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Democratic Legislative Agenda
Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, as the Senate's schedule for this calendar year begins to wind down, hopefully with the anticipation of spending time with our friends and families during this holiday season, I want to look back over some of the deadlines that the majority leader, the Senator from New York, has set for Senate action and to ask whether these sort of arbitrary deadlines and attempts to do legislation essentially along party lines is the right way to actually get things done in the Senate.
We have excellent examples of how to get things done. Today, we passed the Defense authorization bill with a strong bipartisan vote. But we know that when either political party decides to do things unilaterally, especially in a 50-50 Senate, it makes the work immeasurably harder, and that is for a good reason.
The Founders of this country and our Constitution and the creators of this Senate looked to the Senate to be a deliberative body and looked for us to do what sometimes doesn't come naturally, which is to work together to build consensus. But, as I said, when one party or the other attempts to do things unilaterally, it usually means what you see here, which is one blown self-imposed deadline after another.
First of all, the majority leader set a July 21 target for Senate action on a budget resolution.
He laid out an August deadline for a partisan election takeover bill, which would have preempted State and local laws, which are responsible, under our division of responsibility in the Constitution, under our Federal system, for conducting elections.
Then he proudly announced his goal to get two bills to President Biden's desk by the end of October. He said those would be joined together--a bipartisan infrastructure bill that is the exception to the rule--actually like the Defense authorization bill that actually enjoyed broad bipartisan support--but the hangup was the other part of that proposition, which was the Democrats' multitrillion-dollar partisan spending bill.
Of course, not one single one of these deadlines was met--again, because it is hard to do things in a 50-50 Senate when you try to do it unilaterally without doing the hard work of building consensus, which is the way the Founders wanted this institution to work.
So our colleague from New York kept setting deadlines and blowing right past them, and it looks like he is about to add another one to the list. Senator Schumer's latest deadline for the ``Build Back Bankrupt'' bill is December 25. That is Christmas. While he has yet to make an official announcement, news reports are starting to confirm what we have known all along--that the Senate will not vote on this bill by Christmas because it is just not ready for prime time.
Before our colleagues can bend the rules of the Senate to pass their partisan, multitrillion-dollar spending bill, they have got a lot of roadblocks to overcome. The most obvious is they need a bill to vote on. This bill is not even in final form yet. As a matter of fact, the Senate Finance Committee, on which I have the pleasure of serving, released about 1,100 pages of new text on Saturday, and there are at least 20 different issues that have been raised with the Parliamentarian which need to be litigated in a deliberative process, but the version of the legislation that passed the House started getting picked apart even before reaching this side of the Capitol. The committee chairmen here were still deciding which provisions to keep, which ones to alter, and which ones to throw away.
It is tough to know how things are progressing because all of these conversations happen not here on the Senate floor, with open debate, but behind closed doors, completely out of view of the American people. That is dangerous because this bill will touch virtually every aspect of Americans' daily lives and stick them with a massive invoice--
without any visibility into the process.
We are told that the Build Back Better bill is immensely popular. Well, that may be true until you start looking at the details, at the fine print. Right now, we have to rely on vague statements from our Democratic colleagues to understand where things stand, and I will tell you, right now, it doesn't sound too promising.
Following severe blowback from the American people after the details of this bill began to become public, Finance Committee Democrats began making changes to one extremely controversial part of the bill. The Washington Post headline says it all: ``The second-biggest program in the Democrats' spending plan gives billions to the rich.''
No wonder they went back to the drawing board. After all, there is a sharp contrast from how our colleagues have tried to sell this bill--
really, an effort of false advertising. They have harped previously--or some sections of the Democratic caucus--on the need to stick it to the rich, to tax the rich, but when given the opportunity, they hand out massive tax breaks for the rich.
It is unclear how long it will take our colleagues to finalize changes to the millionaires' tax breaks and the countless other provisions that are being retooled, but once they lay down their pens, the work is not done. As I suggested, they have the substantial and difficult process of vetting a number of the provisions with the Senate Parliamentarian to determine whether these provisions can pass the Byrd rule.
The Byrd rule is simply the name given to the process to see whether it complies with the 1974 Budget Act, which provides for an expedited process and 51 votes for passage because it is limited strictly to budgetary matters. When our colleagues try to stick into the bill other substantive law changes which require a 60-vote requirement, that is where the Byrd rule comes in, and that is where these provisions get kicked out.
