Legislative Program
Floor Speech
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, on Monday, the House will meet at 12 p.m. for morning-hour and 2 p.m. for legislative business, with votes postponed until 6:30 p.m.
On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the House will meet at 10 a.m. for morning-hour and 12 p.m. for legislative business.
On Friday, the House will meet at 9 a.m. for legislative business.
Mr. Speaker, the House will consider several bills under suspension of the rules. The complete list of suspension bills will be announced by the close of business today.
Mr. Speaker, the Budget Committee has announced a markup for the Build Back Better Act for tomorrow and Saturday. It is my intention to bring it to the floor next week.
This legislation will help move tens of millions of Americans closer to economic security while also making transformational investments in making childcare more affordable, helping Americans access healthcare, and addressing climate change with the seriousness that it deserves and demands.
On September 27, pursuant to the rule passed on August 24, the House will consider the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This legislation passed the Senate on a bipartisan basis last month and would create millions of good jobs all across America by investing in critical infrastructure.
That bill and the Build Back Better America Act are the essence of the vision and program that has been proposed by President Biden, which, as I said, will grow millions of jobs and make the lives of Americans more secure and safer.
3110, the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, which amends the Fair Labor Standards Act to provide workplace protections for mothers to pump breast milk in the workplace.
H.R. 3992, the Protect Older Job Applicants Act, which allows applicants to bring a disparate claim under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 when they experience age discrimination while seeking a job.
In addition, H.R. 2119, the Family Violence Prevention and Services Improvement Act of 2021, which modifies, expands, and reauthorizes the fiscal year 2026 Family Violence and Prevention Services program, which funds emergency shelters and supports related assistance for victims of domestic violence.
Mr. Speaker, lastly, there may be additional legislative items as possible and as necessary.
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Mr. HOYER. The Budget Committee is going to take it up tomorrow. They don't need a CBO score for that. The Budget Committee chairman is seeking a CBO score as soon as that can be attained, but I don't know that particular date that that will occur.
Clearly, this bill has been under consideration for a very long period of time, and the President proposed it a very long time ago, in the early part of this year. So it is something that the CBO has been considering, that the committee has been considering. Hopefully, the CBO can produce a score relatively quickly. But I don't, in answer to the gentleman's question, have a specific time or date.
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, it is my expectation that we will be getting a score. I want to tell the gentleman it is also my understanding that the expenditures that will be proposed will be paid for.
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Mr. HOYER. New revenue.
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Mr. HOYER. As I said, the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on Finance have worked on revenues to pay for what we are going to buy so that we do not create additional debt. That is my view, that they continue to have that intention.
There are use taxes on a lot of things, and there are also corporate taxes in that bill. There are some additional revenue items in that bill as well. But I can't tell you exactly because they have not offered a manager's amendment, which I expect to have offered at the Committee on Rules. That does not come out of the Budget Committee, as the gentleman knows.
The Budget Committee is going to put together the 12 bills and send them to the Committee on Rules, and then the Committee on Rules will act on them. I expect a manager's amendment, but I cannot predict for the gentleman what that manager's amendment will be at this point in time.
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Mr. HOYER. It is possible.
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Mr. HOYER. Well, we have to see what the Budget Committee does tomorrow.
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Mr. HOYER. We all will.
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Mr. HOYER. We will have to see how the debate goes on Monday, see how long that takes.
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Mr. HOYER. I have advised Members that, obviously, we have a lot of work to do and that we have scheduled a number of workweeks, committee workweeks--which, by the way, I think have been very successful. We started those in June of last year, and I think they worked out very well, giving the committees an opportunity to meet uninterrupted by having to come to the floor.
With votes, as we know, we continue to have the challenge not only of COVID but the variant, an additional illness spike, so we are still having votes longer than we otherwise would have. So I think that those work periods have worked very well, and there are some scheduled for October.
But I have also advised Members that we have a lot of work to do, and if we need more legislative time, we will provide for that, and Members will get sufficient notice for that. But I did want to put them on notice that we may have to have more floor time than is currently provided for by the committee workweek schedule.
