Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services Relating to ``Patient Protection and Affordable Care

Floor Speech

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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I want to speak first for a moment about the Energy and Water Development bill that the Senate will shortly be considering.

As the Presiding Officer knows, our budget is so large that we divide our appropriations bill into 12 separate bills--many bills, if you will--and Members in some cases are assigned and in some cases choose to serve on these subcommittees to draft a portion of the appropriations bill. I have the privilege of serving as the chair of the Energy and Water Development portion of the larger appropriations bill. My ranking member--in other words, the ranking Democrat--is my friend Senator Patty Murray from Washington State.

We have conferenced that bill. What does that mean? Well, that means that all the Democratic members and all the Republican members of the Energy and Water Development Subcommittee have worked out our differences. It doesn't mean we are all happy, but we have worked them all out. We also worked out our differences with the House--the Republicans and the Democrats in the House who sit on what we call Energy and Water. I am not saying everybody is happy, but they have accepted the bill. We have reached an agreement, and, in fact, the House has already passed it. We are going to be considering that bill, the Energy and Water bill, here in a couple of days. I just wanted to quickly--I will speak more later, perhaps--I just wanted to quickly highlight what we are going to be voting on here in the next couple days.

The bill is $58 billion. That is less than the current budget. I am very proud of that. I said at the very beginning of this process that I was not going to approve a budget that did anything but spend less. We have done that. Nominally, it is a $27 million reduction. Non- nominally, which means if you factor in inflation, it is a 2.8-percent reduction over the current Energy and Water bill. So in the new fiscal year, fiscal year 2026, we will be spending 2.8 percent less than we are spending on the Energy and Water bill right now. I am very proud of that.

We increased defense spending. As the Presiding Officer knows, the Energy and Water bill is divided into a defense portion and a nondefense portion. We increased spending dramatically for defense. In fact, we are spending $912 million extra on defense in the Energy and Water bill over the current budget--a 2.7-percent increase even though overall the bill is 2.8 percent less.

Well, obviously, we had to cut something. We did. We are cutting nondefense spending, the nondefense portion of the bill, by 3.8 percent. We took a meat ax to the Green New Deal provisions in the current Energy and Water budget. Now, not everybody is happy about it. I get it. But we have already spent a lot--a lot--of money on the Green New Deal--too much, in my judgment--so we reduced it in the new Energy and Water bill.

Moving back just for a second on defense spending, what are we spending that extra money on in defense? Well, I am not going to read everything to you, but suffice it to say we plussed up or increased nuclear weapons development, nuclear weapons sustainment. We are strengthening our nuclear weapons stockpile testing. We are strengthening its certification. We are continuing to provide money for a new nuclear warhead, for a sea-launched cruise missile. We are going to spend more money on plutonium pits and special explosive nuclear materials.

The final two points I will make about our bill: We have substantially increased spending for the Corps of Engineers-- substantially. In the new Energy and Water bill, we are spending $1.7 billion more on Corps of Engineers projects. That is a 19-percent increase. And we are also doubling our spending on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

So to sum up, the Energy and Water bill vis-a-vis the current budget cuts spending by 2.8 percent. We increased defense spending by 2.7 percent. We paid for that increase and accommodated the decrease in overall spending by cutting nondefense, mostly green energy, 3.8 percent. We have increased spending for the Corps of Engineers dramatically--$1.7 billion. That is a 19-percent increase. And we have doubled the amount of money for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

I will be happy, when the time comes when we take up the bill, to answer questions. Housing

Mr. President, let me talk about another subject: housing. You can't talk about housing if you don't start with supply and demand and the cost of housing. What determines prices in America? In a free enterprise system, what determines the price of housing? A lot of things, but basically it is supply and demand. In a free enterprise system, supply and demand determines price.

Now, no free enterprise system is perfect. Ours is about as perfect as you can get. In some economies that say they are free enterprise, they are really not. For example, the government will come in and put its thumb on the scale and affect supply and demand. The government might come in--China does this all the time--and say: We are going to favor or subsidize, either with direct money or special loans, solar panels. China does that. They wanted to dominate the world in solar panels. They do. The Communist Party in China went in and gave especially good treatment to the manufacturers of solar panels. I don't much like that. It is China's business. I don't like it when that sort of thing happens in America because it interferes with free enterprise. It is an illegitimate manipulating of price and supply and demand.

How else can prices be affected besides supply and demand? Well, you can have antitrust violations. If all the makers of microwave ovens get together in a back room over cigars and a sip of whiskey and say they are going to fix prices at a certain price, they can run the price of microwave ovens up. That is a crime too. It is illegal under the Sherman Antitrust Act. You can go to the pokey for that.