According to the chairman of the Finance Committee, the Finance Committee's proposal alone has more than 20 different issues to resolve with the Parliamentarian in the so-called Byrd bath, and that is just one committee. Our colleagues on various other committees are presenting arguments on provisions of all sizes. We have heard that our Democratic colleagues are trying to make massive changes in our immigration law on a party-line vote at 51 votes--50 votes plus the Vice President. Well, that has not succeeded on two previous occasions for good reason, and now we are awaiting the verdict of the Parliamentarian on those immigration proposals on the third try.
But we know that this massive legislation, once it is written, presumably, will go from everything from technical changes to major issues like whether the budget rule can be used to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants. Again, these conversations are happening not out here in the Senate, with an opportunity for full debate and amendment; they are happening behind closed doors. So we really don't have a good sense--nor do the American people--of what has been decided or how long it will take to resolve pending disputes.
If our Democratic colleagues receive adverse guidance from the Parliamentarian, it is still unclear whether they will accept the outcome or light the rule book on fire, as some have suggested, and try to overrule her. It is tough to imagine a world in which our Democrat colleagues would put this Frankenstein's monster on the Senate floor before Christmas. Christmas is, in fact, 10 days away. Even if our colleagues were able to iron out every issue with the Parliamentarian and were able to present finalized text and receive a score on the final legislation at that time, Senator Schumer doesn't have the votes to pass it. Again, we are an evenly divided Senate, with the Vice President casting the tie-breaking vote.
Colleagues on the other side of the aisle are not on board entirely with this proposed massive spending-and-tax bill. Unlike the majority of our colleagues who have blindly fallen in line or aired their concerns in private, we know that the Senator from West Virginia, Mr. Manchin, has consistently expressed his reservations about the bill.
In September, for example, he wrote an op-ed, titled: ``Why I Won't Support Spending Another $3.5 Trillion.'' He has hardly been quiet or hidden his concerns. He shared his concerns in that op-ed about the scale and scope of this legislation, and he encouraged his colleagues in his own political party to take a strategic pause.
Some of the reasons he cited included the growing threat of inflation, which has only increased since September. Inflation, in fact, has now reached a 40-year high--just last month. He warned about the possibility that the virus might mutate and take a new turn and that we ought to really save our powder in case we had to address either the public health or economic consequences flowing from a new variant. Well, today, all of our eyes are on the Omicron variant, and we have yet to know how that will play out. He asked how we could respond to another financial crisis like we experienced in 2008 during the great recession or, heaven forbid, a terrorist attack or a major international conflict.
If we spend trillions of dollars on unnecessary programs today, we will hardly have those reserves available to us should we need them. I think the questions and issues raised by the Senator from West Virginia were valid then, and they are even more pressing now.
Over the last several months, the winds haven't shifted in favor of this massive tax-and-spending bill. In fact, we now have more reason to believe this legislation would add to, not solve, the problems that the American people are facing. The Senator from West Virginia told one of our Republican colleagues that the score proposed by his own political party--$1.75 trillion--is full of gimmicks, and he even acknowledged that that pricetag is a form of deceptive advertising.
We now have an honest score, one that acknowledges that massive programs cannot be started and stopped on a dime and that, if you are really going to be honest about the cost of the bill, you need to look at a score that spans the full 10-year budget window. We now have that score, one that avoids the gimmicks that are meant to disguise the true cost of the bill. Now we can quantify how disingenuous this so-called
$1.75 trillion pricetag really is, and it is about as disingenuous as the President's claim that the bill costs zero. Nobody believes that. It really undermines the President's credibility when he says something like that.
The Congressional Budget Office now says this legislation, if in place for a full 10 years, would cost $4.9 trillion. That is on top of the almost $2 trillion our colleagues spent unilaterally earlier this year. Well, that is certainly higher than the $3.5 trillion redline that Senator Manchin drew earlier this year, and it is a whole lot more than the $1.75 trillion pricetag that our Democratic colleagues are claiming. It makes the repeated claim that this bill costs zero seem even more bizarre and out of touch.
Under this bill, as it is shaping up, we know deficits would increase by a staggering $3 trillion over the next decade. Now, last year, when we passed COVID-19 relief bills with huge bipartisan majorities, we did so because it was a public health emergency and an economic emergency, and we did it together. Yet, on top of all of that necessary spending, our colleagues are insisting on spending another $4.9 trillion--adding another $3 trillion to the debt over the next decade. Our children and grandchildren would never have a chance to dig out of the hole that our Democratic colleagues are now drilling.