But as soon as we have a sense of when those days will be needed, we will let Members know.
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Mr. HOYER. Well, obviously, the government funding authority ends on September 30 at midnight, the end of the fiscal year, and it would be our intention to deal with whatever bill the Senate sends back to us-- if, in fact, they do not take our bill--as soon as it comes to us.
We believe that it is absolutely essential not to shut down government, which is costly, disrupts the lives of the American people and those who are expecting services, and is irresponsible.
Even more irresponsible is not increasing the debt limit. I have been saddened on a regular basis that our Republican colleagues are prepared to vote for debt limits when you have a Republican President and not when you have a Democratic President, as if somehow it is the President that creates the debt.
The President doesn't create the debt. The Congress creates the debt. This is not for debt that we may create in the future. It is for debt that we have already created, either by cutting taxes, therefore cutting revenues, or by spending money.
As you know, the debt limit was substantially increased under the Trump administration in a bipartisan way. But unlike this year, Democrats joined with Republicans to ensure that the full faith and credit of the United States of America was not put at risk. And the President of the United States signed that legislation, a Republican President.
So it is, I think, very sad that our Republican friends did not join every Democrat in saying we will not put at risk the full faith and credit of the United States for debts that have been incurred.
Now, I have been here for some time, and just in terms of the public debt going up, under Bush 1, it went up 55 percent; Clinton, 37 percent; Bush 2, 86 percent; Obama, 88 percent; Trump, 39 percent.
Now, obviously, those figures all are based on a lower base than their successor had, but it is interesting that under Ronald Reagan, the debt went up 189 percent, and he signed every one of those. And he also urged us not to put the credit at risk.
In addition, on September 8, 2017, the Republican-controlled House voted 316-90 to suspend the debt limit through December 8, 2017, under a deal endorsed by President Trump. The ``yea'' votes included Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, and Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
Again, on September 8, the Republican-controlled Senate voted 80-17 to suspend the debt limit through December 8, 2017. The ``yea'' votes included Majority Leader McConnell, Majority Whip Cornyn, Finance Chairman Hatch, and GOP Conference Chair John Thune all voting in favor of that.
In addition, on February 9, 2018, a year later, the Republican- controlled House voted 240-186 to suspend the debt limit through March 1, 2019. Voting ``yea'' were Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Majority Whip Steve Scalise, Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, GOP Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, all voting for the measure.
Leader McConnell has stated that it would be irresponsible not to extend either the date or the amount of the debt limit. The business roundtable has said this: Failure to let the U.S. Federal debt limit to meet the U.S. obligations would produce an otherwise avoidable crisis and pose unacceptable risk to the Nation's economic growth, job creation, and financial markets. Goldman Sachs has essentially said the same thing, the American Bankers Association, and numerous other organizations that I can mention.
So I am sorry that earlier this week the Republicans voted unanimously against keeping the government open and making sure that we did not compromise the full faith and credit of the United States of America. But I will assure the gentleman, as soon as a bill is sent back from the Senate, that we will take that up. I hope it is a responsible bill.
I hope it does what Senator McConnell, under President Donald Trump, said ought to be done. Perhaps now that we have a Democratic President, somehow the fiscal responsibility does not seem as important as it did when Donald Trump was President, and I think that is unfortunate.
I, personally, by the way, think that the debt issue is a phony issue. There are only very, very few countries that have a debt limit. The debt limit is decided when we spend money or cut revenues, not in some other venue. And once we do that, the assumption ought to be, and I think has been, that we are going to pay our debts as a country.
And the only time we came close to not doing that was about a little less than 10 years ago, and for the first time since I have been a Member of Congress, which is over 40 years, the rating of the United States was reduced, minisculely, but nevertheless reduced. A shocking consequence of playing games with the debt limit.
So I would hope that my friend would urge his party to not treat this as either a political issue or partisan issue, and would treat it as the issue it is, an issue of the fiscal responsibility and full faith and credit to the United States of America.
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.