So it is supply and demand. Well, what causes prices--specifically, the cost of housing--to go up? Well, it is when demand for housing is greater than the supply of housing. Duh. It is not complicated.

Remember when we had 9 percent inflation under President Biden--not just in housing but in everything else? I will tell you how that happened. President Biden used the pandemic as an excuse, but we were past the pandemic. He and my Democratic friends appropriated billions and billions and billions of dollars, in many cases directly to the American people, and people got that money and said ``Thank you very much,'' and they went out and spent it. They spent it on goods, and they spent it on services. The problem was the people who produced the services and made the goods were not prepared. Many of them had had supply lines during the pandemic that were affected.

So you had this huge amount of demand with the American people having a huge amount of money, and they wanted to buy, but the supply wasn't there. So what happened? Prices went up. At one point, prices went up to--inflation reached 9 percent.

Now, the good news is that it has come down. So we are better, but we are not well. Inflation--I think new numbers came out today. They are at about 2.7 percent. That means prices are still going up. Many of them have come down. Prices are still going up; they are just not going up as quickly as they were going up under President Biden, thanks to the new economic policies adopted by the Trump administration and the Republican Congress.

One of the things, though, that hasn't come down in price is housing. I don't need to tell the American people. It is just breathtaking. The average first-time home buyer in America today--let's just think about this. To buy a home, you have to save up a downpayment, and you have got to have enough income so they will loan you the money, so you can comfortably pay the mortgage. The average person today, first-time home buyer, doesn't reach those parameters until they are 40 years old--40 years old.

Owning a home is the American dream, and housing has gone up everywhere. It has gone up in my State. It has gone up in the Northeast, the Southwest. It has certainly gone up in California. Hell, a refrigerator box behind an Outback costs $500,000 in California.

Nobody can afford homes anymore; they just can't. Why is that? Well, you can hear a lot of experts talk about it. Some of them will say: Well, it is interest rates; interest rates went up. They did go up. And some will say it is this, and some will say it is that. But I will tell you the main reason housing has gone up so much and hasn't come down: because the demand for a house is greater than the supply. We don't have enough houses; we just don't.

You are probably thinking to yourself, boy, then why doesn't somebody build some? Well, the private sector is trying, but in many States--not all, but in many States and many cities, they are being stopped by local government.

And you say: Whoa. Why? Why would a councilwoman or a councilman in a city of 100,000 people in Colorado not want to see more houses built?

I will tell you why: because that city councilperson--man or woman-- controls the zoning laws and controls, for rules and regulations, housing starts.

A lot of the people--I am not just picking on Colorado; this is true in every State--a lot of the people don't want more houses built. Why? Because they already own a house, and it is worth a lot of money, and it is a big part of their nest egg. They know that if, in their area, more houses start being built, then the price of their home is going to go down and they are going to lose money.

Now, again, I am not picking on Colorado. That is true in Colorado. It is true in every State in our wonderful Union. It is called NIMBY-- not in my backyard. It is especially true in California, the most liberal State God ever put breath in. That is why we are not building more residential housing. That is why housing starts are not going up.

Now, what is Congress's usual reaction to that? Well, we start passing bills telling the folks in local government how to do their job. You won't find housing starts in the U.S. Constitution. You won't find the subject of housing in the U.S. Constitution. It is a State but it is really more of a local issue.

Zoning laws are local. Some States may have a statewide zoning law, but most zoning laws, which determine housing starts--who can build houses and who can't and what size they have to be and how big the lot is and what the streets look like--that is up to the local governments, OK?

Usually, what happens is Congress lectures our friends in local government and says: You have got to do this. You have got to do that. We are going to mandate this. We are going to mandate that.

The truth is, we are not housing experts. We are not there in the community. That is why God created members of city councils and mayors. They are closest to the people. They should be in charge of housing. They should be in charge of zoning. They should be in charge of deciding what size the streets and the lots are.

But it is undeniable--and some are trying, but it is undeniable that a lot of them are saying, under political pressure from their constituents: We don't want new houses because it might affect the price of the existing houses, and the people whose houses go down in price won't vote for me.

That is the way a lot of local folks think--not all of them but a lot of them.

So what can we do about that? Short of us getting in the middle of the business of our cities and telling them what zoning laws should look like, here is what we can do. We could use a carrot and a stick.

Every year, we send between $2 and $3 billion to cities across America. Every city gets a little bit of it. Some get a lot of it. But every year, just like clockwork, we appropriate--it is really more like $3 to $4 billion. We send that money through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and based on the population in a city, they determine who gets what portion.