This legislation doesn't just fall short of solving problems; it actually makes them worse. This bill would fuel the red-hot inflation that is already burning up the paychecks of the American people. People who are on fixed incomes are finding their purchasing power shrinking by the day because of the threat of inflation. We know this bill would also hurt our energy security. It would give massive tax breaks to the wealthy while increasing taxes on the middle class. It would literally cut funding for safety net hospitals and drive the national debt to unimaginable heights. Finally, and maybe most importantly, it would hand to the Federal Government decisions that should be made by families.
I hope our colleague from West Virginia will continue to hold strong against the dangers of this bill. At a minimum, we need to tap the brakes and take what he called a ``strategic pause.''
So it seems the Democratic leader is on track to miss yet another deadline. For the country's sake, I hope this bill does not arrive after Christmas. I hope it never comes at all.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Ossoff). The Senator from Ohio.
Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I appreciate my friend from Texas and his comments, but I have trouble following some of them.
When he came to the floor after the deserved credit for the Trump 2017-2018 tax cut for the rich--70 percent of the benefits went to the 1 percent--he did take credit for his work in the Finance Committee. He should take credit for that, but that is what drove this hole in the deficit where the rich got richer.
I remember during that--and the Presiding Officer was not here at the time, but he can still see it here.
You can look out the window, and you can see Senator McConnell's office there and the lobbyists lined up. You should have seen it back when Senator Cornyn was talking about this tax cut--this tax cut for the rich--when they made these promises: You know, if you give tax cuts to really rich people and corporations, it will trickle down, and we will all do better. They will hire more people, and they will raise wages.
Well, we know what they did. In fact, they just announced another round of it--a whole bunch of stock buybacks for the executives. So we know what happened during those years. Profits went up for corporations, and stock markets soared. Executive compensation exploded through the roof, and wages for most people in Mansfield, GA, and Mansfield, OH, and Marietta, GA, and Marietta, OH, stayed flat. We know that. That is why Build Back Better makes sense. It begins to put money in people's pockets.
And what my friend from Texas--and we sit across from each other in the Finance Committee and work together on some issues, and I appreciate what he has done on some other bills. But what he didn't explain is why every one of them opposes the child tax credit. On the child tax credit, we know a number of things. I have been working on this since 2013. It started with not a lot of support, but it built huge support by this year, early this year. Sitting at this desk, on March 6, I voted--as did the Presiding Officer from Georgia in the first really big vote he cast as a Member of the Senate, in the majority--for the child tax credit.
Two different times, every single Republican voted no. Every single Democrat voted yes. Do you know what that meant? It meant that starting in July, when we got it set up, 90 percent of the families in Georgia, 90 percent of the families in Ohio who have children under the age of 18 got at least a $3,000-a-year tax cut.
Think about that. There are families who struggle with paying rent. Twenty-five percent of renters in this country before the pandemic paid more than half their income in rent. Think of the pressure those families are under if, at the end of every month, they cobble together
$700 to pay their rent. They get a $3,000 tax cut. The family who is struggling to pay for diapers or childcare, especially--the cost of childcare has exploded.
Whether it is Metro Atlanta or Metro Columbus, OH, or whether it is smalltown Milledgeville or smalltown Shelby, OH, families struggle with childcare, and this $300 a month per child--or $250, depending on the age of the children--makes a huge difference in those families.
One father said: You know, for the first time, I have money now to buy my daughter fast-pitch softball equipment.
A mother said to me: I have money now. For the first time, I can send my son for a week to summer camp and buy school supplies in the fall.
And, as I said, for diapers and other expenses for infants, it makes all the difference in the world.
I expect the Presiding Officer, I hope, has a long career in this body. I don't know if he will ever get the opportunity to vote on anything as big as what we did in March with the recovery act and what we are about to do with Build Back Better. For me, they are the highlights of my career.
I hope the Presiding Officer has a lot of years in front of him, but this is the most consequential thing this Congress has done, not just to fight poverty, lift poor kids and struggling parents who are working so hard to raise kids and balance two jobs and all that, not just to help kids get out of poverty but to make life easier.
As I said, 90 percent of the families who have children under 18 in Georgia, in Ohio, and every State in between are going to get a $3,000-
a-year tax cut. That alone is so important.
I wish my colleague from Texas would address why they all vote no. They have had two chances. It sounds like they are going to take their third chance and vote no again.
I don't understand it. Is it that the lobbyists who line up in Senator McConnell's office have some weird philosophy that markets always know better? Is it just that they don't really care about helping kids? I don't know what their logic is. I just know what our logic is, and it will make our country better.
SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 216
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