Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I thank my friend from Oklahoma. I will be very brief.

Madam President, Americans woke up yesterday stunned to read that Democrats had voted to end debate on the latest version of this massive bill while they were sleeping. They will be stunned again when they learn about this second early-morning vote to advance a bill that most of them oppose. Americans are right to be stunned because this bill is a mess. And so was the process that was used to get it over the finish line.

Americans are outraged by the last-minute, closed-door, sweetheart deals that were made to gain the slimmest margin for passage of a bill that is all about their health care. Once the Sun came up, Americans could see all the deals that were tucked inside this grab bag, and they do not like what they are finding. After all, common sense dictates that anytime Congress rushes, Congress stumbles. It is whether Senator so-and-so got a sweet enough deal to sign off on it. Well, Senator so-and-so might have gotten his deal, but the American people have not signed off.

Public opinion is clear. What have we become as a body if we are not even listening to the people we serve? What have we become if we are more concerned about a political victory or some hollow call to history than we are about actually solving the problems the American people sent us here to address? This bill was supposed to make health care less expensive. It does not. Incredibly, it makes it more expensive.

Few people could have imagined that this is how this debate would end--with a couple of cheap deals hidden in the folds of this 2,700-page bill and rushed early-morning votes. But that is where we are. Americans are asking themselves: How did this happen? How did a great national debate that was supposed to lead to a major bipartisan reform lead to a bag full of cheap legislative tricks inside a $2.3 trillion, 2,733-page bill that actually makes health care costs go up?

This legislation will reshape our Nation in ways its supporters will come to regret. But they cannot say they were not warned. The verdict of the American people has been clear for months: They do not want it.

Madam President, I thank my friend from Oklahoma, and I yield the floor.

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Mr. McCONNELL. I thank my friend from Oklahoma.

One thing about rushing, not only is there a potential violation of the provision the Senator from Oklahoma mentioned, but we are learning more about this bill every day as we scrub it and try to understand it and figure out what all is in it. All of that, of course, is made more possible by rushing things through in sort of an expedited, hurried fashion to get it by the American people before Christmas in the hopes they will not notice.

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