[Pages H1801-H1804]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY

  (Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. Roy of 
Texas was recognized for 30 minutes.)
  Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. 
Schweikert). We have engaged in a colloquy on his time. I am going to 
start my 30 minutes. He, of course, is welcome to stick around a little 
bit if he wants.
  I am going to just jump off from where he started, or I am going to 
start from where he left off, and that is to talk about what we are 
debating on the floor right now, which is the reconciliation bills that 
we are debating in the House and in the Senate as we speak.
  For the average viewer out there, you don't understand what we are 
talking about. Let me put it in basic terms. The reconciliation process 
is a part of the Budget Control Act, which basically gives us the 
ability to reconcile current policies with what we are dealing with, 
with respect to our spending, debt, and deficits. We have to make that 
all add up, and we are supposed to do that in a way that would yield 
deficit neutrality or deficit reduction. That is the general purpose of 
why we have reconciliation.
  Reconciliation, though, because there is a 60-vote threshold in the 
Senate and that means that certain policies that the majority wants to 
get in place in the House and the Senate if they control both Chambers, 
often hit resistance by the minority party in the Senate, that then 
reconciliation is used to end-run what we call the filibuster--even 
though it is really just a 60-vote threshold, end-run that in order to 
get policy even though we are supposedly not doing policy on 
reconciliation.
  That is how stupid your Congress is, America. That is how you are 
developing policy: through a bunch of arcane procedures, some of which 
are great and designed to have cooling effects, and some of which are 
really stupid.
  Yet, what we are doing is trying to find every which way possible to 
avoid accountability and responsibility, and that is, as I have been 
putting it around here to reporters and getting reported out, to do 
basic math because that is, in fact, our obligation, is to do basic 
math.
  Unfortunately, a whole bunch of my colleagues on the Democratic side 
of the aisle and a whole bunch of my colleagues on the Republican side 
of the aisle refuse to do basic math. They want to say that, through 
magic fairy dust and through money trees, they can just wish away the 
reality that we are going to have a certain amount of inflows and a 
certain amount of outflows every year. Do you want to know why we are 
$37 trillion in debt, or soon to be? That is why.
  Now, we are having a big debate, America, on what we should do in 
this so-called reconciliation process. We are going to have tax policy 
in there that is going to affect our tax revenues to the government 
but, more importantly, affect the tax bill you receive.
  Let me stipulate for the record that when I am attacked a lot in the 
coming weeks for saying, allegedly, I want to have taxes go up, I am 
emphatically for cutting taxes. I would like to zero out the tax code, 
eliminate the income tax, and get rid of the IRS. I would like to do 
all of those things, and I have legislation to do it.
  I will vote for tax cuts, but I refuse to ignore math. If you are 
going to do a certain amount of tax cuts, which will create a certain 
amount of economic growth, yes, you still have to model how much 
revenue will come into the Treasury versus how much you are spending 
because my Republican colleagues love to spend.
  They campaign on tax cuts. They deliver on most of the tax cuts. They 
campaigned on balancing the budget and cutting spending, and never do 
it, ever, in the history of ever, with the possible exception of the 
late 1990s when the Gingrich Republicans, combined with Clinton and, by 
the way, a dot-com economic explosion, to deliver us a balanced budget. 
They did it through welfare reform and through some spending 
constraint. That is the only time in modern history when we have done 
it.
  Here is the problem. This chart shows you what we are dealing with. A 
whole lot of people are saying: Well, Chip, you and all of these fiscal 
hawks, these fiscal conservatives, you guys want to do all of these 
massive cuts, and we can't do it. It is crazy what you want to do.
  Let me be clear what we are talking about. We are currently running 
close to $2 trillion deficits. If we do all of the crazy stuff we are 
trying to do, we will be running what? Close to $2 trillion deficits. 
That is the truth. That is what the models show. That is what we know.
  Look here. These are the projections of the way things will be if we 
do nothing.

