Providing for Consideration of H.R. 644, Fighting Hunger Incentive Act of 2015, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. 636, America's Small Business Tax Relief Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, today we are considering two pieces of tax
legislation under closed rules. These mark our 10th and 11th closed
rules in the first 6 weeks of the 114th Congress. Sadly, this has
become the standard operating procedure in the Republican House.

In 2011, when Republicans took the majority, Speaker Boehner promised
``the right to a robust debate in open process.'' He promised many open
rules. Instead, we have just ended the most closed Congress in history.
And if these past 6 weeks are any indication of where we are headed,
this leadership seems intent on breaking its own record for denying
open debate on the House floor.

I also want to point out that the Department of Homeland Security
runs out of money February 28, 16 days from now. Press reports indicate
that the Republican leadership is scrambling to gather the votes
necessary to pass a bill.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I have some advice for my friends in the majority.
Instead of yelling, instead of pouting and swearing, bring to the floor
a clean Department of Homeland Security Appropriations bill, the
bipartisan negotiated compromise that has been ready to go since last
November. This is a bill that could and should be sent to the President
as quickly as possible, especially considering the international and
national homeland security situation facing the U.S. and the world at
this very, very moment.

So I have to say that I am a little perplexed as to why the majority
has chosen this week to bring to the floor a package of tax breaks that
are not paid for, that are going nowhere, 5 legislative days before the
Department of Homeland Security is going to be forced to shut down
because of Republican dithering.

And I say going nowhere because Senate Republicans have said quite
clearly that these bills will not likely be considered in committee or
by the full Senate. Let me repeat that. These bills are going nowhere
because of the Republicans in the Senate. They have made it pretty
clear.

So the clock is ticking on funding our Homeland Security programs,
Mr. Speaker. Are the Republican leaders planning to let the clock run
out, planning to create another crisis?

We should be debating a clean Department of Homeland Security bill
right now. We ought to vote in a bipartisan way to pass it, have the
Senate do the same thing, send it right to the President, and actually
accomplish something.

I am also concerned, Mr. Speaker, with the partisan approach taken by
the Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee in advancing these
particular tax measures. We went through this same exercise last year with a similar set of bills, only to pass in the final weeks of the
113th Congress a 1-year comprehensive ``tax extenders'' package. The
Republican leadership in the House is setting the stage for a similar
confrontation this year, instead of working in a productive and
bipartisan manner on comprehensive tax reform.

That is something that the American people, Democrats and
Republicans, all want. They want us to be working on it, and they want
us to pass a bipartisan comprehensive tax reform bill.

The seven tax provisions before us today, packaged into two bills,
will add more than $93 billion to the deficit. There was a time when my
Republican friends actually cared about the deficit. I guess those days
are gone.

While I support the goals of many of the provisions contained in
these bills, I cannot vote for legislation that targets only a handful
of tax provisions, chooses to elevate them and make them permanent at
the expense of other tax priorities, and then refuses to pay for them--
absolutely refuses to pay for them.

This Republican package does nothing, absolutely nothing to address
key priorities, like the work opportunity tax credit and the new
markets tax credit. It fails to address the long-term status of the
child tax credit and the earned income tax credit that work to reduce
poverty.

If these tax provisions are allowed to expire in 2017, as currently
scheduled, many working poor families would lose their child tax
credit, and many low-income married couples and larger families would
see a cut in their EITC. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
estimates that if the EITC and the CTC provisions were to expire,
``more than 16 million people in low-income working families, including
8 million children, would fall into--or deeper into--poverty.''

The piecemeal, deficit-spending approach taken by this majority puts
these working family tax provisions at risk.

Mr. Speaker, I was pleased to see members of the Republican
leadership at D.C. Central Kitchen the other day talking about hunger.
D.C. Central Kitchen does incredible work to feed the hungry and help
people get back on their feet.

But count me as a little skeptical because time after time after time
after time, Republicans have targeted poor people and the programs that
help them.

If my friends on the other side of the aisle are serious about ending
hunger, they need to do much more than encourage donations to food
banks. First and foremost, they should stop targeting SNAP, the
Nation's premier antihunger program. They should stop treating SNAP as
an ATM machine for other programs.

Instead, they should work with us to increase the minimum wage or at
least give us a vote on increasing the minimum wage. They should work
with us to expand job training programs and make child care more
affordable. They should work with us to fix the major flaw in our
social safety net; namely, that when someone gets a job that doesn't
pay very much, they tend to lose all their benefits and end up
struggling, once again, to put food on the table, find day care for
their kids, keep their house warm, and pay the rent.

