PAUSE Act of 2021

Mr. Speaker, by the direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 567, and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to my friend and colleague from the Committee on Rules, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Reschenthaler), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members be given 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, this morning, the Committee on Rules met and reported a rule, House Resolution 567. The rule provides for consideration of H.R. 4346, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, under a structured rule. The rule provides 1 hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Appropriations or their designees.

The rule self-executes a manager's amendment from Chairman Ryan, makes in order 12 amendments, provides en bloc authority for Chairwoman DeLauro or her designee, and provides one motion to recommit.

The rule also provides for consideration H.R. 4373, the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, under a structured rule. The rule provides 1 hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Appropriations or their designees.

The rule self-executes a manager's amendment from Chairwoman Lee, makes in order 36 amendments, provides en bloc authority for Chairwoman DeLauro or her designee, and provides one motion to recommit.

Finally, the rule provides for consideration of H.R. 4505, the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, under a structured rule. The rule provides 1 hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Appropriations or their designees.

It self-executes a manager's amendment from Chairman Cartwright, makes in order 61 amendments, provides en bloc authority for Chairwoman DeLauro or her designee, and provides one motion to recommit.

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise and speak in favor of critical investments that my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee have worked tirelessly to secure for the American people. First, I would like to congratulate Chairwoman DeLauro on her exemplary leadership in bringing us a package of legislation that we can be proud to support and as well commend Chairs Cartwright, Ryan, and Lee on their dedication to ensuring America's greatest needs are reflected in this year's appropriations bills.

The underlying package we are considering today includes fiscal year 2022 funding for the Commerce, Justice, and Science; Legislative Branch; and State and Foreign Operations appropriations bills that invest in the future of America's hardworking families and America's engagement around the globe.

These investments are more than just a commitment to our districts, they are firm action items that will help Americans throughout our country grow and heal as we emerge from this pandemic.

The Commerce-Justice-Science bill supports good-paying American jobs, fosters groundbreaking scientific research, and helps to make our communities safer. These critical programs include investments in economic development in distressed communities with support for small businesses, including small- and medium-sized American manufacturers.

This package also increases funding to address gender-based violence in our communities, supports programs to reduce gun violence, and helps us tackle the opioid crisis.

I, for one, know that my community in Rochester, New York, will benefit greatly from the priorities secured in the CJS appropriations bill, and I look forward to delivering on our promise to support safer communities with funding for local law enforcement while bolstering police and criminal justice

reform, increasing funding for community-based violence intervention initiatives, and expanding gun violence prevention efforts.

The Legislative Branch appropriations bill strengthens congressional capacity to recruit a diverse and talented workforce while investing in efforts to protect our Capitol. After hearing firsthand yesterday from the brave officers who protected all of us on January 6, it is our duty to return the favor by doing our job and showing full support for our Capitol Police force.

The insurrection on January 6 left widespread physical damage to the Capitol Complex and emotional trauma for Members, congressional employees, and Capitol Police. This measure is essential to protecting the Capitol and ensuring that we can continue to do the work of the American people. It provides funding to support training, recruitment, retention, and readiness of the Capitol Police force.

The State and Foreign Operations Appropriations bills supports the world's most vulnerable with foreign assistance to meet urgent humanitarian needs, many of which have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This appropriations bill will promote democracy with funding to support allies and partners of the United States, particularly to counter governments that undermine the core values of our democracy and of democracy around the world.

Additionally, it confronts climate change with funding for global efforts to reduce emissions, advances women's rights by increasing funding for family planning, increases United Nations Population Fund funding, and repeals restrictions on safe and legal abortion.

This is a package I am proud to take home to my constituents, and I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to reflect on whom we are here to represent and support, make good on our promises to the American people, and pass this rule and these critical appropriations bills.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to in response, and I appreciate the comments from my friend, include in the Record a 2013 American Progress article titled, ``How the Hyde Amendment Discriminates Against Poor Women and Women of Color.''

[May 10, 2013]

How the Hyde Amendment Discriminates Against Poor Women and Women of

Color

(By Jessica Arons and Lindsay Rosenthal)

In 1973 the Supreme Court decided in the landmark case Roe

v. Wade to recognize the constitutional right to abortion for

all women. Forty years later, however, this guarantee remains

an empty promise for thousands of poor women and women of

color thanks to the Hyde Amendment, an annual appropriations

measure first passed in 1976. This provision intentionally

discriminates against poor women by prohibiting Medicaid, the

health-insurance program for low-income individuals and

families, from covering abortion care.

Because of the intersection in our country between race,

ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, this restriction also

has a disproportionate impact on women of color. Due to a

number of root causes related to inequality, women of color

are more likely to qualify for government insurance that

restricts abortion coverage, more likely to experience higher

rates of unintended pregnancy, and less likely to be able to

pay for an abortion out of pocket. The Hyde Amendment

therefore does not only undermine gender equity, but it also

violates principles of racial and economic justice.

The Hyde Amendment discriminates against poor women.

Congress passed the Hyde Amendment in order to deny poor

women access to abortion. Former Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), the

law's sponsor, admitted during the debate of his proposal

that he was targeting poor women. ``I certainly would like to

prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a

rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,'' he said.

``Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the Medicaid

bill.''

1 in 10 women of reproductive age in the United States

relies on Medicaid for their health coverage. By prohibiting

Medicaid from covering abortion services, the Hyde Amendment

has used the primary source of health care for low-income

women to restrict access to abortion.

Poor women face significant disparities when it comes to

reproductive health. Compared with higher-income women, poor

women's rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion are each

five times as high, and their unplanned birth rate is six

times as high. These disparities are rooted in deeply

entrenched inequities in the areas of health-insurance

coverage, health care, and medically accurate sex education,

as well as other health-promoting resources.

Abortion costs between $300 and $950 in the first

trimester, making it unaffordable for poor women without

insurance coverage. In

2009 more than half of nonelderly adult women enrolled in

Medicaid had family incomes below the poverty level; one-

quarter had incomes below 50 percent of the poverty level.

The monthly income for a family of three living at half the

current poverty level is $813.75.

One in four Medicaid-qualified women who seek an abortion

is forced to carry her pregnancy to term because of cost.

Many more are forced to delay their procedure for as long as

two to three weeks while they raise money, with the costs and

risks of the procedure increasing the longer they wait.

The Hyde Amendment discriminates against women of color.

A dissenting Supreme Court opinion recognized that the Hyde

Amendment was discriminatory. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood

Marshall's dissenting opinion in Harris v. McRae noted that

the law was ``designed to deprive poor and minority women of

the constitutional right to choose abortion.''

Women of color are disproportionately poor and therefore

less likely to be able to pay out of pocket for their health

care. According to 2011 census data, 25.5 percent of African

Americans and 25 percent of Latinas are living below the

poverty level, compared to only 10.4 percent of whites and

12.2 percent of Asians. Moreover, certain groups of Asian and

Pacific Islander women face much higher poverty rates than

are reflected in the aggregate census data. For example, 67

percent, 66 percent, and 47 percent of people of Laotian,

Hmong, and Cambodian descent, respectively, live in poverty

in the United States.

Women of color are more likely to be enrolled in government

insurance. In 2011, 40.9 percent of African American females

and 36.3 percent of Latinas had government-based insurance,

including 29.2 percent and 29.6 percent participation,

respectively, in Medicaid. In contrast, 32.6 percent of white

females and 24.4 percent of Asian American females got their

insurance through a government program. While Asian and

Pacific Islander women use Medicaid at lower rates for a

variety of reasons--only 6 percent were enrolled in the

program in 2004--participation is quite high among various

subgroups. For example, 20 percent of women of Southeast

Asian descent are covered by Medicaid.

Women of color are disproportionately more likely to need

an abortion. Black women had the highest unintended pregnancy

rate of any racial or ethnic group and more than double that

of non-Hispanic white women. The unintended pregnancy rate of

Latinas is 78 percent higher than the non-Hispanic rate.