                              {time}  1315

  The blue line, we do nothing this year. We let the tax cuts expire, 
taxes go up--let me repeat, I am against that--taxes go up, revenues 
are projected to do what they do, and we will have the amount of debt 
over the next 10 years we see here growing from almost $30-something 
trillion all the way up to $50 trillion.
  What do these other lines represent? The orange lines are the House 
bill. The red lines are the Senate bill. We just did a thing where we 
combined the House and the Senate bill into one budget. We are now 
negotiating that, and this is all yet to be determined.
  Why am I saying all this? No one wants to read all of this. Nobody is 
going to pay attention to a chart. All of my staff and everybody says, 
``Don't use charts on the floor. Just go down and say things that will 
get clipped and sent around.'' Let me try to say something that will 
get clipped and sent around.
  Even if the House Republicans are successful in working with the 
President and the Senate to achieve the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in 
spending restraint over the 10-year budget window, which is a mere $150 
billion to $200 billion a year, even if we are successful, we are going 
to massively increase the debt in the United States all the way to 
pushing well over $50 trillion by the end of this budget window. That 
is it. If we fail, then debt will go up a little higher.
  We have an obligation to do better. Everything we are fighting for 
right now in the House is for crumbs. I haven't decided whether I will 
vote for it or not vote for it. Why? Because I am one vote. Out of 220 
Republicans, I am one vote, and I have to figure out how we build a 
majority and how the Senate builds a majority and then work with the 
White House to get a bill signed. I recognize that.
  There is a limit that I can accept. I just want the whole world to 
tell me, should I vote for a bill if we are successful at fighting for 
what we are fighting for on Medicaid reforms, on unwinding the student 
loans, on cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, on finding savings and fees 
on illegal aliens here so that we can pay for continued enforcement of 
the law at the border? If

[[Page H1802]]

we are successful for all of those things in terms of revenues and 
expenses, I am still going to burden my kids and grandkids with over 
$50 trillion in debt.
  What does that mean? It means more interest. It means likely higher 
inflation because, at some point, we can't afford this. That is the 
fundamental question.
  Now, I have a bunch of my colleagues, to the point of the gentleman 
from Arizona, running around saying that we can't touch Medicaid. Why 
can't we? Medicaid was expanded under ObamaCare, which we all opposed, 
and the Medicaid expansion was a big reason why we opposed it. Why can 
we now not demand reforms to the broken pieces of ObamaCare that 
expanded Medicaid such that we are giving 90 percent Federal match to 
the able-bodied, the people who are not the most vulnerable, compared 
to the vulnerable population who only get 50 to 60 to 70 percent? Why 
would we do that? Why would we give more to Medicaid recipients than 
Medicare recipients, which we often do?
  Why would we continue to allow States like California and other 
States to game the system, to get Federal dollars sent back in a money-
laundering scheme, as has been reported widely by The Wall Street 
Journal and others? They are openly and knowingly doing it. Why 
wouldn't we fix that?
  Why wouldn't we apply eligibility rules and work requirements, 
combined with lowering that abusive Federal match rate subsidizing blue 
States to game the system when they are using Federal borrowed money to 
prop up their weak State budget? Why wouldn't we fix that?
  I don't have a single constituent I know who thinks we ought to 
continue doing that. Even more so, my colleagues are running around 
giving in to these arguments that we are somehow cutting Medicaid. That 
is a lie.
  We could have a debate about whether we should actually reduce 
Medicaid and give more money in other places or free up the States to 
provide better service or empower Americans to go get the doctor of 
their choice and be able to afford healthcare without having an 
employer- or government-provided, insurance-run bureaucratic system 
enriching insurance bureaucrats and pharma and hospitals because that 
is what we have.
  We don't have free healthcare anywhere in this country. The freest 
country in the world, and we do not have the freedom to go to the 
doctor of our choice. We don't. The average family in this country is 
paying $25,000 a year to go to insurance bureaucrats to tell them what 
handful of doctors they can go to, what lousy deductible they get, what 
ridiculous copay they have.
  I have a constituent who died from cancer last year who couldn't go 
to MD Anderson because she was covered under ObamaCare. Think about 
that, covered under ObamaCare, sick with cancer, can't go to the best 
cancer hospital in the world 2 hours from her house. That is your 
healthcare system, and we won't touch Medicaid.
  Our budget contemplates Medicaid going up 25 percent. I am not going 
to say whether that is good or bad, but can we at least just have the 
backbone as the Republican Party to not allow our colleagues on the 
other side of the aisle and the media to say that we are cutting 
Medicaid when we are increasing Medicaid spending? I mean, it is mind-
boggling that we allow that narrative to set in on a program that is 
broken, that has a trillion dollars of improper payments, that is rife 
with abuse.
  What are we here for? I mean, that would be my question for my 
Republican colleagues. Why did you run for office? Because I don't 
recall Republicans running on a big platform of: The government is the 
solution to all your problems. I don't remember growing up as a child 
of the eighties listening to Ronald Reagan or, frankly, listening to 
President Trump's speeches saying, man, we really love government 
bureaucracy and all the great things it does for the people.
  Nobody runs on that. Not a single Republican has run on increasing 
deficits. Every single Republican has run on balancing the budget. Yet, 
every year, we vote for more spending. Every year, we vote for more 
debt. Every year, we increase deficits and add to the debt, every 
single year.

