Let's Talk
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. DeSANTIS. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.
I just want to address some things that I have been hearing out there that just strike me as wrong. The President said that ObamaCare has nothing to do with the budget. Now that is very rich, considering it was passed using budget reconciliation in order to ram it through the Senate with less than 60 votes. So it was a budget issue then. Somehow it's not now. Of course the individual mandate has been ruled a tax by the Supreme Court, and it authorizes trillions of dollars in new spending.
Now some say ObamaCare is the law and, therefore, cannot be changed. Well, this body has the constitutional authority to legislate. We can always amend or change the laws. But I would also say, if this particular law is somehow so special and sacrosanct, then why isn't the President enforcing it, as written? Indeed, he has given waivers and exemptions to politically connected entities, including a bailout for Members of Congress, giving them relief from the text of the very law that they passed without reading.
I think ObamaCare is dangerous in terms of how it's going to impact economic growth and medical care in the country. But just in terms of good government, this really is a recipe for institutionalized cronyism. You have burdens imposed on society. And then those who have political connections can get those burdens removed.
So employers can get it removed. We know there will be something for labor unions at some point. But if you are an individual, well, you've still got to abide by ObamaCare's dictates.
Some say doing individual bills is simply cherry-picking, we can't pass individual spending bills, which the House has been doing very resolutely over the last several days.
Big omnibus CRs, that is not the way business is supposed to be done. You are packing all the departments into one big bill. You are forfeiting Congress' ability to make good spending choices, forfeiting Congress' oversight authority, locking in bad policy. We haven't done appropriations bills in this House for years. A lot of this stuff that's locked into these CRs was done when we had the previous Speaker of the House. So individual bills are better. The Senate should absolutely act on our bills.
And then just finally, I would say, before I yield back to the gentlewoman from Missouri, ObamaCare is the only major piece of legislation that's passed in the last 80 years that had zero support from the other party. Social Security had 80 percent of the Republicans in the House; the Civil Rights Act had 80 percent of the Republicans in the House; Reaganomics, the Reagan economic program, had 78 percent of Democrats in the Senate. So typically, these big laws have broad bipartisan support. This one didn't. And we have a lot of constituents who didn't want it to begin with and don't like living under it now.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source