These high unintended pregnancy rates are part of the reason

women of color seek abortion at higher rates than non-

Hispanic whites. Although they represent much smaller

segments of the population as a whole, black and Latina women

comprise 30 percent and 25 percent of women who have

abortions, respectively. Data on Asian and Pacific Islander

women's utilization of health services, including abortion,

is extremely limited, but one study has shown that 35 percent

of pregnancies for Asian and Pacific Islander women end in

abortion, compared to 18 percent for non-Hispanic white

women.

These health disparities mirror other health disparities

that women of color experience. In addition to higher rates

of unintended pregnancy and abortion, women of color face

higher rates of reproductive cancers, HIV and other sexually

transmitted infections, premature births, low birth weights,

and maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. They also

encounter poorer health outcomes for diabetes, cardiovascular

disease, and obesity, among other health conditions.

Root causes of inequality drive the health disparities

women of color face. Differential access to treatment, lower

levels of respect and competency from health care providers,

lack of trust in the medical establishment, lack of accurate

information, and a host of other socioeconomic factors lead

to poorer outcomes along racial and ethnic lines for overall

health indicators, specifically with regard to reproductive

health.

The Hyde Amendment treats the rights of women in this

country according to two different standards: whether you can

afford to pay for your rights or not. That is not equality.

Mr. Speaker, I do note that in my home State of New York we have made the decision for many years to support women in poverty who seek reproductive rights.

Rights are granted to us under the Constitution. Those rights are as fundamental as any other right guaranteed to us under the Constitution, but we don't have economic tests for rights in the United States. So if you have a right, Mr. Speaker, you have a right. We don't say you have the right to free speech as long as you can pay for it. We don't suggest that the right to assemble, the right to have your grievances addressed by your government, the right to petition, the right to press or to select the religion and support the religion that you choose is subject to some kind of economic test. We believe the same should be true for reproductive rights.

So I would just say that in New York it is something that we have supported for many, many years, and we continue to urge support, public dollars for reproductive rights and for women's health, which is very much at stake, particularly in communities of color.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Perlmutter), who is my friend on the Committee on Rules.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

First, I do want to respond to my distinguished colleague from Oklahoma and friend from the Rules Committee as it relates to the McGirt decision. I share his concerns for the challenges being faced by the people in the State of Oklahoma. I know his amendment has been made in order. Without regard to how that vote takes place, I would love to work with him--and, I am sure, others would--to address the real concerns by the people of the State of Oklahoma. I look forward to that conversation.

I do want, before I yield to my friend, to mention that I talked, in my opening comments, about some of the things that are in the bill. I do want to highlight some of the important things in the Legislative Branch appropriations, which provides $4.8 billion, an increase of nearly 14 percent.

I mentioned earlier that we hope to build upon the emergency supplemental bill, which we passed in May, that would continue to support the Capitol Police, National Guard, et cetera. In this bill, we put money to improve training and bolster wellness support for the Capitol Police, who were attacked on January 6, and provide funding to hire up to over 2,100 sworn officers and 450 civilian members of the Capitol Police and more resources for recruitment, retention, and readiness for them.

We strengthened congressional capacity. It increases funding for congressional offices to help recruit and retain a talented and diverse staff and supports mental health and wellness for Members and staff.

We always talk about being Article I of the Constitution, and we really need to support that legislative branch and make sure we have the resources to be able to provide balanced, thoughtful support for the American public.

I wanted to highlight some of the really important things. I appreciate, certainly, Chairman Ryan and the work that he, the ranking member, and the members of that subcommittee did in getting that bill before the House and the rule that we are debating right now.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Lois Frankel), my colleague and friend.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I do want to commend the previous speaker for her encouragement of all Americans to be vaccinated. We certainly want to continue to promote that message and urge everyone in the United States to be vaccinated.

Mr. Speaker, in my previous comments, I talked about the congressional and legislative appropriations.

I include in the Record a July 13 Business Insider article entitled: ``Capitol Hill staff take second jobs with Postmates, Starbucks, and J. Crew to make up for their low salaries.''

I continue to repeat that men and women who work here shouldn't struggle to make ends meet just because they have dedicated their careers to public service.

[July 13, 2021]

Capitol Hill Staff Take Second Jobs With Postmates, Starbucks, and J.

Crew to Make Up for Their Low Salaries

(By Kayla Epstein)

With no choice but to accept low pay, Capitol Hill staffers

often have to pick up second jobs.

Retail, gig-economy, and service-industry jobs are frequent

options.

Staffers told Insider the second jobs add to an already

stressful workload and lead to burnout.

The next time you order takeout in the DC area, your

delivery person might work for Congress.

Given no choice but to accept startlingly low salaries in

exchange for the privilege of working on Capitol Hill, many

interns and junior staffers to America's most powerful--and

wealthy--politicians take second jobs to survive in

Washington, DC, one of the most expensive cities in the

country.

Some staffers and interns go for gig-economy roles like

Postmates, Uber, and DoorDash, while others work as baristas

and bartenders. For those who struggle to afford a

professional wardrobe, retail jobs help provide additional

wages and a discount on clothes.

While it's common for people in the US to work second jobs

to make ends meet, civic groups and staffers say that low pay

on Capitol Hill pushes out talented staff and creates an

environment in which employees from privileged backgrounds

have an edge in building long-term careers.

``You could tell when certain people kind of came from

money and didn't have to'' work second jobs, one former

staffer to a House Republican said. ``I have some friends

that didn't need to because they came up from a wealthy

upbringing . . . They were comfortable. Others were kind of

like, `OK, yeah, I need to really do some extra jobs because

this is not livable.'''

Insider spoke to five current and former staffers who had

worked second jobs as a way to compensate for what one former

senior Democratic House aide called ``poverty wages.'' They

described exhaustion and burnout from pulling double duty,

their only days off eaten up by delivering takeout or

grabbing graveyard shifts at clothing stores. Some spoke on

the condition of anonymity because they feared losing their

jobs or hurting their careers by speaking out.

``It's tough for the normal traditional staffer because

that is easily a 50- to 60-hour week,'' said one former House

and Senate aide who started out at $27,000 a year and had to

take a second job at apparel company J.Crew.

When you add on the additional hours for a second job, he

said, ``you just burn yourself out to stay afloat.''

Do you have a tip about Capitol Hill workplace issues to

share? Bad bosses, toxic offices, or questionable behavior

toward congressional staffers? Insider is continuing to cover

Congress as a workplace.

An open secret

The fact that many congressional employees take on second

jobs has been an open secret on the Hill for years. But when

some staffers do seek outside work, they face repercussions.

Audrey Henson, who was a Republican House aide making

$25,000 before she founded the internshipplacement program

College to Congress, said she faced pushback from her manager

when she took a bartending job near the Hill.

``I would work until 2, 3 in the morning on a Tuesday,

Wednesday, Thursday night. I'd come into Congress absolutely

exhausted,'' she said of her job, which she held from 2013 to

2014.

``Whenever I was having to pick up more shifts at the bar,

and then when I ended up getting a weekend job, I was talked

to by my chief of staff about priorities,'' she told Insider.

``And he was like, `This job should be your priority.'''

``I said, quite frankly, it is. I'm only doing these other

jobs so that I can give you more,'' Henson said. ``Trust me,

this is my only priority. Those jobs allow me to afford this

job.''

She worked at Union Pub, a popular watering hole on Capitol

Hill.

``I was like, I'm up here to work in Congress, and I'm

putting in equal hours at Union Pub. There's an issue with

this picture,'' she said. ``And I wasn't alone.''

Union Pub spokesperson Sam Sanchez said that, ``pre-

pandemic, Capitol Hill staffers made up a good portion of our

staff working as part-time servers or bartenders--more than

50% at times.''

One current Democratic House staffer, who started in DC

before eventually making her way back to a district office,

worked at a law firm and a retail store to make it through

her part-time, unpaid Senate internship.

