Fiscal Responsibility

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert). We have engaged in a colloquy on his time. I am going to start my 30 minutes. He, of course, is welcome to stick around a little bit if he wants.

I am going to just jump off from where he started, or I am going to start from where he left off, and that is to talk about what we are debating on the floor right now, which is the reconciliation bills that we are debating in the House and in the Senate as we speak.

For the average viewer out there, you don't understand what we are talking about. Let me put it in basic terms. The reconciliation process is a part of the Budget Control Act, which basically gives us the ability to reconcile current policies with what we are dealing with, with respect to our spending, debt, and deficits. We have to make that all add up, and we are supposed to do that in a way that would yield deficit neutrality or deficit reduction. That is the general purpose of why we have reconciliation.

Reconciliation, though, because there is a 60-vote threshold in the Senate and that means that certain policies that the majority wants to get in place in the House and the Senate if they control both Chambers, often hit resistance by the minority party in the Senate, that then reconciliation is used to end-run what we call the filibuster--even though it is really just a 60-vote threshold, end-run that in order to get policy even though we are supposedly not doing policy on reconciliation.

That is how stupid your Congress is, America. That is how you are developing policy: through a bunch of arcane procedures, some of which are great and designed to have cooling effects, and some of which are really stupid.

Yet, what we are doing is trying to find every which way possible to avoid accountability and responsibility, and that is, as I have been putting it around here to reporters and getting reported out, to do basic math because that is, in fact, our obligation, is to do basic math.

Unfortunately, a whole bunch of my colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle and a whole bunch of my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle refuse to do basic math. They want to say that, through magic fairy dust and through money trees, they can just wish away the reality that we are going to have a certain amount of inflows and a certain amount of outflows every year. Do you want to know why we are $37 trillion in debt, or soon to be? That is why.

Now, we are having a big debate, America, on what we should do in this so-called reconciliation process. We are going to have tax policy in there that is going to affect our tax revenues to the government but, more importantly, affect the tax bill you receive.

Let me stipulate for the record that when I am attacked a lot in the coming weeks for saying, allegedly, I want to have taxes go up, I am emphatically for cutting taxes. I would like to zero out the tax code, eliminate the income tax, and get rid of the IRS. I would like to do all of those things, and I have legislation to do it.

I will vote for tax cuts, but I refuse to ignore math. If you are going to do a certain amount of tax cuts, which will create a certain amount of economic growth, yes, you still have to model how much revenue will come into the Treasury versus how much you are spending because my Republican colleagues love to spend.

They campaign on tax cuts. They deliver on most of the tax cuts. They campaigned on balancing the budget and cutting spending, and never do it, ever, in the history of ever, with the possible exception of the late 1990s when the Gingrich Republicans, combined with Clinton and, by the way, a dot-com economic explosion, to deliver us a balanced budget. They did it through welfare reform and through some spending constraint. That is the only time in modern history when we have done it.

Here is the problem. This chart shows you what we are dealing with. A whole lot of people are saying: Well, Chip, you and all of these fiscal hawks, these fiscal conservatives, you guys want to do all of these massive cuts, and we can't do it. It is crazy what you want to do.

Let me be clear what we are talking about. We are currently running close to $2 trillion deficits. If we do all of the crazy stuff we are trying to do, we will be running what? Close to $2 trillion deficits. That is the truth. That is what the models show. That is what we know.

Look here. These are the projections of the way things will be if we do nothing.

The blue line, we do nothing this year. We let the tax cuts expire, taxes go up--let me repeat, I am against that--taxes go up, revenues are projected to do what they do, and we will have the amount of debt over the next 10 years we see here growing from almost $30-something trillion all the way up to $50 trillion.

What do these other lines represent? The orange lines are the House bill. The red lines are the Senate bill. We just did a thing where we combined the House and the Senate bill into one budget. We are now negotiating that, and this is all yet to be determined.

Why am I saying all this? No one wants to read all of this. Nobody is going to pay attention to a chart. All of my staff and everybody says, ``Don't use charts on the floor. Just go down and say things that will get clipped and sent around.'' Let me try to say something that will get clipped and sent around.

Even if the House Republicans are successful in working with the President and the Senate to achieve the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in spending restraint over the 10-year budget window, which is a mere $150 billion to $200 billion a year, even if we are successful, we are going to massively increase the debt in the United States all the way to pushing well over $50 trillion by the end of this budget window. That is it. If we fail, then debt will go up a little higher.

We have an obligation to do better. Everything we are fighting for right now in the House is for crumbs. I haven't decided whether I will vote for it or not vote for it. Why? Because I am one vote. Out of 220 Republicans, I am one vote, and I have to figure out how we build a majority and how the Senate builds a majority and then work with the White House to get a bill signed. I recognize that.

