Legislative Program

Floor Speech

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

On Monday, the House will meet at 12 p.m. for morning hour and 2 p.m. for legislative business with votes postponed, as usual, until 6:30 p.m.

On Tuesday, the House will meet at 10 a.m. for morning hour and 12 p.m. for legislative business.

And on Wednesday, the House will meet at 12 p.m. for legislative business.

On Thursday, the House will meet at 9 a.m. for legislative business.

Madam 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.

With the short-term extension of the Surface Transportation Program through October 31, the House will aim to consider the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Build Back Better Act this work period.

In addition, the House will consider H.R. 2119, the Family Violence Prevention and Services Improvement Act of 2021, sponsored by Lucy McBath of Georgia. That bill modifies and expands and reauthorizes, through fiscal year 2026, the Family Violence Prevention and Services Program, which funds emergency shelters and supports related assistance for victims of domestic violence.

Madam Speaker, if time allows, the House may also consider H.R. 3992, the Protecting Older Jobs Applicants Act, which allows applicants to bring disparate impact claims under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 when they experience discrimination while seeking a job.

Lastly, additional legislative items may be possible when and if they are ready.

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

Let me say that I mentioned two bills that will have a very, very substantial impact on the welfare of Americans, of their families, of their health, and yes, even of their environmental security in the Build Back Better plan and the BIP plan, which is a bipartisan bill on the Senate side.

I hope to bring both of those bills to the floor next week, if they are ready. Unfortunately, we don't have help from your side on either of those bills so it is more difficult to get unanimity on our side of the aisle.

Madam Speaker, I will tell my friend, all those problems that you mentioned, would be extraordinarily worse if we hadn't passed the American Rescue Plan in March of this year, which helped families extraordinarily and generously to stay above water. Not a single person on your side of the aisle voted for those.

So when the gentleman asked me, are we going to bring legislation to the floor, we brought it to the floor. You all opposed it, however-- unfortunately--that helped families, helped childcare, helped healthcare, helped health workers, helped States all to meet the pandemic that this administration inherited.

The pandemic was not the previous administration's fault, obviously, but the failure to deal with it effectively was their fault.

So I tell the gentleman that 5 million jobs have been created since this administration took office. Some people lamented the 233,000 jobs last month, how awful that was.

In the best year that Donald Trump had, that was his average production of jobs--in the best year he had, which was from January 2018 to January 2019.

So I will tell my friend, we hope to be able to bring these bills to the floor. We think they will have a very substantial, positive impact. We inherited, of course, because of the pandemic--again, not the fault of any--well, we don't know whether it was the fault of somebody purposely, but in any event, for whatever reasons, extraordinary amounts of people were laid off around the world.

Then, because of the American Rescue Plan, we finally gave some people the resources that they could buy things that they had needed and wanted for them and their families, and now we have a supply shortage.

The President acted through executive order, as the gentleman knows, to make sure that we had a 24/7 operation at the ports off Long Beach, off other ports in our country, to try to make sure that we, A, got goods on those ships that you say are to China--I don't know whether they are to China, but there are a lot of them; you are absolutely right on that--to get them offloaded, to get them on trucks, and to get them to where they could be distributed and available for businesses.

Then, of course, we have a substantial shortage of chips, which the gentleman knows, which was caused by a lockdown for major producers-- Singapore being one--of chips.

So, we are dealing with that. The executive is dealing with that as well.

I very much hope the gentleman will help us get that legislation passed, which will make a major difference. Who says? Fourteen or 17 laureates who wrote to the White House and said if these bills passed, it is not only going to help jobs, it is not only going to help climate, it is not only going to help health, but it is also going to help bring down inflation, which is a problem.

Why do we have inflation? Because we have too many dollars chasing too few goods, so prices go up. That is true of employment as well, which probably is good news in terms of salaries going up for people around the country.

I tell my friend that we do have some very substantial, important legislation that we are trying to get done. It would be a lot easier to get it done if we had help from your side of the aisle. And your answer will be, well, it would be very helpful if you would take some of our ideas. I get that.