``I would do a shipment shift at like 3:30 in the morning,

go to the law firm, and go to my internship,'' she said. ``I

was working seven days a week . . . I wanted to work

somewhere I could buy work clothes because it's very

expensive.''

After her predawn store shift, ``I would leave at 7, go

catch the Metro'' to her law firm gig, she said.

As a part-time Senate intern, she didn't get any travel

benefits.

``I spent $260 a month on my Metro,'' she said.

Even after getting a full-time role with a committee, she

continued to work her $10-per-hour retail job on the weekends

to have enough spending money and afford work clothes.

``It was exhausting all the time. But in my mind it's what

I had to do for the job on the Hill,'' she said. ``I didn't

have much of a social life. I kind of missed out on a few

years of my 20s just working myself to death.''

Union Pub, a popular bar near Capitol Hill in Washington,

DC. ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images.

`I was giving up a lot'.

Other Hill veterans echoed the detrimental impact of

holding a second job while working full-time in Congress.

Instead of using weekends to recuperate from weeks of late-

night votes, political chaos, and a stressful office

environment, they had to spend their time finding ways to

make money.

The former Republican House staffer started driving for

Postmates to bolster his $30,500 salary.

``I would typically do it Friday evening, Saturday,

Sunday,'' he said. He could make about $200 to $300 a month

from Postmates but had to ``really grind to make those

numbers.''

``I was making money, to have extra money, but I was also

giving up a lot,'' he said. ``And it was just really hard

sometimes to do my second job because I wanted to go out, I

wanted to have fun, I wanted to just be lazy on a Saturday or

Sunday. I wanted just to be able to relax.''

Sometimes, the staffers said, the stress affected their

physical health, too. One current staffer told Insider that

the exhaustion of working sunrise Starbucks shifts on top of

her Hill internship made her hair fall out.

``I wasn't getting a lot of sleep. I was looking very

tired,'' she said. ``I was breaking out a lot. My hair was

not in great shape--it was thinning out.''

`They're missing out on the most talented people'.

House and Senate offices and committees have only so much

money to spend, and that allotment must fund everything,

including travel, office supplies, direct mail, and staff

salaries. Each office functions like its own business,

determining pay and the number of workers and interns. There

is no formal human resources office on Capitol Hill that can

help regulate pay for certain jobs, and the pay band system

that exists across the federal government to standardize

salaries doesn't apply to Congress.

On June 14, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and

more than 100 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to the House

Appropriations Committee to demand an increase in the

Members' Representational Allowance, the pool of funding that

is distributed equally among all House offices.

``For years, pay and benefits for the staff of Member

offices, leadership offices, and committees have fallen

farther and farther behind what is offered in the private

sector,'' the lawmakers wrote.

A few days later, the House Appropriations Committee

released its legislative funding bill that calls for a $134

million increase to the MRA. It would also increase the

spending for intern pay and committee budgets.

But there's no guarantee that the extra money to the MRA

would go toward bolstering staff salaries. And many House

offices still don't properly use the money available for

internships, said Carlos Vera, executive director of the

advocacy group Pay Our Interns.

Low pay is simply accepted as the cost of admission into

the legislative branch, and many job candidates fear

attempting to negotiate with hiring managers because of the

scarcity of these opportunities.

But Henson, who bartended, said it's long past time for

that to change. Forcing staffers to work themselves to the

point of burnout hinders their ability to do their jobs for

the American people, she said.

``What other profession do we ask full-time professionals

to be a barista on the side?'' Henson said. ``What if you had

professional athletes leave practice every day to work at

Starbucks? Would they be winners? Would the teams be getting

the best talent? No.''

``That's what's happening in Congress,'' she added.

``They're missing out on the most talented people because

they're not paying them.''

Mr. Speaker, having talked about the legislative branch, let me take just a moment now to talk about where we are globally with this appropriations bill.

The State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Subcommittee asks for an increase of more than 12 percent, an appropriation of $62 billion to support the displaced and vulnerable, rebuild public health infrastructure, confront climate change, advance women's health, and promote democracy.

If I could take just a moment, Mr. Speaker, I would like to highlight some

of these things, particularly as it relates to rebuilding the public health infrastructure.

The rule which supports the underlying bill would dramatically increase funding to confront the current COVID-19 pandemic, prevent future pandemics, and shore up gains made in global health. It includes $10.6 billion to support the health of families and communities around the world. The total includes a billion dollars for global health security to prevent future pandemics through both bilateral and multilateral mechanisms, something that is critical to stop the spread of future pandemics.

It also places a premium on confronting climate change and the climate crisis by expanding global efforts to address environmental threats and reduce emissions, with over $3 billion to address the climate crisis and other environmental programs and includes the first direct appropriations for the Green Climate Fund, to the tune of a $1.6 billion investment.

It also promotes democracy around the world, provides funding to support allies and partners of the United States with a $1.6 billion appropriation to promote a free and open Indo-Pacific and help counter the growing influence of the People's Republic of China in developing countries, something that I think people on both sides of the aisle know is a growing threat to freedom and democracy around the world. It also funds a $2.517 billion effort to increase democracy programs and provides $300 million for the National Endowment for Democracy.

For those of us who care deeply about the world in which we live and care deeply about those countries that seek to limit democratic institutions and democracy, this is welcome news and I think very, very appropriate to the American values which we hold so dear.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I want to just take a moment to dive a little deeper in the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies appropriation, and thank, again, the chairman of the subcommittee, Mr. Cartwright, for the great work that he did in getting the appropriations bill before the House.

Overall, the appropriation bill provides $81.6 billion, an increase of 14 percent, to create jobs, support safer communities, and confront the climate crisis here at home.

I would like to take just a moment to highlight some of the specifics, because it is important, as the American public observes the conversation going on here in the Congress about what our priorities are. Budgets always describe our priorities and our values.

For instance, this bill provides $25 billion, an increase of $1.77 billion for NASA, with strong funding and a total effort to gain scientific knowledge about the Earth's changing climate.

It includes $6.46 billion for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for climate research and mitigation efforts, including improvements to weather forecasting, understanding the impact and degree of sea level rise, supporting offshore wind energy, fisheries management, and STEM education.

It fosters innovation in U.S. economic competitiveness with $9.63 billion for the National Science Foundation to support climate science and sustainable research, as well as research on artificial intelligence, quantum information science, advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, and other critical research efforts, which I might say, parenthetically, is critically important, not only for economic security, not only for the climate crisis, but for national security as we confront these threats across the globe.

In this bill we also address gender-based violence, providing $753.8 million for Violence Against Women's Act prevention and prosecution programs and includes $60 million for grants to reduce the backlog of unprocessed rape kits, which is critically important.

This bill also provides support to create good-paying jobs for Americans, including providing $10.95 billion for the Department of Commerce, an increase of $2.03 billion, with investments in economic development in distressed communities and support for small businesses, including small- and medium-sized American manufacturers, as we continue to be concerned about the supply chain and the value chain as it relates to not only competitiveness by American companies but also, again, to make sure that we support our warfighters, and to make sure the supply chain for critical components and parts is ready for the defense of our Nation.

It invests directly in our communities, with $433.1 million for the Economic Development Administration, an increase of $87 million, to boost economically recovering areas and launch innovative community development efforts, as well as $275 million for the very important Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program, which we utilize in my community and others across the country, and an increase of $125 million to help small- and medium-sized United States manufacturers create and preserve jobs.

Much of this will also be involved with making sure that people who have been displaced because of the pandemic economically will have opportunities to go into new industries and be trained, as well as make sure that incumbent workers continue to upgrade their skills so they can be competitive

in what is a very, very competitive global economic environment.

So I want to highlight those, Mr. Speaker. I know that I just talked about a lot of things that are not before the House, but I thought I would spend just a few moments talking about what is actually before the House and some of the critical investments that we are making in the bills that are before us.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I just remind folks that the Members of the House who are on the floor today are working very hard to make sure that we pass appropriations to support the American people, to create jobs, to make America safe, to make our interests around the world known.