We need desperately to have a serious and thoughtful discussion about
the long-term sustainability of our safety net programs.

The Fighting Hunger Incentive Act makes permanent the enhanced
deduction for contributions of food inventory. I strongly support our
food banks and charitable organizations that work each and every day to
feed the hungry in this country. I support efforts that provide
incentives to donate food to these organizations. But one tax break
does not constitute a plan to address hunger. And it certainly does not
make up for the cuts to SNAP and other safety net programs that have
been proposed and enacted by this Republican majority.

So in closing, again, I would urge my colleagues to pay attention to
today's National Journal Daily, the headline: ``So Far, a Congress
About Nothing.'' That is what this Congress is becoming known as, ``a
Congress about nothing.''

Well, work with us in a bipartisan way to change this headline, and
you could do that by allowing a clean Department of Homeland Security
Appropriations bill to come before us. We can pass it in a bipartisan
way, and we can meet the national security needs of our country and
actually do something before we go home on another break.

With that, I urge my colleagues to reject this rule and the
underlying legislation.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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MR. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Again, I urge my colleagues to read the National Journal Daily today
and pay close attention to this headline,

``So Far, a Congress About Nothing.'' And that is basically what we are
doing here today

The tax provisions that we are talking about here today, the
Republicans over in the Senate are saying that they don't intend to
bring any of these before the relevant committees or bring them to the
floor. They are trying to work on a more long-term comprehensive tax
reform bill, as we should be here. So we can't blame the Democrats for
that. It is the Republicans in the Senate who have said they aren't
going to take this up.

So then the question arises, why are we doing this? Why aren't we
doing something that is more urgent and more pressing, like passing a
Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill?

And let's be clear about what the problem is. There is a bipartisan
bill that Democrats and Republicans agree on on funding the Department
of Homeland Security. What some of the more extreme elements in the
House of Representatives on the Republican side have done is they have
loaded it up with all kinds of anti-immigration provisions.

They have decided that that is where they want the debate on
immigration, so all of a sudden, this bill has been loaded up with
extraneous issues that don't belong on this bill. Quite frankly, we
think that that is wrong, and Democrats in the Senate think it is
wrong. What we are saying is actually bring before both bodies a clean
bill.

What is so wrong with that? If you don't like what the President is
doing on immigration, bring up a separate bill or sue him again because
that seems to be what my Republican friends like to do all the time,
but don't hold up a Department of Homeland Security bill for a
political battle on an issue, quite frankly, that does not belong on an
appropriations bill.

Mr. Speaker, again, there are only 16 days left until the funding of
the Department of Homeland Security expires. It is 16 days, but 5
legislative days only. If it expires, it would shut down many of the
crucial operations that keep our country safe.

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an
amendment to the rule that will allow for consideration of a clean
Department of Homeland Security funding bill. With such serious
consequences, it is time to put politics aside in order to strengthen
our homeland and protect American families.

To discuss our proposal, I will yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman
from New York (Mrs. Lowey), the distinguished ranking member on the
Committee on Appropriations.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume
to respond to a few of the points that the gentleman has made in his
speech on the floor here.

First of all, about the process--these are closed rules that we are
dealing with here today. Yes, while it has been traditional to give tax
provisions closed rules, there were Members who actually brought
amendments to the House Rules Committee to help pay for some of these
that I think might have been able to earn bipartisan support because I
think there are some Members on your side of the aisle who would like
these paid for and do not want to add to the deficit, but they were not
made in order in the Rules Committee.

There may be other ideas on how to pay for this so we can truly have
a bipartisan vote on this and not add to the deficit, but we will not
have that opportunity because of the rule.

Again, Mr. Speaker, these provisions that we are talking about would
add $93 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years. Yes, maybe
Republicans and Democrats in the past have extended these without pay-
fors, but that doesn't make it right. It just means we both added to
the deficit. Maybe we ought to get serious about Pay-As-You-Go.

My friends on the other side of the aisle insist that emergency
unemployment benefits have to be paid for, but when it comes to any
kind of tax cut, they don't believe anything has to be paid for, so we
should have a more open process on this.

My friend talks about certainty, that all we are trying to do is give
people certainty, but that is not the case. It is not the case because
the President has said that he would threaten to veto these bills if
they weren't paid for. It is what Republican leaders in the Senate have
said.

Roy Blunt, our former colleague in the House, made it very clear. He
said:

As long as the Finance Committee in the Senate feels there
is an opportunity for overall tax reform, I think you are
going to not see a quick response to individual bills coming
over here. We may deal with them later on down the aisle, but
there is no sense that the Senate is going to act on this any
time soon.