  I want to get right to the chase here because, for the last 2 months, 
some of us have been willing to walk out and say that we will not vote 
for the tax cut extensions if we don't get spending restrained. I am 
getting lots of Republicans around town who like to stir the pot and go 
and say, ``You are going to vote for a tax increase, are you, Chip? Oh, 
we are going to hit you hard. We will come after you for voting for tax 
increases,'' but they won't say a thing about voting for the inflation 
tax increase on every American family while they run to the hills on 
spending restrained because they won't do it. That is the truth.
  I didn't come to this town for more of the same. The men and women 
who walked into a wall of bullets at Normandy didn't do it so we could 
have $50 trillion of debt and destroy our own country from within. That 
is what is happening.
  This country is weaker because the very individuals entrusted to 
defend her, defend the Constitution, and be responsible stewards of the 
Treasury have failed them and continue to fail them.
  Let me be very clear about the budget we are talking about right now. 
We see what happens to the debt under our budgets. They go way up, but 
I am not accounting for the other things. What are those other things? 
This budget, the House budget, assumes that we are able to figure out 
how to hold what we call discretionary spending flat.
  I don't know if the Speaker, who is the only other person in the 
Chamber with me, believes that we will hold discretionary spending 
flat, but history would say we wouldn't. Our budget assumes that we 
hold discretionary spending flat. That is Defense, DOJ, DHS, all the 
spending on all the various programs in Commerce, and go down the list.
  What else? I read a story yesterday that because of tariff policy--by 
the way, I support the President using tariff policy to isolate China, 
restructure our worldwide trade that is being abused by friend and foe, 
but I just read a story yesterday that they are planning on how to bail 
out farmers from tariffs.
  Remember, 7 years ago, we had to spend $25 billion to $30 billion, 
$35 billion to bail out farmers for tariffs. This last December, we 
spent, I don't know, $30 billion or something in a supplemental bailing 
out farmers. What happens when we need more money for California 
wildfires, or what happens when there is a hurricane that hits Florida 
or, apparently, North Carolina or Tennessee? Is that $5 billion, $20 
billion, $30 billion, $50 billion? You see, Congress doesn't have the 
ability to say no to spending.
  Let's bring it all back. Should I vote for a reconciliation package 
that will almost certainly guarantee $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion of 
deficit spending because I am getting certain crumbs in cuts in certain 
committees, and the only reason that I have gotten said crumbs was 
because we threatened to stop the extension of the tax cuts in order to 
force the question on spending?
  Look, I want to absolutely applaud the great work of a whole lot of 
committee chairs and my Republican colleagues for the work that they 
have done to identify spending restraint and savings. Education, they 
found a bunch of savings. I can go through committee by committee. Last 
night, we added a lot of fees to pay for border security and stuff in 
the Judiciary Committee. There are other things we could do.
  The math is still going to have to be math. We are going to spend 
about another $300 billion in this bill for defense and border 
security. That is another $300 billion. We are going to find savings of 
allegedly $1.5 trillion over 10 years, so that is $150 billion a year. 
What that means is we are already in the hole.
  By 2035, the United States will be spending more on interest per year 
than all Federal programs, aside from Social Security. Right now, 
Federal debt is so large that 40 percent of all personal income taxes 
go to paying interest on the Federal debt. Think about that. We have 
over a trillion dollars a year in interest.
  Spending drives inflation. In 2024, the typical American family 
needed an extra $17,000 a year to maintain the same standard of living 
as January 2021.
  We have increased spending, our budget, our Federal budget, from