I will also tell you, if the gentleman is concerned about all of those issues, if we don't protect the full faith and credit of the United States of America, they will all get disastrously worse. And not one of you is prepared, in a debt that we all created, all of us, not all on the same thing--it may have been cutting revenues, increasing spending, this, that, and the other.

We all essentially voted for very substantial spending last year to meet the crisis of the pandemic. All of us did. The CARES Act, the largest of those, $2 trillion, was unanimously passed by a voice vote in one instance.

The only thing I would say to the gentleman is that we are very, very concerned about what is happening. We are very glad that we created 5 million jobs. Nine million jobs were lost the year before under Mr. Trump. He had a net loss of 2 million jobs over his 4 years--a net loss of 2 million jobs. This President has a net gain, and we are going to try to continue that. I hope we get some help from your side of the aisle.

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Mr. HOYER. I don't think I can respond, nor do I intend to respond, to each one of those assertions. I noticed that the gentleman totally ignored the facts.

The presentation the gentleman made, Madam Speaker, was as if the Republican policies were in place, we would be in high cotton.

Let me remind the gentleman, Donald Trump was President; the Republicans were in the majority, Madam Speaker; and over those 4 years, we lost a net 2.876 million people from jobs. The last 12 months of the Trump administration, 9,416,000 jobs were lost. Let me remind you, the best year you had, you had 2,820,000 new jobs. That is about an average of 235,000 jobs a month. Last month, when we were all wringing our hands because it came down substantially from expectations, it was 233,000.

In other words, the wringing of the hands over the poor job performance you seem to reflect was the average of Mr. Trump's best year. In fact, under this administration, helped by a bill, the American Rescue Plan, that every Republican voted against--what was the difference between the first five bills that were passed and the bill of 2021 that every Republican voted against? Donald Trump was President, and then Joe Biden was President.

It is like the debt limit, Madam Speaker. They know the debt limit has to be raised, or all the things that the gentleman just referenced are going to be hurt very, very badly.

Before you start criticizing people for not doing things to help, why don't you stop hurting the ability of the United States to present a balanced fiscal posture to our own economy and to the rest of the world and have some certitude that America is going to remain fiscally responsible and viable and pay its bills? I don't know the answer to that question. Perhaps, Madam Speaker, the gentleman from Louisiana knows.

The gentleman from Louisiana comes from a very important and critical energy producing State of our Nation. I don't blame him for being concerned about energy. He ought to be. We all ought to be. But, very frankly, we ought to also be very concerned about global warming, which the national security apparatus of the United States of America, even during the Trump administration, said was one of the biggest existential threats to the welfare of our people and the global community.

So, yes, we are very concerned about reaching an environment which is not dangerous for life on this planet. That is a very big issue for us. My friend is right, and we are going to deal with that in the Build Back Better plan. We are dealing with it, and we are dealing with it in the BIP plan.

Now, the BIP plan is a plan to spend $1.2 trillion on infrastructure investment over the next 10 years which will make our country more competitive, will increase our ability to produce goods here in America, Make It in America, which will make us more independent and self-sufficient. We found during the pandemic we weren't as self- sufficient as we should be and wanted to be.

These bills that we are considering will do that.

I don't expect many Republicans to vote for it. Even the transportation bill that I think they ought to be for--Donald Trump said he was going to spend $1 trillion, have a $1 trillion infrastructure program during his campaign, and then we went down to the White House, we had a meeting with him, and he said: No, $1 trillion is not enough, we ought to do $2 trillion.

He did zero, Madam Speaker, zero when the Republicans were in charge. Zero.

We are going to pass this infrastructure bill, and it is going to make a real difference. It is going to make a real difference on jobs, it is going to make a real difference on inflation, and it is going to make a real difference because we can increase the supply chain. It is going to make a real difference on the health of our globe.

So I tell the gentleman that he raises a lot of issues, and I would hope his party would start returning to a sense of bipartisanship in dealing with legitimate problems that the gentleman raises which we did in 2020.

