Small Business Tax Relief Act of 2007--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

SMALL BUSINESS TAX RELIEF ACT OF 2007--MOTION TO PROCEED -- (Senate - July 30, 2007)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I don't want to turn this into a bouquet-tossing contest, but I do want to single out the bipartisan quartet: Chairman Baucus, Senator Rockefeller, who is here, Senator Grassley, and Senator Hatch. To carve out hours and hours, as the four of them have day after day, is evidence of their commitment. I just want them to know I am very much aware we would not be here today advocating for America's kids without their work and their effort to find common ground. I wish to start the day by praising the four of them.

Mr. BAUCUS. If the Senator will yield, I note the Senator from West Virginia is a very busy man and he could be doing other things, other meetings, and so forth, but he has decided to stay on the floor during all debate on this bill, and I think that is a testament to how strongly he is committed to getting this legislation passed, as well as the Senator from Oregon. The two of you could be vying for who is an even stronger advocate for health care, and you both do a good job.

Mr. WYDEN. I thank you and all four of you for your efforts.

Mr. President, it seems to me this is the opening bell of round one in the fight to fix health care in America. Fixing health care is the premier domestic issue of our time.

Suffice it to say we heard in the Senate Finance Committee and we hear on the floor of the Senate every day that the current health care system cannot be sustained. The costs are going up too dramatically. The rapid growth of the elderly population is, of course, relentless, and the disadvantage our employers face every day competing in tough global markets cannot be sustained.

My sense is the challenge for the United States is twofold. One--and this is embodied by what Senator Rockefeller, Senator Baucus, Senator Hatch, and Senator Grassley are doing--is to meet the immediate needs of the most vulnerable Americans, immediately. It is obscene that millions of youngsters, in a country as rich and strong and prosperous as ours, go to bed at night without decent health care. The bipartisan effort of these four Senators is moving to erase this moral blot on our country. I am proud to be supporting the four of them in this effort.

But as we move to tackle these immediate needs of the most vulnerable Americans, let us also set about the task of trying to transform American health care. Senator Bennett, a member of the Republican leadership, has joined me in this effort. We brought to the floor of the Senate the first bipartisan health reform bill in more than 13 years. As Senator Rockefeller knows, as we are both admirers of the late John Chafee, his was the last, and Senator Bennett and I want to work with colleagues to pick up on this effort. Senator Bennett and I have tried to build on the bipartisanship embodied by Senator Rockefeller, Senator Hatch, Senator Baucus, and Senator Grassley.

What we are saying is that you need something of an ideological truce on health care in our country. I think my party has been right in saying you have to get everybody covered. It is the moral thing to do. If you don't do it, the people who are uninsured shift their bills to the insured. But I think colleagues on the other side of the aisle have had a point as well in saying that you just can't turn everything over to Government, that there is a role for the private sector. So Senator Bennett and I are trying to pick up on the prospect of an ideological truce, just as Senators Rockefeller, Baucus, Grassley and Hatch have tried to do on the children's health program.

I can tell my colleagues, having served on the Senate Finance Committee through the markup, and through those weeks and weeks of discussion, that what Senator Rockefeller and the other leaders of the Finance Committee had to do was a heavy lift. There are a lot of colleagues on our side of the aisle who wanted to spend more. They were interested in covering other groups of citizens. That was unacceptable to colleagues on the other side. So Senator Rockefeller and Senator Baucus had to swallow hard; they had to make concessions on points that were important to them. That is what Senator Bennett and I are trying to do in terms of transforming American health care. So I am glad Senator Rockefeller and the group on the Finance Committee have brought us a bipartisan piece of legislation because it lays the groundwork, in my view, for going further.

I have a word for the administration on this point in particular: I am very hopeful they will join the bipartisan effort here in the Senate to find common ground. We know this bill has a long way to go. It will be considered by this body. The other body has other ideas with respect to how to tackle this issue.

I would say to the administration that there are a number of us on both sides of the aisle who want to work with them on a broader piece of health legislation. But to get to that broader piece of health legislation, you first have to deal with the needs of the children. In fact, in the budget resolution--and this has not been widely noticed--it specifically stipulates that the children's health program would come first, before there was an effort to deal with heath issues in a broader way.

Now, I share the view of the administration with respect to the Tax Code in health care. It is a mess. It is regressive. It disproportionately rewards the most affluent in our society and promotes inefficiency at the same time. If you are a high-flying CEO, with today's Tax Code, you can go out and get a designer smile put on your face and write off the cost of every dime of that operation on your taxes. But if you are a hard-working woman in West Virginia or Oregon or elsewhere and your company doesn't have a health plan, you don't get anything out of the Tax Code.

So I am supportive of working with the administration in a bipartisan way to fix the Tax Code as it relates to health care and to fix the private marketplace. But you don't get there until you first deal with the needs of our children. So I want to be conciliatory, both with respect to the administration and with colleagues on both sides of the aisle. We have a big opportunity with this issue.

With respect to domestic issues, one of the biggest ones--the immigration legislation--obviously reached something of a standstill. If we can sustain this bipartisan effort for the country's most vulnerable--and I know of no one in the Senate--no one--who doesn't care about the well-being of our kids--if this effort can be sustained, there will be a broad berth for another effort to move significantly to transform American health care.

Seven members of the Senate Finance Committee, during our discussion of the children's health program, specifically talked about the need to fix American health care. Senator Conrad, the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee, pointed out that over the next 5 years--the life of this program--there will be plenty of opportunities to transform American health care. Senator Bennett and I are saying we want to do it in this session. We don't think we got elected to wait around for another 2, 3, 4 years to fix health care; we want to do it in this session.

We had a very promising hearing in the Senate Budget Committee where support for our efforts was demonstrated by both the chairman of the committee and the ranking minority member. I wish to underscore that even the Senate budget resolution makes clear that this program for children will be done first. As Senator Baucus and Senator Rockefeller pointed out earlier, this is a question of reauthorizing existing Federal law. The country has already made the judgment that the needs of children are going to come first. But a lot of us are not going to say the job is done by passing one extremely important bill; that there will be more to do, there will be an opportunity to do it in a bipartisan way.

While he is on the floor, I want to thank Senator Rockefeller, Senator Baucus, Senator Grassley, and Senator Hatch.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator's time has expired.

Mr. WYDEN. I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. WYDEN. I just want to use it to thank our colleagues who are the principal architects of the children's health program. Because of those of us who would like to go further in this Congress, the bipartisanship the leaders of the Senate Finance Committee have shown is going to give us that kind of opportunity, if the administration will join this bipartisan effort as it goes through this body and the other body.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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