I do want to talk a little bit about making our communities safer, because there are substantial resources in the appropriations bill to do just that, providing resources for local law enforcement who are facing a period of great challenge: $360 million for Byrne Justice Assistance Grants; $156.5 million for COPS hiring grants, it takes concrete actions and provides resources for meaningful police reform initiatives, including requiring recipients of Federal law enforcement funding to comply with requirements in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; provides $100 million for community-based violence intervention initiatives; addresses the epidemic of gun violence in the United States with $100 million to strengthen the National Instant Criminal Background Check System; $40 million to incentivize States to establish or refine red flag and gun licensing laws; and $10 million to develop and expand gun buy-back and relinquishment programs.

We are working very, very hard, Mr. Speaker. We are trying to move ahead for the American people who have been through one of the most difficult times in the history of our country, in the history of the world, a pandemic which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. We do see rising rates of infection. If you look at and do the correlation of those States who have the lowest vaccination rates, that is where the greatest numbers of those infections are occurring.

And we are working hard. We are trying to move forward an agenda that will serve all Americans from a public health perspective, from an economic recovery perspective, and how to move forward and build this country back better and make sure that all people in America, every American citizen has the right, the opportunity, the potential to meet their dreams and aspirations.

That is our work before the House, and we are not going to be distracted. We are not going to be taken down the proverbial rabbit hole. We have work to do, and that is the work before the House.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to follow up on the remarks of my friend from California, who just noted the crisis we have at the border and the danger that that puts the American people in, and not just the American people, but the immigrants who seek to come here.

I rise today, in particular, to bring the public's attention to that border crisis, which my friend rightfully recognized is being driven by that guy who runs that outfit over there.

Now, I do not mean, in saying that, the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin. I know who he is. I mean that other guy who runs that outfit over there, down Pennsylvania Avenue, and that is the President of the United States.

I say this because the President cannot possibly have any idea what is going on because no American President entrusted with the safety and well-being of the United States and her citizens would purposely empower cartels or would purposely empower illegal organizations to harm American citizens for profit, to flood our streets with dangerous fentanyl and narcotics, to cause high-speed chases like the ones that have occurred in the district I represent, where Americans are in danger, or the murder of Americans through wide-open borders. No American President would purposely do that, would they?

No American President would purposely lie to immigrants and cause them to get raped and abused on long, dangerous journeys across the desert, upon the promise of amnesty, for crass political purposes. No American President would possibly do that, would he or she?

No American President could be so callous, so indifferent to the lives of Americans and immigrants who seek to come here, that he would allow his staff and the Secretary of Homeland Security to lie, repeatedly, to the American people that there is no crisis at our border.

No American President would do that, so no American President could know that this is happening and take that position, could understand what is happening and then ignore it, could understand what is happening at the border and then deny it and encourage it through reckless policies.

No, that guy who runs that outfit over there cannot possibly know what is happening at our border because no American President would do that.

But I assure you, we Texans know; our neighbors in other border States

know; and the American people across the country affected by this crisis know. We see it every day, the brutal conditions along the border ravaged by the deceit and the lies of politicians governing by sound bite and pretending they are compassionate. We do see it every day.

Who is this that I am showing here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives? This is the Vargas family. I have come to know Lori, and I have come to know other members of this family because Jared, depicted in this picture, was murdered by a colleague at a restaurant who was in this country illegally, who had been caught, let go, caught, let go, caught again, let go, and then murdered Jared. He was from San Antonio, Texas, which I represent.

This is real. This happens every day. We, in Texas, are on the front lines while the people in this body fiddle, and endanger the lives of American citizens, to prostrate themselves to a crass political left that could care less about the American citizens getting killed or raped. And they do it for political purposes.

The arrogance of leftist Democrats destroying our own Nation with trillions of dollars of spending; the reckless disregard of our energy independence and strength; the reckless disregard of the small businesses getting destroyed by shutdowns and the livelihoods destroyed while peddling fear and panic; the reckless disregard of our children, as their futures are destroyed by teachers' unions and the devastating masking of their innocent faces; the reckless disregard of our fundamental inalienable rights to worship, to speak freely, to defend ourselves with firearms, to pursue happiness by working to provide for our families; the reckless disregard for our safety while defunding police and attacking our rights to defend ourselves under the Second Amendment at the same time, done on this floor today; the reckless disregard for our national security, while empowering China to undermine our way of life; the reckless disregard for public health, as we rejoin the very World Health Organization that lied to us to protect China.

But perhaps the most reckless, by my leftist Democratic colleagues, is the arrogance of using crass political selfishness to encourage parents to send their children to be raped, to be abused, to ride on train cars, and even to die along dangerous journeys, while simultaneously facilitating or encouraging the destruction of our neighbors to the south, in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. It is happening in real time and in extraordinary arrogance, for purposes of crass political gain or perceived gain.

Our neighbors to the south lament the mass exodus of their people under the lies and false compassion being sold from American Democrats.

This is the truth of what we are dealing with.

Let's talk about some of the real issues going on on our border. Uvalde, Texas, the mayor, Don McLaughlin said, ``The 2019 border crisis will look like a cakewalk to what is coming with Biden's border crisis.''

He said they are seeing 10 to 12 high-speed chases each week, with speeds up to 105 miles an hour. The local government has to take it on the chin because this administration refuses to secure the border. That is the mayor in Uvalde, Texas, just outside of the district I represent. My friend, Mr. Gonzales, represents that district.

Don calls me all the time saying, ``Where's the help?''

Where is the Federal Government, whose job it is to secure the border of the United States? You know where it is?

Nowhere to be found. In fact, actually found at a border making it worse for the citizens of this country, making it more dangerous, purposely or incompetently, either one unacceptably endangering the lives of Americans and the immigrants who seek to come here.

Del Rio mayor Bruno Lozano said, ``I am pleading and requesting you to please put a halt to any measures regarding the release of immigrants awaiting court dates into the city of Del Rio and surrounding areas.''

Madam Speaker, the American people are pleading with their leadership. They are begging for the people in this body, the people's House, to recognize what is happening to them.

It is real. People bury their head in the sand up here protected by fences with razor wire, walking through magnetometers, tweeting out how they somehow compare or have compassion for immigrants, ``Look at us.'' And in this photo is what is happening to immigrants in south Texas.

There are mass graves where cartels kill people along the Rio Grande. There are people dying in the desert, seeking to come here like any normal person would do around the world, seeking to come to the United States of America, but being fed irrational hope from an administration for political purposes, endangering lives of immigrants and American citizens.

Yuma, Arizona, mayor Douglas Nichols said, ``I am urging the Federal level for additional resources for United States Customs and Border, the need for more space at migrant holding facilities that will allow for adherence to CDC guidelines, more COVID testing. There is no capacity in our current nonprofit system in Yuma.''

Our colleague, my friend from Texas, Mr. Cuellar, has said thousands of migrants have not been tested. Over 10,000 people have come in through the lower Rio Grande Valley. He said, ``Those folks aren't being tested.''

There are folks--my friends on the other side of the aisle who recognize what is happening.

My colleague, Mr. Gonzales, sent a letter to Biden, requesting a meeting, stating, ``It is imperative we get this situation under control or we are looking at another crisis on our hands.''

Well, that crisis is here, citing the large number of unaccompanied children and increased hospital admissions. This is happening right now.

Where is the President? Where is the Homeland Security Secretary? Where is anyone in this administration recognizing the crisis at our border, the death toll, the impact on citizens and immigrants who seek to come here?

Texas State senator, Chuy Hinojosa, Democrat, said, ``I don't think, quite frankly, the Biden administration was aware of what is happening on the ground here, which you can understand because they are just coming in and trying to get people up to speed with what is happening. But I don't think they were aware there were that many coming across. The Border Patrol is overwhelmed. They are throwing their hands up because they don't know what to do.''

That is all from my Democrat friend from Texas.