Now, we did. We were in the minority. We voted with President Trump. Actually, we were in the majority, but President Trump was President, and we helped support his and the Treasury Secretary's objectives and our own objectives, and we came to an agreement, a bipartisan agreement.

Very frankly, it is unbelievable to me, Madam Speaker, that in the debt limit the minority leader of the United States Senate--and, very frankly, the gentleman just said that we all understand we don't want to--I presume he doesn't believe we ought to not raise our debt limit. I believe he wants us to pay our bills because he knows the catastrophic impact if we don't. But I don't understand why they won't support this. That is not an issue of Democrat or Republican. We all created that debt in one form or another. Certainly, last year we did a big number because we thought we needed to meet the pandemic. We did, and we saved millions of jobs in the process.

So my friend has these bills, we have bills, we are prepared to talk about proposals, as I have told my friend in the past. But, very frankly, there needs to be on some issues--that ought not to be political at all, like the debt limit--a statement that we are loyal to our country, not to Democrats. I said this the other day to the gentleman, the loyal opposition, not to Democrats, not to me as the majority leader, not to any of us, but to the country.

I would implore my friend, because we are going to have to do the debt, we are going to have to do the omnibus, we are going to have to do the debt limit, we want to do Build Back Better, and we want to do the infrastructure bill, those are four pieces of big legislation we want to do before December 30, I am hopeful that we can get some cooperation from the Republicans.

I mentioned the debt limit because that is an issue that the gentleman came to us under the Trump administration and asked us to help with. We knew it was critical for the interests of the country, and on three different occasions we voted with the President at the Secretary of the Treasury under the Trump administration's request and voted to make sure that America did not default on its bills.

Can I ask if the gentleman will at least, Madam Speaker, indicate that they will support making sure that America continues to pay its bills?

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Mr. HOYER. The gentleman continues to say facts that are not true.

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Mr. HOYER. They are not true.

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Mr. HOYER. I do not disagree with it.

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

The reason I said he was misstating the facts is we have a bipartisan bill. It wasn't done by the Democratic leadership. It, frankly, wasn't done by the Republican leadership. It was done by Members of the United States Senate on the Republican side and on the Democratic side.

That bill was sent over here with almost half of the Republicans in the United States Senate voting for it, and my friend's leadership is lobbying against that infrastructure bill which would help all the issues the gentleman raised.

My friend is urging a ``no'' vote on that, and he is threatening Members who are going to vote for it--maybe not very many--because they know it is a bipartisan bill.

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, the whip is talking about bipartisanship. There has been so little bipartisanship, and when there is bipartisanship, their Members are disciplined. When there is bipartisanship on saying that it wasn't a protest, it was an insurrection, there was no bipartisanship on that.

It was a: ``We don't care what it was. We don't care that some people were killed. We don't really care that they were trying to stop the counting of votes for the President of the United States of America. It was just a protest.''

That is what former President Trump said the other day. What a bunch of hooey. There clearly has been a conscious decision made by the leadership on the other side of the aisle, Madam Speaker, against a bill that had 69 votes in the United States Senate. We only have 50.

And it is being lobbied against. Why?

To hurt Joe Biden.

Yes, they voted, Madam Speaker, for the five bills.

Why?

Because ultimately Donald Trump was for them. Not everybody voted for them, but the majority. And as I said, CARES, $2 trillion, absolutely essential, was passed. But the gentleman refuses to answer the question except to say: Well, the credit card was maxed out.

The credit card was maxed out by date in a couple of those votes which we helped as the responsible opposition, as we did with John Boehner and Paul Ryan when they couldn't get votes to pass bills to keep government open or to keep the United States from defaulting. Yes, we cast the responsible vote.

It is not a popular vote because it is demagogued, Madam Speaker. It has nothing to do with the debt. The debt happens when you pass spending or pass revenue cuts. That is what affects the debt, and that is what all of us do one way or the other.

So we are all responsible and we ought to all be responsible. But the Senate leader on the Republican side of the aisle has said he is not going to do anything.

