The Budget

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, I rise to make a parliamentary inquiry.

The Senate will soon receive from the House legislation to fund the Federal Government for the rest of this year--H.R. 1473. Normally, spending bills such as this one go through the Appropriations Committee. Despite the fact that this spending bill the Senate will soon take up covers funding for the entire Federal Government, including all appropriations bills for the year, it was never even considered by the House or Senate Appropriations Committees.

Snuck into this massive spending bill are legislative provisions that typically are not allowed by Senate rules to be included in the appropriations process. The Senate has a rule--rule XVI--that prohibits Senate legislative amendments to an appropriations bill. Despite this Senate rule, the spending bill the Senate will consider today includes provisions that are clearly legislative in nature. Specifically, I am referring to section 1858 of the spending bill which repeals free choice vouchers from the affordable care act that became law last year.

There should be no doubt that repealing a law or part of a law is legislating. In this case, section 1858 repeals part of the Internal Revenue Code. Amending the Internal Revenue Code is general legislation, not the appropriation of funds. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office has actually determined that free choice vouchers involve no appropriation of funds whatsoever.

Madam President, my parliamentary inquiry is whether repealing free choice vouchers in the spending bill the Senate will soon consider is legislating on an appropriations bill.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair is advised that repealing any law is legislative in nature, and repealing a law in an appropriations bill is legislating on an appropriations bill.

Mr. WYDEN. I thank the Chair for making this very clear; that repealing free choice vouchers--the opportunity to come up with a marketplace-oriented approach for people in a health care no man's land--in this spending bill is clearly legislating on an appropriations bill and that is not the way the Senate traditionally does business.

If this provision were brought up in the Senate, we now know it would be ruled out of order. It would be ruled out of order because in the Senate we simply do not legislate on appropriations bills. The Senate doesn't legislate on appropriations bills for a simple reason. Every Senator knows it would be open season for the special interest lobbyists all over this town.

The administration and this body took a stand earlier this year against earmarking--something the Chair is very much aware of--and I wish to quote from the President's State of the Union Address. The President said: The American people deserve to know that special interests aren't larding up legislation with pet projects. Both parties in Congress should know this: If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside it, I will veto it.

Madam President, I wish to have somebody explain the difference between letting a lobbyist slip an earmark into an appropriations bill and slipping legislative language into an appropriations bill that benefits a whole array of special interest lobbyists. It sure seems to have the same effect to me.

I am not certain who proposed eliminating free choice vouchers in this appropriations deal. Maybe a lobbyist asked for it or maybe some staffer with special interest sympathies saw an opportunity to send the lobbyist what one lobbyist called today ``an early Easter gift.'' But either way, I know with 100 percent certainty this decision was not made with the public interest in mind. The American people are not the ones who benefit from eliminating free choice vouchers. The American people like the idea of being able to have choices for their health care--choices, I would point out, that are much like the ones we have as Members of Congress.

The fact is this is one provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that combined the thinking of colleagues on both sides of the aisle--Democrats who wanted to expand coverage and Republicans who have an interest in choice and competition. This was the one provision that provided a concrete path to holding down health care costs, and it has now been gutted by the special interests.

Some special interests are arguing that free choice vouchers would in some way harm employer-based health coverage. What we know for certain is that for the group of people who could access a free choice voucher, the employer-based health system is dysfunctional. It is dysfunctional for them. The group of people who are covered by free choice vouchers--folks who aren't eligible for the exchanges and folks who aren't eligible for subsidies--now have only two choices: coverage that is completely unavailable or coverage that is completely unaffordable.

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, at the time free choice vouchers was accepted, specifically talked about how this filled a gap in the bill. And now, with it gone, more than 300,000 Americans aren't going to have a path to affordable, good quality coverage. Free choice vouchers were needed at the time we worked on the affordable care act and they are even more necessary today.

For example, the Kaiser Family Foundation, in their most recent analysis, has demonstrated how consistently, again and again, more health care costs are being shifted onto the backs of American workers. In their most recent analysis, they found that employee health expenses in the last year have gone up 14 percent, and the employee was eating almost all of that. Almost all of it was being shifted onto the backs of the workers.

This was important today--it was important when we moved originally to enact the legislation. It is even more important today. The fact is, these individuals are only looking for another path because the system does not work for them. If it worked for them, we would not even have an issue. But as the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee pointed out, this is a gap in the system, a gap that, had we been able to sustain free choice vouchers and stop the lobbyists from stripping them out, we would have had a way to ensure that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of hard-working Americans--these are folks who work at jobs--would still be able to go to sleep at night knowing they had decent, good-quality, affordable coverage for themselves and their families.

The Senate does not legislate on appropriations bills because, as the President said so appropriately, we should be working to rebuild people's faith in the institution of government. We do not slip legislative language into these kinds of bills that benefits a few special interest groups at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Americans. This is not the way we do business.

Throughout 2009, I promised my constituents that I would not support health care reforms unless they were real reforms. This legislation lets special interest groups take real reform out of the health care law. It seems to me that, all over this town, the special interest groups are looking at the bill and they are saying now it is going to be possible, if we can just find, behind closed doors, some allies to take away real cost containment, real opportunities for good-quality, affordable coverage for people. This legislation takes real reform out of the health care law. Because I keep my promises, I will not support it.

I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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