Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROGERS of Kentucky. Madam Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution
495 and as the designee of the majority leader, I call up the bill
(H.R. 1314) to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide for a
right to an administrative appeal relating to adverse determinations of
tax-exempt status of certain organizations, with the Senate amendment
thereto, and ask for its immediate consideration.

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Mr. ROGERS of Kentucky. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I
may consume.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to present the House amendment to the
Senate amendment to H.R. 1314, the Bipartisan Budget Agreement of 2015,
an agreement that helps advance this Nation toward our goals of fiscal
stability, strong national security, and entitlement reform.

These are goals that we have been advocating for years, ones that
will secure significant long-term savings, provide our economy with the
certainty needed to grow and prosper, and ensure the readiness of our
military to meet current and emerging threats.

First, this agreement prevents the economic damage of a default,
which could happen as early as next week, by suspending the debt limit
through March 2017.

Next, the agreement includes the first significant reform to Social
Security since 1983. These structural reforms will help maintain the
solvency of vital Social Security trust funds by closing loopholes,
increasing program integrity, and cracking down on fraud, resulting in
$168 billion in long-term savings. The agreement also finds savings in
other mandatory programs, including over $30 billion in Medicare
entitlement savings.

As I have said many, many times before--and I have heard it said many
times by others here on the floor--mandatory and entitlement programs
make up two-thirds of the Nation's budget and are the primary drivers
of our deficits and our debt. In fact, we have saved $195 billion on
discretionary spending in these last 4 years. In the meantime, the
entitlement-mandatory side of the budget continues to zoom skyward.
Reforms to these programs are necessary and overdue, and I hope that
this bill today paves the way for additional action in the future.

This bill also repeals a flawed provision of the President's
healthcare law, eliminating the automatic enrollment mandate that
forces workers into employer-sponsored healthcare coverage that they
may not want or need.

Finally--and, in my opinion, most importantly--this agreement
provides for new top-line spending caps for the next 2 years. This will
roll back the harmful, automatic, meat-ax approach of sequestration
cuts which gut important Federal programs and slice the good with the
bad, including slicing into our military strength.

A 2-year plan, why is that so important? Well, it provides much-
needed certainty to the appropriations process and to the Defense
Department and all the other agencies of the government, ensuring our
ability to make thoughtful, responsible funding decisions over that
time.

Having established agreed-upon, top-line numbers for both fiscal 2016
and 2017 will allow Congress to do its work on behalf of the American
people and avoid a harmful government shutdown or the threat thereof.
This is particularly crucial when it comes to our national security. It
provides the Pentagon with the certainty needed to plan for the future,
maintain readiness, and provide for our troops.

These adjustments are fully offset by mandatory spending cuts and
other savings, not through tax increases, as the administration
proposed in its budget submission earlier this year.

These new levels do not undermine our remarkable success in limiting
Federal discretionary spending. Since 2011, as I have said before, we
have reduced discretionary spending--that is what we appropriate here
on the floor--by $175 billion. We remain on track to save taxpayers
more than $2 trillion if you extrapolate those numbers through 2024.

With passage of this important agreement, my committee stands ready,
coiled, poised to implement the details of this deal, going line by
line through budgets and making the tough, but necessary, decisions to
fund the entire government in a responsible way.

We will begin work with our Senate counterparts as soon as this bill
is signed.

We have our eye on the December 11 deadline, and it is my goal to
complete our appropriations work ahead of that date to avoid any more
delays, continuing resolutions, or shutdown showdowns that hurt
important Federal programs, our economy, and, coincidentally, the trust
of the people in the Congress.

I want to thank and commend our leaders for their courage, their
tenacity, and their resolve. While I know that this deal is not
perfect, there are things I would change if I had the chance. The
process by which it emerged is less than ideal. I believe, still, it is
in the best interest of the country that we move forward with this
arrangement.

This agreement takes steps in the right direction, from finding
savings in our entitlement programs to protecting our economy from a
dangerous default, to providing for the future of the Nation through
funding certainty.

These are goals that I believe we can all get behind. So I ask my
colleagues to support this bipartisan agreement today.
I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. ROGERS of Kentucky. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of
my time.

Madam Speaker, it has been my goal, as chairman of the Appropriations
Committee for these 4 years, to get us back into regular order.

When I first came here and for many years thereafter, we passed 12
individual appropriations bills funding the entire government, but
separate bills so that every Member had a chance to dissect each of
these bills, offer amendments, debate them, fight them, promote them,
what have you, but at least everyone had their day in court.

Then somehow we got off on a tangent to where we could not
appropriate separate bills. So at the end of the fiscal year, we had no
choice but to pass what is called a continuing resolution, which means
we just continue spending as we had for the last year, regardless of
the needs of the moment.

That is a terrible way to do business. Agencies, particularly the
military, would not have a way to plan their work or to make orders or
to deploy troops and the like, a terrible way to do business. We lurch
from one crisis to another, it seems.

My goal has been just to get back to that business of appropriating
12 separate bills so that we don't need a CR. We hear current needs. In
a CR, you are spending money on projects no longer needed, but,
nevertheless, they are required to spend the money, for example. A
terrible waste of money.

So to get back on track, the appropriations process, our committee
needs to have a top line number to which we appropriate. We have not
been getting that number for one reason or the other. But now in this
bill, not only are we getting a number for fiscal '16, which we will
now use to write an omnibus appropriations bill for current needs and
finish it by September 11, the deadline, we will do that, but it will
be made up of the bills that have passed both the House and Senate
Appropriations Committees and in conversations between the two bodies.

Not only do we have the number for fiscal '16, but we have it for
fiscal '17, and that is very important. It gives us a year to plan our
work to try to marshal through 12 separate bills for the first time in
many, many years so that we, with the Senate, can send to the President
12 bills that have the polish and the content put into it and on it by
the Members of our bodies, the House and the Senate. That is my goal.
That is why I am so strong for this bill. That is the biggest thing in
it from my perspective.

It is important that we are helping our folks who are on Social
Security Disability to take the worry away from them that they have
that that fund will be drying up, which it will be. It is great that we
are taking care of the problem with Medicare benefit increases, the
interest on Medicare. It is important, very important, of course, that
we avoid the default in our debt ceiling coming up momentarily. All of
these things you have heard about in this debate are great.
But for me, the 2 years that we have now to get back on regular order
and stop lurching from crisis to crisis, to stop that business, this
bill will give us that great chance.

I urge Members to support the bill. It is a good one. It is not
perfect, not ideal, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is the
best we can do with what we have, and the alternative would be
disaster. I urge an ``aye'' vote.
I yield back the balance of my time.

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