Legislative Program

Floor Speech

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, I would tell the gentleman that would certainly be the ideal. There is no doubt about that. We would like to get to that position.

We continue to consult the Capitol physician on his advice on what we ought to be doing. It would be a lot simpler if every Member had been vaccinated, I will tell my friend. Although, obviously, the information as to who gets a vaccination and who does not is privileged and private information, as it should be, I would ask my friend to urge his Members to get the vaccination so that both sides will know that all of our Members have been vaccinated. That will facilitate getting to where the gentleman wants to get and where, I share his view, I want to get and the Speaker wants to get. So, we will continue to talk about that.

Although we have a regular schedule, it is not the old schedule. It is not the 15-minute vote or 17- or 20-minute vote that we had, which was much more efficient, as you may have seen me quoted in the paper the other day about virtual, that we prefer to come together in this Chamber, in committee rooms, on this campus, to discuss with one another, to work with one another. We think that is the ideal, and we hope to get there as soon as possible.

We are making progress, obviously. We are getting a lot of Americans vaccinated. We are not anywhere close to the 75 percent yet, but, hopefully, we will be there soon.

I would think and hope we could get to 100 percent of Members and make sure that our staff is vaccinated as well. The sooner we do that, the sooner we can accomplish what the gentleman wants to accomplish.

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments.

Let me make a few comments. First of all, the gentleman mentioned about the White House and the President. I am going down with the President, who is going to sign the American Rescue Plan tomorrow, an extraordinary piece of legislation that we are very excited about and that is going to help literally millions and millions of Americans and our entire economy, our families, and our children. So we are very excited about that.

I was required to have a test. Now, I have had two shots, but I was required to have a test this morning by the Capitol physician before I went down to the White House. The gentleman says that you don't wear a mask, but one has to have a test before one gets into the room.

Now, with respect to the 100 percent, I think we ought to have 100 percent. I think everybody in this body and every one of our staff ought to have the vaccine to make sure that we are safe and that others who deal with us are safe. The CDC guidelines, by the way, recommend that people be vaccinated but that they avoid medium and large crowds.

Now, depending upon what the gentleman says, Madam Speaker, if you have 300 people on this floor, that is a reasonably good-sized crowd, and we are in great proximity to one another because of the size of this Chamber.

The CDC also says--the Senate has not listened to the CDC. The CDC says wear masks. So in terms of the gentleman's suggestion about the CDC changing its rules, that is true, but they haven't changed their rule on masks. They say wear a mask and try not to congregate in large crowds.

However, having said that, we want to get to the same objective that the gentleman references, and we are working towards that with the consideration of the safety of our staff, the safety of our Members, and the safety of security folks. We hope to get there sooner rather than later, and we are working on it.

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, everybody in America wants to get back to normal. Everybody in America. We agree with them, and we are hopeful that we will get there sooner rather than later, and we are making good progress.

We just, yesterday, invested a large number, billions of dollars, to facilitate getting to where we want to be. And Americans want to be in testing, vaccination, and tracing. So I don't want to have anybody think we are in disagreement. We want to get there. We want to get there safely. We want to get there consistent with good health practices and the advice of the scientists and the physicians who treat us. But we are talking about it as we were here this week, and we are going to be talking about it next week because we all want to get to the same place.

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Mr. HOYER. The gentleman was here in 2017, of course. There was a bill that approximated the size of this bill. It was about $1.5 trillion, $1.6 trillion. This is a little more--substantially a little more, $300 billion, $400 billion, but in the same ballpark. There were no hearings on that bill. There were no amendments on that bill. It came to the floor, and there were no amendments to that bill. None. Zero.

Now, of course, 83 percent of that bill went to the top 1 percent of Americans. This bill was just about the opposite; 85 to 90 percent go to probably the bottom two-fifths in terms of income level and wealth. Hundreds of amendments were offered, as the committees marked up their instructions from the Budget Committee. Hundreds.

Amendments were, of course, offered in the Senate, as well. As my friend knows, they had their vote-a-rama; they met for over 24 hours. To indicate that this bill did not have a robust committee process in which Republicans and Democrats could offer amendments and have them adopted, I think, is not accurate, with all due respect, Madam Speaker.

Furthermore, this bill enjoyed the overwhelming support of the American people. Madam Speaker, 77 percent of Americans--59 percent of Republicans in the Morning Consult poll, 67 percent of Americans supporting the minimum wage, which was rejected, of course, by the parliamentarian in the Senate; 83 percent of Americans supporting H.R. 1, one of the bills that passed; 89 percent supporting comprehensive background checks, which passed today; 72 percent of Americans supporting equal protections for LGBTQ Americans.

The point I am making is, A, the bill to which my friend refers, the American Rescue Plan, had very substantial consideration over days.

The Ways and Means markup took 2 days and many amendments offered. So from the standpoint of the public's knowing what was going on, I would suggest to my friend that that was very much greater than when the tax bill--about the same--in the same range of, in that case, $1.5 trillion with interest approaching the $1.9 trillion. So we think, very frankly, that there has been a lot of discussion on that bill.

One of the things, Madam Speaker, that concerned me the most was we worked in a bipartisan fashion on six prior bills. One passed on voice vote, the CARES Act, on the floor. Others passed with well over 150 Republicans and well over 150 Democrats--more than that, but well over 300 votes. They were all bipartisan. They were negotiated with the administration--the Trump administration. The CARES Act, Madam Speaker, was about exactly the same amount of dollars, and it passed on a voice vote here.

What was the difference?