Not only will he not do anything, Madam Speaker, he will not allow the majority to do it on their own because he is going to filibuster so it requires 60 votes. We don't have 60 votes. We have 51.

Not only will they not do the responsible thing on debt, which would adversely affect, if we do not extend it, all the things that the minority whip lamented were wrong; it would all be adversely affected if, for the first time in history, Madam Speaker, we fail to extend the debt limit, which, by the way, very few countries have--one or two-- because it is a phony issue. The debt is not phony, but the limit is controlled by what budgets we pass, what tax cuts we pass, what policies we pass.

Once we do that, we go in the store, or as Jim McGovern, the chair of the Rules Committee said, we go in the restaurant and buy the steak. You need to pay for the steak. The argument, Madam Speaker, of, oh, well, you are proposing a lot of spending in the future, is totally unrelated. The debt limit is caused by the debt that we already incurred. The two bills that we had, they don't affect the debt limit. We have met it now, not when we passed these bills, not after we make that commitment.

We have a debt limit coming up now on December 3, which was totally irresponsible in and of itself, for political reasons only, coterminous with the funding of government. In 2019, when we took over, the government was shut down. We spent a lot of time opening it up. That hurt the economy. That hurt jobs. Now, at that point in time, it didn't hurt inflation. And I have been amazed over the years, over the last 10 years, that we haven't had more inflation for a number of reasons.

But he didn't answer the question, whether he would help on that. That is not for us. It is not for Democrats, not for Republicans. It is for our country. It is for our economy. It is for global fiscal stability.

So I would hope at least in that area--not for us. I am not asking you to do it for me, Madam Speaker. I am not asking anybody to do it for me or for my party or for the President of the United States. Mitch McConnell says it is the country and the global community that could not afford default, and that is true.

Let me tell you, I think that is the first step to showing bipartisan responsibility together; not for one another, but for our country, Madam Speaker. And I hope that at some point in time we can show that kind of good faith.

I included this morning the remarks that President George W. Bush made in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on the kind of America that he wanted to see. I would hope all of my Republican colleagues would read what George W. Bush had to say. It is so different from the rhetoric of the current leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, in terms of bringing us together as a country.

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, I think that bill passed the Senate Wednesday, so we will look at it, but we haven't had a chance to look at it at this point in time.

I want to get back--and I know this sounds like a broken record on the debt limit, but the gentleman makes the point, Madam Speaker, that somehow we have raised the debt to accommodate spending. That is what you always do because if you reach the debt limit, you are done. You stop Social Security. You stop veterans' payments. You stop any support payments. You stop paying the armed services of the United States. That is the spending you stop when you can no longer incur debt. Why? Because we spent a lot of money. We put it on the credit card, and it is coming due. It comes due on a regular basis, and we have to pay it on a regular basis.

The gentleman has voted for bills that do exactly what the bill he lamented, and none of his colleagues voted for, Madam Speaker, exactly what he asked us to do, extend it by a date, not a number, by a date. Then he hypothesizes, well, in that timeframe, you are going to incur additional expenses. He is absolutely right.

So, he is lamenting and giving as a reason for his not voting for it is because there are some proposals to spend money in the future. There are lots of them from all sides.

Then he brings up this ``tied together.'' Let me tell you who has tied it together. The Republican leadership has tied these together. Yes, the President talked about it. He said, no, they are not tied together. He said, first of all, they are tied together, and then he said, no, I negotiated this bill; don't do it.

But I will tell the gentleman, as the majority leader who brings bills to the floor, their infrastructure bill passed overwhelmingly in a bipartisan vote and put together in a bipartisan vote Republicans, Democrats, and the President of the United States.

Now, he is the President of the United States. I know the gentleman voted against certifying his election in a bipartisan move, I suppose.

But, Madam Speaker, that bill will be brought up separately, and you vote for that bill on its merits and vote against it on its merits. Do not hide behind the fact that you don't like some other bill.

Donald Trump said he was going to do a trillion dollars on infrastructure to help our economy. He didn't do it. Then he said it was going to be $2 trillion. He didn't do it. Republicans were in the majority. They controlled the House and the Senate. They didn't do it.

