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Floor Speech
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Mr. GRAHAM. Madam President, I have a different approach that will get the same result.
But to my colleagues here, we are playing the Medicare card in a very dangerous fashion. Senator Hawley said it pretty well. Medicare is something people depend upon, and all of us understand the need to keep Medicare solvent. We need to reform it to save it.
But this idea puts all of us in a box, and I don't appreciate it and I won't forget it.
Now, this is a problem on our side. You don't even have to listen, Senator Wyden. For 4 months, we have been saying, as a party, our Democratic colleagues are spending all this money by themselves through reconciliation; they should choose that path to raise the debt ceiling.
Because what are we talking about? A $1.9 trillion spending bill without one Republican vote through reconciliation.
We have pending next week another reconciliation proposal that scores at 1.7 trillion, if you assume every program goes away in a year. I will be in the NBA before that assumption. I don't like my chances.
Ronald Reagan said the closest thing to immortality on Earth is a government program.
So they have written the bill for the 17 big spending items to expire within 1, 2 or 3 years, and not one of them want them to expire.
So the whole bill is a fraud. And the Congressional Budget Office is going to give to me Friday what the bill would cost if the sunset clauses actually went away--did go away; what would it cost if the programs survive, which it will.
And I anticipate, Senator Kennedy, it will be at least twice what we are talking about.
The effect on the debt is 367 billion only because they limited the programs to last for a year or two rather than the 10 years they are actually going to last.
So the deficit is going to go from 367 billion to probably close to 2 trillion. We are going to expose that Friday. They are playing a game. They are creating gimmicks.
And Senator Manchin, to his credit, said: ``I believe Build Back Better is full of gimmicks.''
We will know Friday exactly what the bill would look like without gimmicks.
This is the ultimate gimmick. If you had asked me 4 months ago, ``How does this movie end?'' I will be reading in the paper about a rules change to the Senate made by the House, where I have got to pick between Medicare and abandoning what I said I would do for 4 months.
This is a deal that led to Donald Trump. If you wonder why there is a Donald Trump, it is moments like this, where everybody starts down a road that makes perfect sense, you panic, and you throw everybody over.
They would raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation because they should, and we want to do it that way to deter spending in the future. We want to make it harder to use reconciliation to spend more money than World War II cost.
If you look at the cost of World War II in present dollars, it was 4.7 trillion. When you look at all the money we spent and going to spend, it is going to be 5.4 trillion. Literally, we have spent more money in the last year and a half than we did to win World War II.
I think they should raise the debt ceiling, Senator Kennedy, through the process they used to spend the money. That made perfect sense to me as a Republican. That is why I said it for 4 months.
Now, all of us on our side have a moment of reckoning here. I don't want to default, and we won't. But I do want to make sure that when Republicans tell their other Republicans and the public at large, you can somewhat count on who we are and what we say. We put that at risk for no good reason.
To the leadership of both sides, I like you. Senator McConnell has been a great Republican leader--minority leader, majority leader. But this is a moment where I want to be on the Record to say, I don't like this.
What we have done is allow the House of Representatives to change a Senate rule. No matter what the subject matter, that is not a good idea. We have set in place a process that allows our Democratic colleagues to raise the debt ceiling without using reconciliation, the budget process, where they would have to amend the budget resolution. The very resolution they used to spend all this money, we are simply asking amend it to pay for it.
We have taken that off the table, and people on our side are not going to accept this very well. So all I can say is--I want to make it clear--when it comes to Medicare, count me in to avoid the cuts. When it comes to raising the debt ceiling, I want it done through a process that will make it harder to spend all this money in the future. And I want to be part of a Republican Party that you can take what we say to the bank on big stuff--stuff that matters.
So I have a proposal that when the bill comes over from the House, which it is here, that would allow us to vote to prevent Medicare from being cut, would strip out the way you are going to raise the debt ceiling, reject the idea that the House can amend a Senate rule to limit minority rights--and that is what we have done here.
This is not a good idea, to take Medicare and marry it up with anything important, as Senator Hawley said, because there is no end to that game. And it is not a good idea, in my view, even with some Members of my own party agreeing, to let the House change the Senate rules. I don't like that. 610, it be in order for me to offer amendment No. 4877, which strikes section 8 relating to the debt limit. I further ask that the Senate vote on adoption of the amendment prior to the vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to concur in the amendment to S. 610.
In English, I am asking for a vote so that we can show the country that we will protect Medicare, but many of us are not going to have our fingerprints on a Washington deal that I think stinks up the place.
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Mr. GRAHAM. So why does this matter? It matters a lot about how the Senate works. Every Member of this body has the ability to come down to the floor and object to a piece of legislation. That makes the Senate different than the House.
What we have done here is allowed the House to change the Senate rules in a fashion where, if you can get 10 Republicans, all of us are dealt out. So that is not a good idea 1 time, 10 times, or 100 times by either party because what it does, it changes the rules of the Senate in a fashion that I feel very uncomfortable with simply because the House has been able to change the rules of the Senate so that all of us have been basically marginalized.
There will be some Republicans who are my friends, and do what you need to do. I understand. I don't want to default on the debt either. But this is a bad idea. It is not what we promised we would do. It sets in motion playing the Medicare card in a dangerous fashion, and it sure as hell sets in motion playing with the rules of the Senate in a fashion that I never even thought of until 24 hours ago.
So I want to make this hard, not easy, because I think what we are doing is going to really change the structure of the Senate and certainly going to do a lot of damage to the Republican Party.
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