The CBP has already encountered nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants since October, and the numbers are rising. For contacts in the first 5 months of fiscal 2020, the CBP encountered 200,000. That is twice as many this year, twice as many.

What changed?

The administration's absurd, embarrassing, incompetent or, worse yet, purposefully malicious policies.

Just last month, February, the CBP encountered over 100,000 aliens at the border. One month. That is who they encountered. That is not got- aways. This is real.

Come do like I have done and go spend the night on the border. Go sit down at the river at the Rio Grande. Talk to the immigrants, in my case in broken Spanish. If you are fluent, talk to them or have somebody who can and talk to them about why they are coming. Talk to them about what the cartels are doing to them.

Have a conversation with a young man, like I did last year, about the pack of girls behind him, about whether they were abused on the journey. He said, ``Yes,'' ``Si.''

Or just continue to bury one's head in the sand and pretend it is compassionate to have open borders, because that is what is happening today in the people's House. These are human beings, y'all.

As of last month, the number of families encountered is the highest since January 2019. In January, 7,200--almost 7,300 family units were encountered. In February, that number skyrocketed to 19,246. That is not an accident. These are families.

Encounters with what we call UACs--unaccompanied alien children-- increased 74 percent year to date. Just last month, some 6,000 migrants aged 16 and 17 were caught. The Department

of Homeland Security currently projects there will be 117,000 unaccompanied child migrants crossing the border this year.

The number of migrant children is on pace to exceed the all-time record by 45 percent, and the administration does not have enough beds. The Biden administration needs another 20,000 beds to shelter the minors.

Now, I have a couple friends here, a couple colleagues, who I think are waiting to join.

Is the gentleman from California looking to add a few remarks?

I will yield to the gentleman from California in just one minute, and then my friend from Virginia after him.

But what I would say, when we are talking about these numbers, people get lost in the numbers, 20,000 beds, talking about 45 percent increase. Let's just be very clear. For those of us who spend time on the border--I am going back on Monday--these are human beings. These are people. They are not political pawns. And that goes for American citizens and for the immigrants who seek to come here.

And this is the dirty little secret. My Democratic colleagues know full well that what is happening at the border is going to be a catch- and-release organization. The Department of Homeland Security is turning the CBP into a catch-and-release organization. So you will see some of these numbers going down.

But don't kid yourself, the American people watching this. When the numbers go down in these facilities, it is because the Biden administration is purposefully catching and releasing folks, whether they have been tested or not, regardless of what kind of security threat they might pose, regardless of fully checking whether a child goes with a family member or not, whether they can be abused, put into the sex trafficking trade, because it is rote incompetence. When you see those numbers go down, just know what is happening.

11,000 people were caught and released in January and February, immediately caught and released from the CBP rather than being put in facilities.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his remarks. He rightfully points out the impact on Miss Steinle and her family and American citizens in California being negatively impacted by illegal immigration.

I talked before about Jared Vargas from San Antonio, the city I represent, who was murdered a couple years ago. His twin brother just graduated from college. He is going on. His family is a beautiful family. They have a strong faith, and they are persevering, but their family was turned upside down by a brutal murder. He was beaten to death and burned. Beaten to death and burned by a guy who came here illegally, was caught and let go, caught and let go, caught and let go again. He beat and burned to death Jared Vargas.

These are real people. We can do hundreds of these. We can talk to the angel families who have lost loved ones. We can talk to the parents of law enforcement officers and others in Border Patrol who have lost loved ones along our border. We could do a whole hour, we could do a whole day just going through that impact and, as I pointed out before in the other slide, the impact on the immigrants who seek to come here.

This is the story, all in the false name of compassion by this administration.

I will be happy to yield in just 1 minute to the gentleman from Virginia.

My friend from California was raising the important points of the impact of illegal immigration. Now we are seeing it in real time, particularly in Texas, among all four States along the border and throughout this country, empowering cartels, endangering the lives of the immigrants who seek to come here, endangering American citizens for one reason and one reason only, and that is the crass political interests of the American Democratic Party and this administration.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Virginia.

Madam Speaker, in a moment I will yield to the gentlewoman from Georgia, and I thank the gentleman from Virginia for those remarks that are directly on point.

What we are seeing right now--you used the phrase that we are creating a ``sanctuary Nation,'' is a sanctuary country. Well, that is what is happening. That is what this administration is doing. You talk about sanctuary cities; this administration is just going right past sanctuary cities, and they want to make the United States of America a sanctuary Nation.

They are turning the Department of Homeland Security and the CBP into the welcoming center for a sanctuary Nation. And not a welcoming center in the sense that we would all agree we want to do as Americans, to make sure that those who are truly seeking refuge following our laws, seeking asylum, the things that our laws provide for people truly under persecution. No. They are using that as an excuse and cover for wide- open borders and, essentially, people seeking economic opportunity, which no one I know begrudges those who seek economic opportunity. But we do take issue with those who seek to violate our laws to come here, overwhelm our border, and an administration whose job it is to enforce the laws of the United States to refuse to do so.

It begs the question whether the President of the United States, as I said before, either has no idea what is happening at the border or whether it is purposeful. And if it is purposeful, is it the President of the United States choosing to refuse to defend the Constitution and the laws and to refuse to take care to see that the laws of the United States are faithfully executed as is required under the Constitution of the United States? I think it is a question this body ought to be asking.

The people's House ought to be asking: Is the President of the United States refusing to take care to ensure that the laws of the United States with respect to our borders are being faithfully executed?

I would posit that that is precisely what is happening, or the President of the United States has no idea what is happening at our border. Because, again, no American President can be so callous as to use raw, crass politics to allow what is happening at our border to happen to human beings, American citizens and immigrants alike. ``That guy who runs that outfit over there.''

I yield to the gentlewoman from Georgia.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the gentlewoman from Georgia coming down and joining us in this conversation.

I did not realize that the gentlewoman had the pleasure of meeting with and getting to know the Vargas family or at least maybe the aunt and uncle, I think is what you said. And what I would tell you is that it is a truly wonderful family. They embody all that is right and good about the American Dream, about opportunity.

These are American citizens, American citizens who happen to have, you know, Hispanic family members, which is so ironic because--you know, those of us who really try to take and honor the idea of judging people by the content of their character and not their skin color or race or creed, I find it ironic that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle seem to only view the purpose of the legislative body to view human beings by the color of their skin and to make all of our policies based on segmenting us out.

To quote the Supreme Court Justice John Roberts in a seminal Supreme Court case, Divvying us up by race is a sordid business.

And my colleagues on the other side of the aisle often use words like ``voter suppression'' when we talk about believing we should have voter identification. Believing we should have rules in place about how we run our election systems, heaven forbid.

And would the gentlewoman agree that too often those words like ``voter suppression'' are code words, buzz words for the allegation that those of us who believe a secure border is better for immigrants and American citizens believe that voter ID and systems that make sure American citizens are the ones voting that we are labeled bigots, and that words like ``voter suppression'' are code words and buzz words, dog whistles that we are bigots and that the agenda of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle is often directed to label us as such. Would the gentlewoman agree with that?

Madam Speaker, a brief moment, a side-step away from the issue of border security--and I know the gentleman is here and is waiting patiently--and I would just ask one more question.

The gentlewoman was here on Monday when we let it be known our desire to not allow 13 bills--10 Democratic bills, 3 Republican bills--to move off of the House floor by voice vote, that is without a roll call vote. And you would have thought that we, you know, lit a match on the floor of the House of Representatives or had done something extraordinary to just break this hallowed institution from its smooth operations of today.

You would think that we were, you know, up-ending our Constitution as we know it because, believe it or not, we demanded the yeas and nays, a roll call vote, on 13 bills. The gentlewoman has also often taken to using motions to adjourn--and I believe I have heard she has done so and the gentlewoman stipulates she has done so--to force another hour of consideration when we have a bill like the $1.9 trillion monstrosity that reshapes the American economy, reshapes the American healthcare system, funds money for people in prison, up-ends our entire fiscal stability, I could go on and on.