There is a limit that I can accept. I just want the whole world to tell me, should I vote for a bill if we are successful at fighting for what we are fighting for on Medicaid reforms, on unwinding the student loans, on cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, on finding savings and fees on illegal aliens here so that we can pay for continued enforcement of the law at the border? If we are successful for all of those things in terms of revenues and expenses, I am still going to burden my kids and grandkids with over $50 trillion in debt.

What does that mean? It means more interest. It means likely higher inflation because, at some point, we can't afford this. That is the fundamental question.

Now, I have a bunch of my colleagues, to the point of the gentleman from Arizona, running around saying that we can't touch Medicaid. Why can't we? Medicaid was expanded under ObamaCare, which we all opposed, and the Medicaid expansion was a big reason why we opposed it. Why can we now not demand reforms to the broken pieces of ObamaCare that expanded Medicaid such that we are giving 90 percent Federal match to the able-bodied, the people who are not the most vulnerable, compared to the vulnerable population who only get 50 to 60 to 70 percent? Why would we do that? Why would we give more to Medicaid recipients than Medicare recipients, which we often do?

Why would we continue to allow States like California and other States to game the system, to get Federal dollars sent back in a money- laundering scheme, as has been reported widely by The Wall Street Journal and others? They are openly and knowingly doing it. Why wouldn't we fix that?

Why wouldn't we apply eligibility rules and work requirements, combined with lowering that abusive Federal match rate subsidizing blue States to game the system when they are using Federal borrowed money to prop up their weak State budget? Why wouldn't we fix that?

I don't have a single constituent I know who thinks we ought to continue doing that. Even more so, my colleagues are running around giving in to these arguments that we are somehow cutting Medicaid. That is a lie.

We could have a debate about whether we should actually reduce Medicaid and give more money in other places or free up the States to provide better service or empower Americans to go get the doctor of their choice and be able to afford healthcare without having an employer- or government-provided, insurance-run bureaucratic system enriching insurance bureaucrats and pharma and hospitals because that is what we have.

We don't have free healthcare anywhere in this country. The freest country in the world, and we do not have the freedom to go to the doctor of our choice. We don't. The average family in this country is paying $25,000 a year to go to insurance bureaucrats to tell them what handful of doctors they can go to, what lousy deductible they get, what ridiculous copay they have.

I have a constituent who died from cancer last year who couldn't go to MD Anderson because she was covered under ObamaCare. Think about that, covered under ObamaCare, sick with cancer, can't go to the best cancer hospital in the world 2 hours from her house. That is your healthcare system, and we won't touch Medicaid.

Our budget contemplates Medicaid going up 25 percent. I am not going to say whether that is good or bad, but can we at least just have the backbone as the Republican Party to not allow our colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the media to say that we are cutting Medicaid when we are increasing Medicaid spending? I mean, it is mind- boggling that we allow that narrative to set in on a program that is broken, that has a trillion dollars of improper payments, that is rife with abuse.

What are we here for? I mean, that would be my question for my Republican colleagues. Why did you run for office? Because I don't recall Republicans running on a big platform of: The government is the solution to all your problems. I don't remember growing up as a child of the eighties listening to Ronald Reagan or, frankly, listening to President Trump's speeches saying, man, we really love government bureaucracy and all the great things it does for the people.

Nobody runs on that. Not a single Republican has run on increasing deficits. Every single Republican has run on balancing the budget. Yet, every year, we vote for more spending. Every year, we vote for more debt. Every year, we increase deficits and add to the debt, every single year.

I want to get right to the chase here because, for the last 2 months, some of us have been willing to walk out and say that we will not vote for the tax cut extensions if we don't get spending restrained. I am getting lots of Republicans around town who like to stir the pot and go and say, ``You are going to vote for a tax increase, are you, Chip? Oh, we are going to hit you hard. We will come after you for voting for tax increases,'' but they won't say a thing about voting for the inflation tax increase on every American family while they run to the hills on spending restrained because they won't do it. That is the truth.

I didn't come to this town for more of the same. The men and women who walked into a wall of bullets at Normandy didn't do it so we could have $50 trillion of debt and destroy our own country from within. That is what is happening.

This country is weaker because the very individuals entrusted to defend her, defend the Constitution, and be responsible stewards of the Treasury have failed them and continue to fail them.

Let me be very clear about the budget we are talking about right now. We see what happens to the debt under our budgets. They go way up, but I am not accounting for the other things. What are those other things? This budget, the House budget, assumes that we are able to figure out how to hold what we call discretionary spending flat.

