of the world, is that whatever someone is today, however much they make today, wherever they came from today, they can be anything they want to be if they work hard, play by the rules, and follow their dreams, whatever that dream is, even if that person wants to be a billionaire

Mr. Speaker, frankly, talk to most billionaires. They didn't start off chasing wealth because that is not what gets them there. They chased the idea of something bigger than themselves. It usually involves bringing a lot of other people along with them. It involves creating a lot of wealth for a lot of other people along the way, too.

I guess the people on the other side of the aisle want to crush that ability. Mr. Speaker, go to Marxist countries, which is the utopia of some of the people on the left. Those Marxist countries don't have any billionaires to beat up on because they don't allow anyone to have that opportunity. They tell people what they can do, how much they can make, what kind of job they can have, and what their potential is. That is not America, and that never should be America.

Mr. Speaker, Americans can be whatever they want to be because of what is great about this country. If a person happens to get success, however it is defined--and it doesn't even have to be financial--if someone gets success, why should the government want to punish them for achieving it?

Again, there are great examples all over the world of how failed that approach is and every one of those countries has experimented with that, and it has been a dismal failure. I don't see any of the people, that want to change America to that, going to those other countries, because those other countries are so failed.

Let's start with that. Look at the individual income tax rates. We want to keep them where they are. We would like to make them lower, but we surely don't want them to go up as the other side of the aisle wants to do.

If these tax cuts are allowed to expire, which a ``no'' vote today would ensure, if the tax rates expire, it is not millionaires and the billionaires they keep talking about; it is 95 percent of all families in America who would see their taxes go up.

Unless a person makes $70,000 a year and thinks they are a billionaire, their taxes are going to go up. If they make $50,000 a year, their taxes will go up. The alternative minimum tax comes back. A lot of people don't know what that is because we got rid of it in 2017. Every member of the Democratic Party voted ``no'' because they didn't want those taxes to go away, but, luckily, we got the votes without them and passed it.

For the middle class of this country, that was a kick to the gut. We got rid of that. That would come back 100 percent, and all of those people in the middle class would see a massive tax hike.

Think about small businesses. People love to come here and talk about small businesses. We should do everything we can to help the creation of more small businesses and to help the growth of our existing small businesses.

Mr. Speaker, what happens if there is a ``no'' vote on this resolution?

There is a tax provision called 199A. Very few people might be able to explain it if they were asked to explain it.

Let me tell you what it is. 199A, that would expire if we keep going with this resolution, is the equalizer for small businesses to be able to compete on the same level playing field as a large business, a massive, multinational corporation.

The massive, multinational corporations already have their tax rates set at 21 percent. Think of the small business down the street, the mom-and-pop store, the business that is hiring three people, that is allowing that person to maybe be the next billionaire. They are not there today, but they might want to get there. If 199A goes away, all of a sudden that small business and every small business in America goes from paying a 21 percent equivalent to almost 43 percent.

Mr. Speaker, the small businesses will get crushed because they won't be able to compete with the big, multinational corporations.

I don't know why the Democrats who oppose this resolution want multinational corporations to get a two-times advantage over every small business in America, but that is what a ``no'' vote means.

The Democrats can hide behind billionaires all day long. The billionaires will benefit from that. We want to allow those small businesses to keep thriving. Yes, maybe some of them will become billionaires, and I am not going to attack them if they do. We ought to celebrate it if they do.

Some of them actually don't make it. A lot of them won't make it if this resolution fails, Mr. Speaker. We protect that as well so they can have their shot at the American Dream; so the single mom who has maybe never had a family that was able to afford their own house can go own their own business and one day buy their own house, maybe get a nice car, and maybe get the nice things in life. They don't have that opportunity if this resolution fails. That is what is at stake.

We do a lot of other things that we will open up the door to go do in reconciliation by passing this resolution. We secure America's border. Now, again, this was a major issue on the campaign, and I know the folks on the other side want an open border. Thank God President Trump won and followed through on his promise to secure the border. We now have a 95-percent reduction in illegal crossings at our border. However, that doesn't solve the problem, Mr. Speaker.

President Trump wants to continue to give our Border Patrol agents the tools they need to do their job effectively. Why the previous administration denied them these tools we can all debate, but the voters of this country made a decision in November. They said: We don't want our Border Patrol agents to be at a disadvantage with the drug cartels in Mexico, which they are.