Is the gentlewoman in agreement with me that what we are trying to do is to simply put our colleagues on notice that perhaps the people's House should debate, vote, amend, be present, not vote by proxy from your home districts, actually be here, not have fences with razor wire, actually do our job, actually represent the people that elect us to come here, would the gentlewoman agree with that? I yield to the gentlewoman.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Georgia. I know I have my friend who has been waiting patiently, and so I will yield to that gentleman.

Madam Speaker, I would just note that the gentlewoman from Georgia mentioned video taken from southeast Texas this morning. I am looking at that on social media at the moment, a huge line of people waiting for smugglers to ferry them across the Rio Grande into the United States, video courtesy of Tripwires and Triggers, which is run by a fellow named Jaeson Jones, who is a good friend of mine, formerly with the Department of Public Safety in Texas.

Jaeson is on the job, on the spot, much like my friend Brandon Darby and others who work for Breitbart Texas who are on the spot, always trying to look out for the interests of Texans and American citizens, but also the immigrants who seek to come here.

These immigrants are being abused by cartels while my Democrat colleagues use them as political props. It is unconscionable that we are allowing that to continue in the greatest Nation in the history of the world, again, all for crass political purposes.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Montana (Mr. Rosendale).

Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time.

Would the gentleman be surprised if I recounted to him the story of when I was at the border last year at Laredo, and we were having a conversation with Border Patrol and went into one of the facilities, and we were talking to one of the fellows there. While we were there, through conversations with one of the young men who had come across-- frankly, encouraged to do so and come in and meet with Border Patrol in order to get across. He then gave up the location of a stash house in Houston, Texas, where we then went and found, that day, 50 immigrants in a basement, in a stash house in Houston, Texas, being held essentially for ransom.

These were human beings, the product of a broken system that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle hail as somehow pro-immigrant when it is decidedly the opposite of pro-immigrant.

Would the gentleman agree with that?

Madam Speaker, it certainly goes without saying.

I started my remarks earlier about the knowledge and the engagement of this President and the President's administration, that the policies of this administration, the policies of Democrat cities, the policies of Democrat States, with sanctuary cities and sanctuary States, and now, effectively, a sanctuary Nation, are directly causing the movement and the migration of human beings to come here, being exploited by cartels for profit, endangering their lives, endangering American citizens.

Yes, for any understanding of law, you are complicit in what is happening to the people in question.

Madam Speaker, and I would say to my friend that the scourge of human trafficking, in all of its elements--and human trafficking in the sense of the sex trafficking trade, modern-day slavery right here in the United States, people being under the thumb of dangerous organizations, cartels, and illegal organizations embedded in this country. It all has its roots and connections, in many ways, to the trafficking of human beings across our border for profit.

The power being put over these people, in which they are working in subpar conditions or put into the sex trade, that is happening in the greatest country in the history of the world, and it is all a direct consequence of accepting and embracing that lawlessness.

That lawlessness starts at our border and is also tied to our lack of enforcement and interior enforcement, through ICE, and the other cutbacks by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

Madam Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining.

Madam Speaker, what I would like to expand upon is an extension of what my friend from Montana was just talking about, what is happening to human beings here in the United States.

But now let's talk a little about the impact with respect to COVID and the pandemic that we are dealing with. The Biden administration, in its infinite wisdom directly causing what we are seeing at the border, relaxed title 42 to allow illegal alien minors to enter the country, leading to a massive surge of illegal immigrants at the border in total.

In February, CBP encountered nearly 9,500 unaccompanied alien children at the southern border. That is a 28 percent increase over January, more than 2,000 over last year, and, incredibly, almost 30,000 UACs have been encountered in just the first 5 months of the fiscal year, 30,000 children. That is nearly a thousand more UACs than the first 5 months of last year, but it is a 74 percent increase over fiscal year 2020 numbers.

Here is the thing: It is harming these kids, but it is also distracting Border Patrol from their job. They are turning Border Patrol into an entity that has to manage people, kids in facilities, but they are no longer doing their job between the ports of entry.

Do you know what that means? Fentanyl, narcotics. Why do we have a mass opioid crisis in this country? Now we are feeding into that as a literal, direct, and obvious result of the policies of this administration.

It has to be, as I said as I opened, either complete incompetence or purposeful. Either one of those is unacceptable.

Madam Speaker, Mexico is closing their Migrant Protection Protocol shelters where migrants are supposed to be tested and confirmed negative for COVID before being let into the United States. Reports have indicated at least 108 COVID-positive illegal aliens were released by CBP in one fell swoop. According to reports, at least 185 immigrants released in the past month in Brownsville tested positive.

Madam Speaker, 25 Border Patrol agents have died of COVID, but the administration is taking no major steps to prioritize those frontline workers for the vaccine in the last 2 months. Most of them are having to go into the communities to go get the vaccine, even though they are on the front lines, dealing with COVID-positive individuals coming across our border.

Madam Speaker, it is for this reason that my colleague from New Mexico, Yvette Herrell, introduced H.R. 471, the Protecting Americans from Unnecessary Spread upon Entry from COVID Act of 2021, or the PAUSE Act.

Title 42 must remain in effect under her act until all State and Federal lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, curfews, and other COVID mandates end; all public and Federal public health emergencies for COVID-19 end; and the CDC's COVID-19 travel health risk level for Canada and Mexico is reduced to level 1.

Madam Speaker, that is a good bill. We should continue to enforce title 42. There are 44 cosponsors to this bill, only Republicans.

Yesterday, I filed H. Res. 216, which is a rule to discharge this bill. When it ripens, which is another 8 or so legislative days, we are going to be pushing to discharge that bill from committee and vote on it on the floor of the House of Representatives.

I hope my Democrat colleagues will agree that we should enforce title 42 to protect American citizens and make sure that we don't have an epidemic at our southern border.

Madam Speaker, this is what we are facing, and it is a direct consequence of

an administration peddling amnesty and the false hope to immigrants to come here through dangerous channels, being abused by cartels in the process.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert), my friend.

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas for his remarks.

Madam Speaker, I think the gentleman who has spent time at the border, as I have, would appreciate the story that I can recount. When I was last there, there was a conversation involving a young man who had come across, and he was being questioned, as the gentleman just described. He was questioned about where he came from and all the things to go through, his age and so forth, and then at one point the young man said he needed to use the bathroom.

The Border Patrol agent said: Oh, sure, it is no problem. Let me get up and show you where it is.

He said: Oh, I know.

He knew. He knew where the bathroom was. This wasn't his first rodeo. This is happening every day at our border, literally every day.

But the media just goes about its business, ignoring the crisis now that it is not politically expedient to do so. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle spent the last 3 years saying that it is all a manufactured crisis and that there is no crisis at the border. Then with Trump, there was a crisis suddenly. There wasn't a crisis, and then there was a crisis.

Then there were people drinking out of toilets--a lie. Then it was kids in cages--a lie. Fences and barriers were put up in facilities to protect these kids and separate them from the dangerous elements to make sure someone claiming that they are this kid's uncle is actually the kid's uncle.

Those chain-link barriers that were put up in these facilities were put up by whom?

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

That is exactly correct.

Yet for 4 years under the Trump administration, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle went around ranting about the treatment of migrants, whom we are dealing with because of very broken policies, trying to protect the kids, keep them from being abused, put them in air-conditioned facilities with airflow, the chain-link barriers so you can see them--oh, no. Kids in cages. Oh, drinking out of a toilet. It was a lie. It was a straight-up lie.

I sent my chief of staff down the next day. He went to where they were talking about it, and it was one of those devices that is a toilet with a water fountain off the back of it, which we have in all of our facilities and in a lot of our prison facilities and ICE facilities in this country.

By the way, in every bathroom in America, the water supply behind the drywall is supplying the water to your faucet and the water to your toilet, Madam Speaker. Oh, but this is kids drinking out of toilets.