The local governments love what we call community development block grant money, CDBG funds. You say ``CDBG'' to a person in local government, and they will start salivating. They love this money like the Devil loves sin. Why is that? Because it is free money, and they have a lot of discretion--``they'' meaning our friends in local government--they have a lot of discretion in how they spend it. They can rehab public housing. They can build streets. They can use it for code enforcement without the Federal Government staring them down.

So I came up with this idea, convinced Senator Elizabeth Warren to join me, and we drafted and indeed passed--I will talk about that in a second--a bill called the Build Now Act. It is really very simple. It says that we are not going to tell local governments how to increase housing starts; we are just going to tell them that if they do increase housing starts, we are going to reward them with more CDBG money. If they don't increase housing starts, we are going to take some of their money away. Carrot; stick.

Here is how it would work. Every year, we look at all of our cities-- I think the cut off is 50,000 people or more--and we look at the housing starts percentage-wise in each of our cities across America. After we look at all of them--it will be a bunch of them, but we have got computers--we look for the median point, not the average. We don't add them up and divide; we look for the median point. The median point is the city right smack dab square in the middle. Half of the cities have increased housing starts more, and half of the cities below the median have increased housing starts less.

So that is our starting point--the median. Let's call it 4 percent. If our bill were in effect and next year the median--you can call it average if you want--the median is 4 percent, if you are a local government and you meet 4 percent, you get all of your CDBG money. Good for you. You get a gold star. Maybe, if the median is 4 percent, you did even better. Not only did you reach the median level--4 percent increase on housing starts--you got 6 percent. Guess what. You are going to get extra CDBG money. You get extra money. That is the carrot.

Now, if you are thinking to yourself: ``There is a catch here somewhere,'' OK; there is no free lunch. Anytime someone tells you something is free, uh-uh. Anything that is free, somebody had to pay for.

Here is the catch: We are going to take that extra money to reward the cities that increased housing starts above the median--we are going to take it from the cities that don't, up to 10 percent.

Now, what does that mean? That means we are not going to tell our friends in local government whether to increase housing starts or decrease, and we are sure not going to tell them how to do it. They don't have to do a damn thing if they don't want to. But if they do increase housing starts, they are going to get extra money from the Federal Government, and if they don't, they are going to get less.

It will work. Others agree with me. Senator Warren and I passed the Build Now Act unanimously out of the Banking Committee. Every Democrat and every Republican voted for it.

Then it came to the Senate floor. Every Member of the Senate--every Democrat, every Republican--said: We like it. We will take a dozen of these.

They liked it so much--my colleagues liked it so much that they made it a part of the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, which, as you know, is a bill we have to pass every year. And housing is not directly relevant to the NDAA. But under the rules, my colleagues liked Elizabeth's and my bill so much they said: Let's put it on the NDAA. And we did; flew out of here.

Then it went over to the House, and we started negotiating the NDAA because the House passed its version of the NDAA, and we had passed our version of the NDAA, and they weren't the same. So the people in charge of the NDAA from the Senate sat down with the people in charge of the NDAA in the House and started negotiating the final product.

I will use my words carefully here. There were a couple of folks on the House side who for whatever reason decided to take our Build Now Act out, and they did, despite the fact that every Member of the Senate was for it and a lot of House Members.

I am not going to kid you, I was upset. I called that person and those handful of people every--well, I called them an epithet that ends with the word ``hole.'' I did. I swallowed it. I took it. I just said: That is the legislative process. I took it full in the face, went home, had a beer, petted my dog, tried to get over it, and lived to fight another day. It was stupid, but they did it. But we live to fight another day.

Now, when moms and dads lie down to sleep at night and can't in America today, I can tell you one of the things they are worried about is the cost of living, and part of the cost of living is the cost of housing.

This bill will work, and it would have worked, and it would be law right now. But that was then. You have to look to the future.

Mr. President, if you are listening, please endorse this bill.

To my friends in the House, please bring this bill up and vote for it. It will work. We have been jawboning and talking about ``Oh, you know, the cost of living is''--some say it is fake. Some say it is not. Some say we are doing better than we are. Well, things are better, but they are still not well. This bill will lower the cost of housing in America, and it will do it under the basic principles of free enterprise. You can write this down and take it home to Momma: All things being equal, if you increase supply and demand stays the same, the price is going to go down.

It will work. So I hope my friends in the House will take these comments in the spirit in which they were meant and that they will pass Senator Warren's and my Build Now Act.

I hope that the President is listening and that he will endorse it because--I am going to repeat it again--this is America. Owning a home is the American dream. A satisfactory home is not a refrigerator box behind Outback. The American people deserve better.

Mr. President, what would you like me to do next? I think I will ask for a quorum.

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