Trump was President. That was the difference in all five. And it had been negotiated with him--or the Secretary of the Treasury, to be more accurate.

But substantively there was very little difference in terms of the broad nature of their impact, the dollar value of the bills, and the diversity of their objectives. To that extent, they were very much like this bill.

But, Madam Speaker, what was the difference?

The same thing that was the difference when we did the Recovery Act in `09. The gentleman was here. He was elected in `08. He came here and he voted ``no'' on the Recovery Act. Every Republican voted ``no'' on the Recovery Act--$787 billion. In my view, it kept us out of a depression. But that was not my view alone. It was Bernanke's view and it was the Secretary of the Treasury's view. So we see the same thing happen again. We went from bipartisan to partisan votes.

I, frankly, Madam Speaker, find it hard to believe that there wasn't a single Republican who thought the investments in opening up schools-- some people say, well, you open up schools, that is the big cry now.

Yes, and we are doing something about it. They weren't open when we took over, but they are coming to be open.

I think it is unfortunate, Madam Speaker, that some demean our teachers. I will tell you, Madam Speaker, I have four great- grandchildren. All but one, who is too young, were taught virtually for these many, many months.

And my granddaughter, their mother, raves about their commitment of the teachers to those three children, and the work that they put in, day after day after day.

So are they concerned about their own safety? Are they concerned about the safety of the children? Are they concerned about other children and children taking it home to their moms and dads or their grandparents? They are. So we need to be safe.

But this bill, which all our Republican friends voted against, has substantial billions in there to make the schools safe so that people can go back with the confidence that they will be safe.

So I would simply say to my friend and others that they have talked about openness. In the 115th Congress--that is the last Congress in which there was a Republican majority--there was not a single open rule, not one. In the 115th Congress, you had 103 closed rules. In the last Congress, which we were in charge, we had that number to less than 52, 51. Jim McGovern, the chairman of the Rules Committee, is very committed to trying to make amendments, including amendments on the Republican side, in order; and I have urged him to do that.

So, hopefully, we will move forward in a way that continues to allow this House to operate effectively, and also give opportunity to your side and our side to raise issues.

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Mr. HOYER. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Madam Speaker, I don't think there is a socialist agenda on this floor, any more than I think there is a fascist agenda on this floor. And we hear socialist. When Gingrich was here it was liberals. Now it is socialists; trying to distract from substance, trying to inflame.

It wasn't socialists that stormed the Capitol, and they weren't carrying Biden signs, they were carrying Trump signs.

I am tired, Madam Speaker, of this socialist drivel. First of all, I think a lot of them don't have the faintest idea what socialism is versus dictatorship or authoritarian regimes.

And the schools weren't reopened when we took over. Trump was President for 10 months.

The gentleman apparently wants to say in this bill, open the schools no matter what. We don't care what your locals say. We don't care what your PTAs say. We don't care what your superintendents of schools say. Open the schools because we mandate it.

I don't think that is what the gentleman, Madam Speaker, in the past has stood for, mandating what States do. Now maybe he thinks that we ought to take over the local education systems and tell them to open. We didn't do that.

What we did was, however, gave them $130 billion, over time--he is right, not immediately--over time to spend to make those schools safe; make their ventilation systems safe for kids; make the accommodations in the schools safe for kids and teachers and parents who go there.

So, Madam Speaker, we get distracted by these assertions of some sort of ideological patina that resonates with the right wing in America. And we can do that, or we can talk about substance.

Yes, I mentioned Americans overwhelmingly said that the substance that we had in this bill was what they liked. So, I would hope the Republican whip would talk about the substance of these bills.

We can have differences. But over and over, in the newspapers and on this floor, the socialist agenda resonates in your polls. It resonates in some of the districts; we saw that. It was not true.

Social Security was called socialist when it was adopted; Medicare, as well; Medicaid certainly, socialist, efforts to try to lift people up.

And when the gentleman tries to make an analogy to a bill that sent 83 percent of $1.5 trillion to the top 1 percent in America as being a bill to help the middle class, and working Americans, boy, that is a stretch, Madam Speaker.

Now, I want to go back to the substance of what the gentleman has raised. We want to see us working together. I see my friend from Texas on the floor. He and I have had these discussions.

It is a shame that we accuse one another of this epithet or that epithet and try to put one another in a corner. I lived through the Gingrich era, and that was almost the entire rhetoric that I heard from the floor all the time.

But if we are going to do that, it is going to be because people really do want to work in a bipartisan fashion.

There was discussion--I know for a fact, I was here, and I saw President Obama try to work in a bipartisan fashion on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Yes, he put his bill on the floor-- excuse me--not on the floor, he put it on the table.

And I heard the meetings at the White House. I heard the meetings here when the Republicans said: Well, he didn't try to talk to us; he put this bill on the floor before he even talked to us. Not on the floor, on the table. I know because I was sitting there in the room when President Obama was trying to reach bipartisan agreement.

Zero Republicans, three in the Senate, helped on the American Recovery Act, which kept us out of depression. And I wasn't surprised that we had zero on this reconciliation bill, and I wasn't surprised that it changed from the six votes previously, where Donald Trump said this bill is okay; I am going to sign it; because nothing could have become law without him signing it. And Republicans voted overwhelmingly, in most cases, for it.

But now that we have a Democratic President, they have decided to return to the ``no'' votes that they cast on the Recovery Act, on the Affordable Care Act, which has helped millions and millions of people, and so many other pieces of legislation.

I would urge, my friend, Madam Speaker, to, when we say we want to work in a bipartisan way, let's try to do it. It is worth doing.

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