[[Page H1803]]

roughly $3.6 trillion or so in 2015 to almost $7 trillion now. That is 
an 80 percent increase.
  Does anybody alive think that we can sustain this? Do any of my 
colleagues, Republican or Democrat, think that we can sustain this? 
Does anybody alive right now in the Chamber, if they are in the complex 
and haven't hopped on a plane to fly home because we had our final vote 
on a Thursday morning and we are going to come back on a Monday night 
in our usual way of doing things in the swamp, not doing what we should 
do, does anybody believe that this is going to save the fiscal health 
of America?
  Like I said, I haven't decided if I am going to vote for it or 
against it. That depends on a lot of variables--the Inflation Reduction 
Act to actually repeal the ridiculous subsidizing, enriching the 
Chinese and enriching billion-dollar corporations, and undermining our 
energy security.
  Do we have the resources necessary to secure the border and the fees 
to pay for it? Are we putting in the provisions that we ought to be 
putting in there to guarantee that we are going to have the President 
be able to carry out his campaign promises to remove aliens?

                              {time}  1330

  Are we going to have transformational reform to Medicaid so we 
eliminate the ridiculous 90-percent subsidy of the able-bodied while we 
are giving a much lower rate of 50 to 70 percent to the vulnerable 
population?
  Are we going to continue to allow the provider taxes and the gaming 
of the system, the money laundering that is allowing money to go to 
California to be gamed and to be doled out to illegal aliens and put in 
their general budget as they openly brag, or are we going to fix that?
  Are we going to fix the debacle that is the higher education system? 
Are we going to restrain their ability to abuse Federal grants, student 
loan subsidies, or are we going to continue to subsidize Harvard, Yale, 
Cal Berkeley, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of 
Virginia, both my alma maters? I don't care. I would cut them off and 
take away their money.
  Are we going to continue to do as I heard, which is to create 
additional taxes on cars, or are we going to fix it?
  Literally, in order to pay for the Coast Guard and air traffic 
control, I heard that the T&I Committee, they were poised to put a 
vehicle tax on every vehicle in America. Limited government, 
constitutional Republicans were going to tax your car. We fought and 
said that is a bad idea. So they got rid of the tax, the $50 tax or $20 
tax, whatever it was, on internal combustion engine cars.
  By the way, we are subsidizing EVs and hybrids and so forth in order 
to get the internal combustion engine off the street, but now we are 
going to tax the EVs that we are subsidizing, unless we repeal the 
Inflation Reduction Act.
  These are the tangled webs that we weave in a government in which 
politicians promise to give away free stuff. As I have said before, we 
are not the United States House of free stuff. You can't just print 
money and give it to people and say, oh, we will take care of your 
problems. Yet, that is what we do.
  Our best case scenario if we pass this reconciliation package is 
still $50 trillion in debt in 10 years. That is literally the best case 
scenario. I think it is much worse, especially if our interest is going 
up and we refinance our debt at higher rates, which seems likely, but 
here we are just nibbling around the edges begging for crumbs. Please, 
oh, please, please give me $150 billion a year in savings on a $7 
trillion annual budget, up almost twice in a decade, bloated and 
expanded under COVID, bloated and expanded under both Democrat and 
Republican regimes.
  We have had an extraordinary first 100 days. The President has turned 
this ship around. We are securing borders. Apprehensions are down 94 
percent. We are resetting our position on the world stage, 
diplomatically, economically. We are rebuilding our military, which was 
being decimated by the previous administration, unwinding DEI, rooting 
out waste, fraud, and abuse in government, firing bureaucrats, 
identifying all the things that ought to be cut, and that is a good 
thing.
  In Congress, my colleagues are doing some good things. We have passed 
some good bills that are hitting a wall in the Senate: the SAVE Act, 
the injunctions bill, a bunch of CRAs to undo the damage of the Biden 
administration. We passed five this week to undo the damage of the EV 
mandates.
  We have got to stay on offense, and we can and we are doing a lot of 
great things, but this reconciliation bill, at a bare minimum, can do 
no harm, and literally that is what we are begging for, when we are 
trying to fight for $1.5 trillion in spending reductions, not even 
cuts. I want to be clear. I will remind everybody about Medicaid. 
Medicaid, there it is. It is going up 25 percent in our budget, for 
better or worse. I can make arguments, but it is going up.
  Can we at least speak the truth that it is going up? We are begging 
for crumbs to get $1.5 trillion in reductions over 10 years. We are 
going to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years. We are just trying 
to save $1.5 trillion of that massive increase for crumbs to have $50 
trillion of debt at the end of that rainbow.
  I hope we will come together. I hope we will unite to deliver a 
product that is worthy of support. I have not decided whether I will be 
able to support it. We will find out whether it has what is needed.