``Never let a crisis go to waste,'' say my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. We are seeing that right now with $1.9 trillion. We are seeing that right now. And we are seeing the result of that right now with a Biden border crisis directly of the making of this administration.

It is the direct consequence of undoing and refusing to enforce their laws; undoing the migrant protection protocol working with Mexico; refusing to fully enforce title 42; refusing to go through what you are supposed to do on asylum determinations; refusing to limit catch and release and instead turning the Department of Homeland Security into a catch-and-release organization, trumpeting an amnesty bill; and then attracting families to come through dangerous channels, risking their own children and lives at the hands of cartels, all to profit and enrich cartels; and then have the audacity to say that is compassion and the audacity to say that that is pro-immigrant.

Meanwhile, the people I represent, the Texans we represent, are having to foot the bill. We are having to deal with it. We are having to deal with schools. We are having to deal with high-speed chases. We are having to deal with crime, drug trafficking, and the reach of cartels in south Texas. And no one in this people's House gives a whit because of political expediency.

Madam Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Madam Speaker, I ask my friend from Texas if he has anything else he would like to add.

Madam Speaker, I will close my last minute to just say that it is currently easier for the cartels to exploit our Southern border and to allow gang members and dangerous narcotics to come into this country than it is for the American people to get access to the people's House. Fences with razor wire surround this building. We are apparently so afraid of what might happen to us in this body that we need fences and razor wire, but, meanwhile, our Southern border is wide open for exploitation.

I am only just reminded of when I started that the guy who runs that outfit over there in the White House, that the guy either is blatantly ignoring his duty to defend the border of the United States purposely or he has no idea what is going on, because no American President--no American President--

should or would allow this kind of activity to be happening at our Southern border, endangering American citizens and endangering immigrants in the name of the United States.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I rise for the purpose of inquiring of the majority leader the schedule for next week.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), my friend, the majority leader.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman. As we go through the bills that may come up next week--of course, we just finished a week bringing some bills to the floor, but as we look around the country, clearly the main concern we are hearing from families are all of the various crises that are facing American families.

You have an inflation crises with goods of all kinds costing dramatically more when people go to buy things at the grocery store. If they try to get a new appliance, they are waiting longer, they are paying more money.

You think about the energy crisis with families paying 50 percent more for gasoline, in some cases, with dramatic increases at the pump and the pain that it causes, especially lower income families.

The border crisis, where every day we see stories of thousands of people coming across our border illegally. The Attorney General was before the Committee on the Judiciary and he couldn't even give a number of how many people have illegally crossed or plan to address it.

The supply chain crisis that we see getting worse and worse with ships backed up, maybe almost all the way to China, because that crisis is not being addressed.

So when you think about all these crises that families are angry about--it is hurting hardworking families, it is costing them, it is taking money out of their paychecks--there has not been a single bill brought to this floor last week. It doesn't sound like any is being brought to the floor next week to address any of those crises.

I would ask the gentleman, would he be open to bringing actual legislation to the floor to address the various, serious crises that families are facing today?

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland.

Madam Speaker, clearly, we stand ready to help on all of those issues. But had Washington spending and borrowing money solved the problem, we would not have any of these crises because trillions of dollars have been borrowed and spent under this administration.

In the previous administration, we worked together on those budget deals, every one of them. The Paycheck Protection Program and the CARES Act were all very bipartisan, and it included addressing the debt that went along with it.

There has been nothing bipartisan in any of the debt that has been racked up under this administration. So if the gentleman is concerned about the full faith and credit of the United States, which we all are, then stop borrowing and spending trillions more dollars.

Families get this, by the way. Families know that if spending trillions was going to solve the problem, there wouldn't be a problem because trillions have been borrowed and spent just from January to October. What they know is it is the very borrowing and spending of trillions of dollars in Washington that has exacerbated these problems.

The inflation crisis would not exist if you didn't have Washington borrowing and spending trillions more dollars, making it harder for people to get back into the workforce, making it harder for the supply chain to be addressed.

What was inherited? I think we know what was inherited by the Biden administration. We had energy dominance the day President Biden took the oath of office. Not only were we producing enough energy for our needs, but gas was less than $2 a gallon all across America. We were exporting oil and natural gas to our friends around the world. We were undermining our enemies around the world.

Instead of President Biden begging OPEC and Russia to produce more oil, we were actually shipping oil and gas to our friends because we could produce enough for ourselves. We created great American jobs here at home. We had low-cost energy.

By the way, the technological advances we made here in this country, if there is anywhere in the world where fossil fuel production is going to be done, you want it done here because we have actually lowered carbon emissions. We were lowering carbon emissions in America while producing more energy. Now we have become more reliant on OPEC nations, on Russia.

Not only is that bad for American families, but they are paying more at the pump because of that crisis created by President Biden's actions. He inherited an energy-dominant Nation. Now you have the President of the United States begging OPEC and Russia to produce more oil, which they are not going to do because they want oil to be over $80 a barrel, but they actually emit more carbon to produce the same oil.

Oil is going to be needed to run an economy, any economy anywhere in the world. You want to make it here because we do it better than anybody else. But that is not what is being done. We have an answer for it.

I know, last night, President Biden was asked specifically about this crisis that he created. His response was, ``I don't have a near-term answer'' for high gas prices.

Well, President Biden might not have an answer, but we do. We have a number of bills, and I know the gentleman has pointed it out. We have a number of answers.

Here is one. H.R. 684 green-lights the Keystone pipeline. You want to talk about creating thousands of good jobs, private-sector money, more energy independence for America; this bill would do just that, and it would do it today.

If pipelines were a problem--I know President Biden doesn't want American pipelines, but he green-lighted the Russian pipeline, the Nord Stream II. So, clearly, it is not pipelines; it is American pipelines he doesn't want.

Why don't we bring up H.R. 684 to create jobs and lower energy costs? H.R. 543 and H.R. 859 would both green-light more production in America that President Biden shut down. There was production going on all across America, really good, safe, environmentally sound production. Again, our standards are the best in the world.

For people who want to bash America, go find a country that produces energy that does it better than America. We do it best. Yet, President Biden, through executive action, shut a lot of that production down. These bills would open that back up again. These bills would lower gas prices.

I know President Biden isn't interested in that because, in his own budget, he specifically blocks the Corps of Engineers from doing infrastructure projects that would lower energy production. President Biden blocks that. You would think OPEC would have come up with that idea or maybe Russia would have come up with that idea. No, that was President Biden in his own budget who said you can't even do infrastructure projects if it lowers energy production. Who would come up with that? Yet, that is in his budget.

Then you go to the border crisis, again, self-created. President Biden inherited a secure border. A wall was being built. You had agreements with South American and Central American countries.

Remain in Mexico was a great policy that President Biden reversed; he blocked it. Did he block it because it was bad policy? No, it was working really well. It was an agreement between two neighboring countries. He just blocked it because President Trump did it. It was working, yet he got rid of it. He could go and reinstate that tomorrow.

We have bills that would solve the border crisis. I will read a few of them off.

H.R. 4828 is a bill I brought to the majority leader's attention back a month ago, in September. This is a bill that deals with a number of problems facing our border today, and it would give more tools to our Border Patrol agents to secure our border.

H.R. 471 is another bill I brought to the gentleman's attention a month ago that would help secure America's border, dealing with the crisis.

None of these bills seem to draw the interest of the majority even though every one of them would address these very real crises facing families that were not around a year ago.

President Biden inherited a secure border; he inherited energy dominance; and he inherited an economy that was recovering from the worst pandemic we have seen in lifetimes. Then, on top of that, there is a proposal to raise trillions more in taxes, more in Soviet-style spending coming out of Washington that would make inflation worse.

The gentleman is correct. We don't support those ideas that would make inflation worse, that would raise gas prices even higher. But we bring a lot of good ideas that would address these crises. We just want to see these ideas brought to the floor.

When you look at the floor schedule and there is nothing last week, next week, a month ago to address any of these crises, these are the things that families are having the hardest time with, and they are struggling.