Drug cartels have better technology today than America's Border Patrol agents. That is a disgrace. Mr. Speaker, you can see drones, and you can see night vision goggles not with our Border Patrol agents. Do you know who has got them? It is the Mexican drug cartels. Our Border Patrol agents who risk their lives to keep our families safe don't have that same ability. Shame on anybody who wants to deny them that ability to have at minimum the same technology, if not more and better, than the drug cartels. We give them that better technology in this resolution.

We also do something, Mr. Speaker, that we used to all agree on in this Chamber, and now, unfortunately, it has become a partisan issue. We still believe in strengthening America's defense. Believe it or not, the bad guys are still out there. There are not necessarily more of them, but it is the same people who have been bad for generations, and if we sit back and stay complacent and don't keep up, go look at China's military right now, how much they are advancing their naval fleet that we are not.

We can look at all the other countries, Iran and Russia, those countries still intend bad things on our friends, but one day they want to have those bad things apply to us too, Mr. Speaker.

How do we stop it? It is by having a strong national defense. We bolster our national defense in this resolution.

Why does President Trump call it one big, beautiful bill? It is because it does a lot of critically important things all in one resolution that helps get this country back on a strong footing.

What else it does is it produces incredibly needed savings, Mr. Speaker, savings that the American taxpayers want, as well. They want their tax dollars being spent better. They want to see this Congress find a way to get back to balanced Federal budgets.

Why don't we all work together to do that? We are here working together to do that. Unfortunately, the other side of the aisle doesn't want to achieve that. They want to vote against any attempt to save money. They criticize DOGE when they identify hundreds of billions of dollars of tax dollars being wasted in foreign countries and here on American soil wasted.

People who work two and three jobs and are working their tails off to help provide for their family are incensed when they hear about this waste.

They say: When is somebody going to do something about it? President Trump said: I am going to do something about it. He actually campaigned about that too, Mr. Speaker. He said what he would do, and he is doing it. There should be a parade applauding a President who actually ran on saying I am going to do things and then he is actually following through on the promises.

The other side can still be upset that they lost the election, and they will keep losing elections as long as they stay in denial about what this country wants, but this country, the American people, 77 million of them, went to the polls and said: These are the things we want our President to do, and their President whom they voted for is doing those things. He needs help from this Congress to continue to follow through on that.

That is what passing this resolution today does. It starts that process. There will be more time to debate every one of these items I talked about, and the people who are against all the things I laid out can still talk about why they are against them. They can make up fake bogeymen: Oh, it is the billionaires, it is this, it is that the disabled people are going to lose benefits.

Do you know what we do, Mr. Speaker? We strengthen benefits for people that are truly needed, Mr. Speaker, because so many of these programs that once used to be so great and talked about and lofty have been abused.

How many illegals are here, people who are here in this country illegally, are on some of these programs that are going bust? Yes, they are going bankrupt. Those aren't my numbers, Mr. Speaker. You can go look at Biden's own actuaries on those programs. Biden's actuaries said that those programs are going bankrupt, and the other side just wants to demagogue and say: Leave them alone; leave them be.

To let them go bankrupt would be irresponsible. We can make them work better for the people who are actually here in America who pay into those programs and who have earned those programs or who had something bad happen in their life where they have to be on one of those programs, instead of people who are stealing from those programs. As far as the waste, fraud, and abuse alone, government agencies have given reports on $60 billion a year in waste just in Medicaid, and they want that waste to continue on the other side.

That is what a ``no'' gets us. It is allowing the $60 billion a year in waste in Medicaid and fraud in Medicaid to continue. That is the theft of hardworking taxpayers' money. That is taking healthcare away from the disabled who need it.

Let's actually get back to having these programs work for the people who funded them, who paid into them, who deserve to be on them, and who need to be on them. That is what we do with this resolution.

Let the other side keep demagoguing and keep making up stories, false stories, and personality fights with a person they don't like who won an election and they are still angry about that result.

They should look in the mirror, and maybe one day they will say: Why? Why did all those people, 77 million of them, go to the polls and say: We want President Trump to be in the White House to go do those things he said he would do?

He is doing them. Let's help him do it. Everybody should be supporting this. Whoever is not can still try to be roadblocks. We are going to keep moving forward, Mr. Speaker, because the future direction of this country demands it. The people in this country demand that we keep moving forward and fixing the problems that are holding them back and holding more greatness for this country back.

Mr. Speaker, I urge everybody to vote ``no,'' but anybody who doesn't want to vote ``no'' needs to understand what they are blocking and understand what they are voting ``no'' on.

The rest of us are going to keep going to work for those hardworking people who are tired of struggling, Mr. Speaker. They are tired of waiting for the right kind of things to happen in Washington. We can finally make those right things happen. We do it by voting for this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I urge approval of the resolution.

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