When we talk about providing people certainty, that is not what we
are doing here. This is about just kind of going through the motions
for the sake of going through the motions.

Finally, on the Department of Homeland Security bill, yes, the House
acted and attached all these radical anti-immigrant riders to the
Department of Homeland Security Appropriations bill.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, told reporters on
Tuesday:

I think it is clear we cannot go forward in the Senate, so
the next move, obviously, is up to the House.

Today is Thursday. Tomorrow we leave for a break, and it doesn't seem
like Republican leaders feel the same sense of urgency that we do over
here that we need to get this business completed.

Republicans are obviously refusing to admit the reality of this kind
of dangerous anti-immigrant grandstanding. In fact, when reporters
asked House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy whether the House would take
up a new DHS funding bill, he said, ``Why do we have to?''

Let me respond to the majority leader. The reason why we have to is
because our primary job here is to protect the people of the United
States of America. By letting this bill lapse, we are failing in our
responsibility.

Mr. Speaker, at this time, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from
California (Ms. Roybal-Allard).

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the remaining time.

Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, I am going to urge my colleagues to
vote against the previous question. If we defeat the previous question,
I will bring up an amendment that will allow for there to be a clean
vote on the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill. No
controversial anti-immigrant riders, just the bill that a bipartisan
group of Members and the Appropriations Committees agreed on in an up
or down vote.

I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment in the
Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote
on the previous question.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, while I have great respect for my friend
on the Rules Committee, and I sometimes get frustrated by the Senate as
well, the fact of the matter is, at least in the Senate, they are
voting on a lot more amendments than we are in the House. We don't have
an open process here. We have one of the most closed processes, if not
the most closed process, in history. That is where a lot of the
frustration comes from.

On these tax provisions, I think there is broad bipartisan support on
the policy. I support, I think, mostly all of them. If we worked in a
bipartisan way to make sure they were paid for, I think you would get
a unanimous vote here in the House.

But for some reason, this notion of working in a bipartisan way is
something that my friends on the other side of the aisle just refuse to
do. It is their way or the highway. It is one political message vote
after another, after another, after another. I think people are getting
sick of it.

I go back to the headline in the National Journal Daily: ``So Far, a
Congress About Nothing.'' The reason why it is about nothing is that
this Chamber is not working.

There is no bipartisanship here when it comes to legislation; there
is no give and take. Routinely, we are being forced to vote up or down
on bills that, quite frankly, with a few tweaks and some improvements,
would pass. And the bills that we are talking about here I think would
pass overwhelmingly if we just open up the process a little bit, a
little give-and-take.

Let's also be clear, we are not providing anybody with any certainty
about anything. The Senate leaders of the relevant committees that
would take up this tax legislation have said clearly they are not going
to take it up, not any time soon. So it is not urgent that we be
debating and doing these bills here today. What is urgent is the
Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill.

For the life of me, I don't understand why the Republican leadership
can't override the views of a handful of extremists in their party who
are insisting on maintaining these anti-immigration riders, holding the
Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill hostage, and
thereby jeopardizing the security of the people of the United States of
America.

We have 5 legislative days left to deal with this, and we are leaving
tomorrow for a break. Again, we go home and tell our constituents when
they ask, ``What have you accomplished?'' the answer is, ``Nothing.''

We have done nothing. Yes, we have had debates, we have had votes,
but on things that are going nowhere. Not only because the President
has threatened vetoes on most of the legislation, but because the House
Republicans are saying: The stuff you are sending over to us is too
extreme.

What have we done? We voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act for the
57th or the 58th time, another waste of taxpayer money going nowhere.
We voted on the Keystone bill twice, closed rules, and voted on a bill
to basically deny women essential reproductive rights that was so over
the top and so extreme that the Republican leadership had to pull it
and substitute it with something else.

So that has been the total amount of work that has been done here. I
don't know how my Republican friends go home and brag about, or even
talk about, what we have been doing here when it has amounted to
nothing.

Let's do something. Let's defeat the previous question. Allow me to
bring up an amendment that would allow for a clean vote on a Department
of Homeland Security appropriations bill. We can come together in a
bipartisan way, pass it overwhelmingly in the House, pass it
overwhelmingly in the Senate. You will all be invited down to the White
House when the President signs it into law. We all can agree on it and
show our constituents, Democrats and Republicans alike, that we can
work together and we can get something done, that we are not a Congress
just about nothing.

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