It is hard to respond, Mr. Speaker, to a not-responsive issue on why we are not voting to extend the debt limit. McConnell said he wasn't going to vote for the debt limit long before there was anything about Iron Dome. In fact, we passed Iron Dome. We passed it overwhelmingly with over 420 votes. It is now over in the Senate, and I hope they pass it immediately, which would, by the way, be faster than they would have done the CR.
Having said that, the gentleman voted for $5 trillion of debt in 2020. It wasn't paid for. We were confronting a great crisis called COVID-19. And in a bipartisan way, we passed $5.4 trillion of spending, the largest amount of spending, I think, in any year that I have been in this Congress.
We did it in a bipartisan way with the expectation that we would borrow that money to meet the emergency that confronted us, and that we would pay for that debt. It didn't have anything to do with politics. It didn't have anything to do with who was President of the United States. And all that verbiage was to mask the fact that, frankly, my Republican friends don't like voting to pay the bills.
They do like to cut revenues, whether or not they balance the budget. And the good news, from their standpoint, was they inherited an economy that was going up incrementally every year.
The gentleman talks about jobs on his tax bill. Under President Obama, who inherited a tanking economy from George Bush, not withstanding the tax cuts that they had effected, during the Obama administration we created 10,838,000 jobs. During the Trump administration 6,688 net jobs. About 35 percent less. But that is irrelevant, it is a smokescreen. It is to distract.
The fact of the matter is we have incurred debt, we have incurred it in a bipartisan way. Whether the objective was defense or whether it was domestic or tax cuts, we created the debt on behalf of the United States of America. We borrowed money and we said to our creditors: we will pay you back.
It had nothing to do with Iron Dome. The Republicans had said if the debt limit was in there, they weren't going to vote for it. They were not going to take responsibility for the debt that they, in a bipartisan way, $5.4 trillion last year, incurred, signed by Donald Trump.
Donald Trump could have stopped every nickel of that money from being spent. He did not. It was a bipartisan agreement.
I believe, although I don't have the figures in front of me, that Mr. Scalise voted for every one of those bills. He can correct me if I am wrong on that.
But the debt limit is a pretense that somehow if you vote against raising the debt limit you will somehow, Mr. Speaker, solve the debt problem of the United States.
No. The way you solve that is paying your bills.
I would urge the gentleman--I don't know what is going to come back from the Senate, but I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, my experience has been, particularly over the last, about 15 years, it has been Democrats who have responded to the fiscal responsibility call of Republican Speakers--Mr. Boehner and Mr. Ryan--who couldn't get the majority of Republicans in their own party to vote for their bill exercising fiscal responsibility. I am proud to say that Democrats were there on behalf of bills sponsored, essentially--I don't know the name of the sponsor on the bill--but supported by both Speaker Boehner and Speaker Ryan. I don't have those figures in front of me, but I can bring them up perhaps next time we talk.
So I would urge my friend, let's get off this political Biden this or--I don't even know if any of those bills have passed because I don't know what list he is reading from, but, Mr. Speaker, he lists the names of bills in Congress.
We passed the rescue plan but got no Republicans on that.
Why?
Because we were over having a Republican President. So now a Democratic President was trying to make sure that this country didn't fall through the floorboards, that our small businesses didn't fall through the floorboards, that our families and individuals didn't fall through the floorboards, and that our childcare providers didn't fall through the floorboards. So they were through voting for those bills. They were voting for them when Trump was President but stopped voting for them when Biden was President. I get that. But the debt limit is about all of us. It is about our country.
Very frankly, as Goldman Sachs and the Business Roundtable and others have said, it is about the global economy. It is about jobs. It is about working men and women having jobs and America being competitive with the rest of the world. That is what the debt limit is about, and that is what the Business Roundtable is saying, not one of our spokes- organs. That is what the Chamber of Commerce is saying.
So, yes, we can argue the specifics, the 4 million less jobs were created under Trump than were created under Obama. We can talk about that. We can talk about a larger debt under Trump in terms of actual dollars. I am not going to talk about that.
Why?
Because we incurred them together because we needed to do so because our country was in trouble and our people were in trouble.
So I will tell the gentleman we are going to--his question was, in case we all forgot it, we probably did--that we are going to deal with the bill that comes back because we are absolutely committed to making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is not put at risk.