I don't know if the Speaker, who is the only other person in the Chamber with me, believes that we will hold discretionary spending flat, but history would say we wouldn't. Our budget assumes that we hold discretionary spending flat. That is Defense, DOJ, DHS, all the spending on all the various programs in Commerce, and go down the list.

What else? I read a story yesterday that because of tariff policy--by the way, I support the President using tariff policy to isolate China, restructure our worldwide trade that is being abused by friend and foe, but I just read a story yesterday that they are planning on how to bail out farmers from tariffs.

Remember, 7 years ago, we had to spend $25 billion to $30 billion, $35 billion to bail out farmers for tariffs. This last December, we spent, I don't know, $30 billion or something in a supplemental bailing out farmers. What happens when we need more money for California wildfires, or what happens when there is a hurricane that hits Florida or, apparently, North Carolina or Tennessee? Is that $5 billion, $20 billion, $30 billion, $50 billion? You see, Congress doesn't have the ability to say no to spending.

Let's bring it all back. Should I vote for a reconciliation package that will almost certainly guarantee $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion of deficit spending because I am getting certain crumbs in cuts in certain committees, and the only reason that I have gotten said crumbs was because we threatened to stop the extension of the tax cuts in order to force the question on spending?

Look, I want to absolutely applaud the great work of a whole lot of committee chairs and my Republican colleagues for the work that they have done to identify spending restraint and savings. Education, they found a bunch of savings. I can go through committee by committee. Last night, we added a lot of fees to pay for border security and stuff in the Judiciary Committee. There are other things we could do.

The math is still going to have to be math. We are going to spend about another $300 billion in this bill for defense and border security. That is another $300 billion. We are going to find savings of allegedly $1.5 trillion over 10 years, so that is $150 billion a year. What that means is we are already in the hole.

By 2035, the United States will be spending more on interest per year than all Federal programs, aside from Social Security. Right now, Federal debt is so large that 40 percent of all personal income taxes go to paying interest on the Federal debt. Think about that. We have over a trillion dollars a year in interest.

Spending drives inflation. In 2024, the typical American family needed an extra $17,000 a year to maintain the same standard of living as January 2021.

We have increased spending, our budget, our Federal budget, from roughly $3.6 trillion or so in 2015 to almost $7 trillion now. That is an 80 percent increase.

Does anybody alive think that we can sustain this? Do any of my colleagues, Republican or Democrat, think that we can sustain this? Does anybody alive right now in the Chamber, if they are in the complex and haven't hopped on a plane to fly home because we had our final vote on a Thursday morning and we are going to come back on a Monday night in our usual way of doing things in the swamp, not doing what we should do, does anybody believe that this is going to save the fiscal health of America?

Like I said, I haven't decided if I am going to vote for it or against it. That depends on a lot of variables--the Inflation Reduction Act to actually repeal the ridiculous subsidizing, enriching the Chinese and enriching billion-dollar corporations, and undermining our energy security.

Do we have the resources necessary to secure the border and the fees to pay for it? Are we putting in the provisions that we ought to be putting in there to guarantee that we are going to have the President be able to carry out his campaign promises to remove aliens?

Are we going to have transformational reform to Medicaid so we eliminate the ridiculous 90-percent subsidy of the able-bodied while we are giving a much lower rate of 50 to 70 percent to the vulnerable population?

Are we going to continue to allow the provider taxes and the gaming of the system, the money laundering that is allowing money to go to California to be gamed and to be doled out to illegal aliens and put in their general budget as they openly brag, or are we going to fix that?

Are we going to fix the debacle that is the higher education system? Are we going to restrain their ability to abuse Federal grants, student loan subsidies, or are we going to continue to subsidize Harvard, Yale, Cal Berkeley, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Virginia, both my alma maters? I don't care. I would cut them off and take away their money.

Are we going to continue to do as I heard, which is to create additional taxes on cars, or are we going to fix it?

Literally, in order to pay for the Coast Guard and air traffic control, I heard that the T&I Committee, they were poised to put a vehicle tax on every vehicle in America. Limited government, constitutional Republicans were going to tax your car. We fought and said that is a bad idea. So they got rid of the tax, the $50 tax or $20 tax, whatever it was, on internal combustion engine cars.

By the way, we are subsidizing EVs and hybrids and so forth in order to get the internal combustion engine off the street, but now we are going to tax the EVs that we are subsidizing, unless we repeal the Inflation Reduction Act.

These are the tangled webs that we weave in a government in which politicians promise to give away free stuff. As I have said before, we are not the United States House of free stuff. You can't just print money and give it to people and say, oh, we will take care of your problems. Yet, that is what we do.