                   Honoring the Life of Diana Denman

  Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I do want to take one second before I yield to 
my friend from California to honor a dear friend of mine who passed 
away a couple weeks ago, Diana Denman.
  Often called the godmother of the Texas Republican Party, she passed 
away on April 17 at the age of 91.
  I don't do a lot of the floor speeches on individuals because I feel 
like if I do them for one or two and I don't do them for everybody that 
I represent that gets tough. Obviously, veterans, police officers, 
there are things that rise to the occasion.
  Diana was a legendary mentor not just to me but to many of my 
friends, many of the people that work for me, many of my staff. She 
played a major role in the political evolution in Texas where Texas 
went from a historic southern Democrat State to a bastion of 
conservative Republican politics and a warrior for freedom across the 
globe.
  I was proud to have her support, but more importantly, I was proud to 
have her friendship. She worked closely with some of my dear friends in 
politics and former bosses like Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Rick 
Perry, both of whom are dear friends of mine.
  She led a storied life. She rode her horse into the lobby of The 
Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. She acted in Hollywood where she 
would go on to meet future President Reagan when she was in Hollywood 
in that Golden Age. She held many positions in the Reagan 
administration in the 1980s, and she stood strong against the Soviet 
Union and Soviet aggression around the globe. She was truly one of the 
last cold warriors, and I mean that in all of the right and good ways.
  As a child of the 1980s, I consider myself a proud cold warrior and 
believe very much that we need to stand against aggression in the same 
way President Reagan stood against that aggression and stood for 
freedom and as a beacon of hope around the world. I think we can learn 
from that era, as I learned from Diana, about doing things with peace 
through strength.

  I will miss Diana, and she will be remembered for her fierce 
patriotism and her strong convictions. She was feisty. She was 
committed. She loved her country. I thank her for her steadfast 
commitment to the conservative movement, to the United States, to 
defending our country, and in service of the Lord almighty.
  I will keep to fighting to live free, and I will remember Diana 
through those actions. I will miss her dearly, as will many of my staff 
who counted her as a mentor.
  When I think of the people who have devoted their life to the cause 
and they come and they go and they pass, I am reminded that we are here 
for these fleeting moments, what will be our legacy? What will be the 
legacy of this generation? Are we going to put this country back on a 
sustainable path? Are we going to actually honor our constitutional 
commitment to having limited government in which people can live free? 
Are we going to constrain the appetite for unchecked spending and the 
racking up of debt and the deficits and the interests that are killing

[[Page H1804]]

our economy, our country, and, frankly, the futures of our own 
children, or are we going to choose the harder path?
  As President Reagan said in 1964, it was a time for choosing. 
Frankly, we didn't actually heed his call. We chose poorly. We chose 
the path of a massive, bureaucratic tyrannical State. We have empowered 
government; we haven't reduced it. We have increased spending; we 
haven't reduced it. We should actually honor that time for choosing, 
and in the memory of my good friend who served with President Reagan 
let's reignite that call for a time for choosing, to choose that path, 
to choose the path of the Constitution of limited government, of 
freedom, of responsible spending, and turning over this country to our 
children better than we inherited.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________