We have a bill they can vote for. I would urge them to vote for extending the debt limit so our country meets its full faith and credit obligations and for the infrastructure bill because I think it is a bipartisan bill negotiated by Republicans, by Democrats, and by the President of the United States which will help our economy and, as I said and will reiterate, every issue that the gentleman raised, Madam Speaker, in his opening remarks.

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Mr. HOYER. That is not accurate, and you know it.

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, if this Congress had never met this year, we would have to extend the debt limit at some point in time this year. That is a fact.

Mr. McConnell has said it is inconceivable that we would not extend the debt limit of the United States of America and fail our obligation under full faith and credit. As a matter of fact, the Constitution, in the 14th Amendment, says it shall not be questioned, but we have to take some legislative action.

The issue is what is our responsibility to the United States of America, not all this argument that pretends that somehow some bills that are proposed on spending or some that may have been passed this year, if they hadn't been passed, somehow we wouldn't have to do this. If anybody on either side of the aisle believes that to be the case, they ought to be defeated by their constituents because they don't know what is going on here, on either side of the aisle.

This is a very serious issue with respect to jobs, infrastructure, inflation, healthcare, and environment. All of those will be adversely affected, and the global community itself, if we do not extend this debt. We can argue about the other issues, but there is no argument about this issue.

Every Republican President has asked that this be done. Every Republican Secretary of the Treasury, since I have been in this Congress, 41 years, has asked that we extend the debt limit; every one of them, without fail. Every one of them has said--President Reagan on--that if we did not do it, the country's economy, reputation, and well-being would be put disastrously at risk.

I don't want bipartisanship. I want patriotism. I want people committed to their country and their country's well-being to stand up and say: I am not going to demagogue an issue that is so critically important to the welfare of my Nation.

I say to the gentleman again: Exactly what they passed when they were in the majority, and we voted for it, setting a future date--not a number, a future date. Exactly. We didn't ask them to do anything more than we did.

In terms of bipartisanship, I will again say: You have got a bipartisan bill negotiated in a bipartisan way that will be coming to this floor at some point in time, I hope earlier rather than later, separately--not tied to I don't like this bill, I don't like that bill, I won't do this, I won't do that, I won't do the other--which will substantially grow jobs in our country and deal with the climate crisis in our country.

I would ask you to support both of those propositions when they come to the floor in a show of bipartisan support for our country, not for each other, but for our country.

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, this needs to come to an end, obviously, but I will tell you this, as I stand here, as somebody who sat on this floor on January 6 and the question was would the House perform its function of accepting the electoral college vote to elect this President--it wasn't that there hadn't been voices in the past who had raised questions. But there was no effort by Ms. Clinton, who received the majority of the votes, or Mr. Gore, who received the majority of the votes, to raise a question about the legitimacy of the election.

But we had an insurrection incited by, invited by, and deployed by the President of the United States. So we didn't start on a very good bipartisan basis, again, not because Republicans should have been happy that their candidate was not elected or any more than we were happy that our candidate was not elected in the Clinton and Gore campaigns.

It was, at least, that we ought to uphold the constitutional principles. Vice President Pence did, and there were people in this Capitol on that night who wanted to see him, apparently, eliminated. That wasn't a good bipartisan start, Madam Speaker. The majority of Republicans voted against certifying the electoral college results in State after State. But we ought to put that behind us. That is done. What we are doing now is we are acting on behalf of the country.

The two issues that I dwelt on, because I think we have agreement on that, rhetorically and intellectually but not electorally, not in terms of voting, is the debt limit should never be breached and that we need to invest in infrastructure, two simple propositions.

The Senate minority leader says: We should never breach the full faith and credit of the United States of America, but I won't help you do it. I don't get that. Frankly, it seems to be kind of irrational.

And then an infrastructure bill passed overwhelmingly by the United States Senate, which we are putting on the floor unchanged, as it was, not coupled--as it is and was--and saying let's vote for that.

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