Our best case scenario if we pass this reconciliation package is still $50 trillion in debt in 10 years. That is literally the best case scenario. I think it is much worse, especially if our interest is going up and we refinance our debt at higher rates, which seems likely, but here we are just nibbling around the edges begging for crumbs. Please, oh, please, please give me $150 billion a year in savings on a $7 trillion annual budget, up almost twice in a decade, bloated and expanded under COVID, bloated and expanded under both Democrat and Republican regimes.

We have had an extraordinary first 100 days. The President has turned this ship around. We are securing borders. Apprehensions are down 94 percent. We are resetting our position on the world stage, diplomatically, economically. We are rebuilding our military, which was being decimated by the previous administration, unwinding DEI, rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in government, firing bureaucrats, identifying all the things that ought to be cut, and that is a good thing.

In Congress, my colleagues are doing some good things. We have passed some good bills that are hitting a wall in the Senate: the SAVE Act, the injunctions bill, a bunch of CRAs to undo the damage of the Biden administration. We passed five this week to undo the damage of the EV mandates.

We have got to stay on offense, and we can and we are doing a lot of great things, but this reconciliation bill, at a bare minimum, can do no harm, and literally that is what we are begging for, when we are trying to fight for $1.5 trillion in spending reductions, not even cuts. I want to be clear. I will remind everybody about Medicaid. Medicaid, there it is. It is going up 25 percent in our budget, for better or worse. I can make arguments, but it is going up.

Can we at least speak the truth that it is going up? We are begging for crumbs to get $1.5 trillion in reductions over 10 years. We are going to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years. We are just trying to save $1.5 trillion of that massive increase for crumbs to have $50 trillion of debt at the end of that rainbow.

I hope we will come together. I hope we will unite to deliver a product that is worthy of support. I have not decided whether I will be able to support it. We will find out whether it has what is needed. Honoring the Life of Diana Denman

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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I do want to take one second before I yield to my friend from California to honor a dear friend of mine who passed away a couple weeks ago, Diana Denman.

Often called the godmother of the Texas Republican Party, she passed away on April 17 at the age of 91.

I don't do a lot of the floor speeches on individuals because I feel like if I do them for one or two and I don't do them for everybody that I represent that gets tough. Obviously, veterans, police officers, there are things that rise to the occasion.

Diana was a legendary mentor not just to me but to many of my friends, many of the people that work for me, many of my staff. She played a major role in the political evolution in Texas where Texas went from a historic southern Democrat State to a bastion of conservative Republican politics and a warrior for freedom across the globe.

I was proud to have her support, but more importantly, I was proud to have her friendship. She worked closely with some of my dear friends in politics and former bosses like Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Rick Perry, both of whom are dear friends of mine.

She led a storied life. She rode her horse into the lobby of The Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. She acted in Hollywood where she would go on to meet future President Reagan when she was in Hollywood in that Golden Age. She held many positions in the Reagan administration in the 1980s, and she stood strong against the Soviet Union and Soviet aggression around the globe. She was truly one of the last cold warriors, and I mean that in all of the right and good ways.

As a child of the 1980s, I consider myself a proud cold warrior and believe very much that we need to stand against aggression in the same way President Reagan stood against that aggression and stood for freedom and as a beacon of hope around the world. I think we can learn from that era, as I learned from Diana, about doing things with peace through strength.

I will miss Diana, and she will be remembered for her fierce patriotism and her strong convictions. She was feisty. She was committed. She loved her country. I thank her for her steadfast commitment to the conservative movement, to the United States, to defending our country, and in service of the Lord almighty.

I will keep to fighting to live free, and I will remember Diana through those actions. I will miss her dearly, as will many of my staff who counted her as a mentor.

When I think of the people who have devoted their life to the cause and they come and they go and they pass, I am reminded that we are here for these fleeting moments, what will be our legacy? What will be the legacy of this generation? Are we going to put this country back on a sustainable path? Are we going to actually honor our constitutional commitment to having limited government in which people can live free? Are we going to constrain the appetite for unchecked spending and the racking up of debt and the deficits and the interests that are killing our economy, our country, and, frankly, the futures of our own children, or are we going to choose the harder path?

As President Reagan said in 1964, it was a time for choosing. Frankly, we didn't actually heed his call. We chose poorly. We chose the path of a massive, bureaucratic tyrannical State. We have empowered government; we haven't reduced it. We have increased spending; we haven't reduced it. We should actually honor that time for choosing, and in the memory of my good friend who served with President Reagan let's reignite that call for a time for choosing, to choose that path, to choose the path of the Constitution of limited government, of freedom, of responsible spending, and turning over this country to our children better than we inherited.

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