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Mr. HOYER. I have different facts.
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
I will not characterize the substance of that argument. However, I believe it has no merit, Mr. Speaker, none, zero, zip.
It is as if we Democrats, when we voted three times to assure that we didn't violate the debt limit under Donald Trump, as if we would say: Well, this is not our debt, this was, after all, the debt of the tax cut of 2017, so we shouldn't pay this.
In fact, the debt, of course, like family debt, is not necessarily for the car, for the mortgage, or for the clothes that we bought for our children to go back to school. It is a cumulative debt, a cumulative debt that--by the way, under Democratic Presidents since President Truman--were increased 24 percent; under Republicans since Truman, 45 percent.
It would be ridiculous, Mr. Speaker, for me to say: Well, I am only going to pay for this debt, that debt, and this debt that I agree with.
Of course, the $5.4 trillion that Mr. Scalise and I voted for in 2020 is a part of the debt that we need to have to service now. In fact, what we of course did, we didn't increase the debt limit per se because politically that was very controversial because people demagogue it. So what we did was we changed the date, which is a ruse, which is a political sleight of hand. It has the same exact effect.
So, Mr. Speaker, with all due respect, the argument that it is not my debt and your debt and this--in fact, most of those bills haven't passed and haven't created any debt yet. I don't know the list, so I don't know whether they have been passed or some have passed. I presume, obviously, the rescue plan did pass, it wasn't paid for. Of course, it was approximately 30 percent of what Mr. Scalise and I voted for in 2020.
But, nevertheless, the debt is the debt; and not to support making sure that America legally can pay that debt is irresponsible.
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Mr. HOYER. I don't know the status of those bills. I will check on the status of those bills.
Let me say, Mr. Speaker, there is a tragedy occurring at our border. There are people in grievous circumstances and in unbearable danger in their home countries. That has been a case for some period of time, and we have some very bad people taking advantage of that and promising them a free route to America, taking advantage of that pain, that suffering, and that fear that so many people have, in this case Haitians who fled their own country, presumably many of them after an extraordinary earthquake and they are living in places that are not their homes.
We all talk about it, and we all believe that America is the greatest country on the face of the Earth. It is. Therefore, it is not surprising that people who are in pain and grieving and are concerned for the future of their children want to come to the United States of America. But, clearly, we cannot take all of the people who would like to come to America.
Therefore, we need a system because America is made up of immigrants. It has been made strong by immigrants. It has been made successful by immigrants. It has been made a great country by immigrants.
My own father came from Denmark at the age of 32 in 1934. Almost everybody who serves in this House, some are immigrants themselves who came themselves to the country. Some at 2 years of age and some at other ages.
The gentleman is correct. We need to deal with this. We need to deal with it in a humanitarian way, in a way that honors our values and respect for individual lives and individual persons. That is one of the great, great differences that we celebrate in America, the importance that we put on the individual.
We said that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal--today we clearly would say all men and women--and endowed not by us, not by our Constitution, and not by our laws, but by God. We have some of God's children who are fearful, scared, and running, running to a safer place. And that place for almost all the world is America.
So we have a responsibility, Mr. Speaker, to adopt a rational, comprehensive immigration reform regime where people will know the rules of coming to America. They will know the rules of how you apply, how you are processed, and how you are vetted. Whether you are coming here because you just want to come to America to succeed and to make your family live in a better neighborhood called America, or you are coming because your family and your are unsafe in the country in which you then reside, we need comprehensive immigration reform.
I would be glad to work very closely with my friend, the Republican whip from Louisiana, on seeing if we can get to that place because we have all been talking about it, all of us.
I think there is not a person in this room--I don't know about in this room, but over the years--who hasn't said our immigration system is broken, who hasn't said we need secure borders, who hasn't said we need secure borders and reveled in the fact that we are a nation of immigrants who have made us stronger so that we can get to a place where we pursue a rational policy for implementing that concept.
So I will tell my friend, I will look at those two or three pieces of legislation he mentioned and talk to the committee chairs about their status and let the gentleman know.
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