Inflation is the biggest tax on lower and middle-income families. President Biden promised he wouldn't raise taxes on anybody making less than $400,000.

Yet, in the tax proposal that President Biden wants to bring forward by next week so that he can go fly to Europe and talk about other proposals that would make it impossible to produce energy in America, they include, among other things, a natural gas tax. That tax would fall the hardest on lower income families, not the millionaires and the billionaires. It would be people making less than $60,000 that would be hit the hardest by a natural gas tax. Yet, it is in the bill.

You talk about adding 83,000 IRS agents. Maybe some people in Washington think that is job creation. Most people in America have shivers running down their spines at the thought of the Federal Government, which now wants to track every transaction if they make more than $10,000 a year, to track all their transactions with 83,000 new IRS agents. Again, maybe to some that is called infrastructure, but to most people, it is called a nightmare right before Halloween.

Why don't we bring bills to the floor to address these crises? If these aren't the bills that the majority likes, let's work on some other ones. All of these would address these problems, and many of them would get us back to the point where we were, where we had a secure border, where we had energy dominance, where we had jobs being created.

Each of these last few months you have seen jobs created dramatically lower than what the projections were because there are all of these self-created crises by the administration that are making it harder on hardworking families. It is the lowest income families that are being hit the hardest by these failed policies and all the Big Government socialist spending coming out of Washington. We don't need more. We need to actually go and confront the problem that is creating a debt crisis and all the other crises that families are facing.

It is not going to be by spending more money and taxing people more. It is going to be by working to address each of them, starting at the root of the problem and what created them. I yield to the gentleman.

Madam Speaker, I sure hope that the gentleman is concerned not just about making sure the credit card bill is paid but making sure that the spending that maxed out the credit card is being done responsibly.

There are some key facts the gentleman left out in his conversation about how we got here. We got here because in January, one party, the Democratic Party--who is in the majority in the House, is in the majority in the Senate, and has control in the White House--made a decision--I don't agree with the decision--but made a decision that they were going to go it alone on the spending side. They decided that they were going to go max out the credit card. We urged them not to do it. We still to this day are urging not to go and just spend trillions and trillions more dollars.

If my friend wants to work with us on what the responsible decision should be, we are right here. We have been here from the beginning.

Madam Speaker, do you know, to this day President Biden has not met-- we are in October, late October. President Biden has not met with the House Republican leadership on any of these issues--any of them.

The gentleman referenced a number of opportunities where it was described we were there to help President Trump. The majority wasn't just there to help President Trump, the majority was in the meetings when the decisions were being made.

The Paycheck Protection Program was not a partisan exercise. In fact, it was one of the most successful bipartisan exercises I have seen Congress come together and do. Everybody was in the room making those decisions. They were all very important decisions and big decisions that involved a lot of money, and we all made those decisions together. We all voted for those bills together, and then, ultimately, the spending that went along with it, the debt that went along with it was part of that negotiation and we voted for it together.

There has not been a decision made this year where the majority has negotiated with the minority to figure out if we could come to an agreement, so the majority did it on their own and look, the majority had the votes to do it.

But when the majority maxes out the credit card on their own, don't come and chide our side and say: Well, you need to be there to pay the bill when we weren't included in the decision to max out the credit card. And now that the credit card is maxed out, it is not as if there is an effort to slow down, in fact, it seems like it is full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes, spend trillions of dollars more on additional things like, again, 83,000 more IRS agents.

Madam Speaker, do you think anybody on this side supports that?

That is not something we support. It will rack up more debt, by the way. We don't support it, but I guess the gentleman expects we should pay for it even if we don't support it. Maybe if there was a negotiation where both sides were part of it.

Sam Graves, who is the ranking member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has not been included in any of these decisions on infrastructure. Yet, I am sure the gentleman would expect him to vote for whatever comes out of a partisan exercise. That is not how things work, and I know the gentleman knows that.

Again, if the President wants to work with us--

Of course, those are true.

We all negotiated on the three different debt ceiling increases that happened under the Trump administration, including CARES and the Paycheck Protection Program. They were very bipartisan.

Does the gentleman disagree with that?

Those are the facts. And so when the gentleman looked at those facts, the gentleman talked about jobs and COVID. Before COVID happened, we had the hottest economy maybe in the history of our country. Wages were up for every demographic group. Those are facts. The gentleman saw small businesses up and women-owned small businesses were up over 20 percent. African-American unemployment was at its lowest level, Hispanic unemployment was at its lowest level, and then COVID came along.

Maybe there is a reason why the majority won't hold a hearing on the origin of COVID, but if the gentleman wants to just say because of COVID all of that is Donald Trump's fault, clearly the economy shut down, and we worked to get it back going again, and it is coming back. Frankly, some of the efforts to pay people not to work--and it is not just enhanced unemployment, it is a whole list of things--are hurting the recovery.

But those things were happening before COVID hit a year and a half ago, and it was because of good, sound policies that got us a secure border and that got us energy dominance, and, frankly, it was things like that that helped us get the economy going again because it was creating good jobs.

Keystone pipeline was moving forward. Those are good union jobs, by the way, and that was ended by President Biden unilaterally. He never even tried to have a meeting and a conversation with us to see if we could come to an agreement.

Again, I guess it is the prerogative of the majority. If the gentleman is in the majority, then the majority doesn't have to talk to the minority. But just because the majority didn't talk to the minority and they made decisions on their own about what they wanted to do, they didn't try to reach an agreement with us, to come to us after the fact when the majority has spent trillions of dollars, it has wreaked havoc through our economy, it has led to inflation we haven't seen in generations and gas prices we haven't seen in decades, then the majority wants to come and not ask us how to fix it--we have got ideas on how to fix it--the majority asks us to pay the bill.

Why don't we work together on the front end and not rack up trillions more in spending?

Because the things the gentleman talked about would rack up trillions more in spending which created these problems, and we were not a part of those conversations. I wish we were a part of the conversations and it was done in a bipartisan way. But, again, President Biden, 10 months into his administration, has yet to sit down and meet with House Republican leadership to talk about any of these ideas and solutions we could come up with together which is how it should be done.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.

No one is being threatened.

Madam Speaker, I would be happy to answer the question. It might not be the answer the gentleman wants, but I would be happy to be part of an actual bipartisan negotiation on how to solve our country's debt. That has not happened.

But if you look at the bill that the gentleman brought to this floor to deal with the debt over a month ago, it absolutely dealt with spending, not that already happened, but that will happen in the future, including the trillions of dollars of debt-laden bills that spend more money in Washington.

It picked a date, and the date that the gentleman put in the bill that was brought to this House floor was December 31, 2022. That is not spending we have already done. That is spending that the majority plans to do in a very partisan way, not just through this year but through all of next year.

When we are not even included in those decisions, then you come and say, well, you should just be expected to pay for whatever we want to spend, trillions more, between now and the end of a year, over a year from now, that is not a negotiation. That is not even an attempt to want to work with the other side.

Now, again, the gentleman is in the majority. In the Senate, they are in the majority, and the gentleman very well knows that both sides have the ability, if you want to do the spending on your own, to address the debt that would be created by all of that spending on your own. It doesn't take 60 votes. The gentleman is well aware that there is a legislative instrument that if all the spending wants to be done in a partisan way--and I am talking about the trillions that are still laying in front of us that the gentleman said may come to the floor next week, not necessarily will, might come to the floor, might come to the floor a month from now, might come to the floor a year from now. And we won't even be included in those negotiations, but we ought to be expected to vote for the debt that would be racked up by it?

If the other side were being asked to do that, you know your majority wouldn't go for that. But we wouldn't do it. We would at least include you in a negotiation. If we didn't want to, then we would be responsible for doing it on our own if we did the spending on our own. And the tools are there to do just that.

Threatening to default on the Nation's debt when legislative instruments are included in this majority to not have default is irresponsible. That threat keeps being thrown out there by the majority, even though the majority knows they could, with a majority vote in the House and a majority vote in the Senate, address the debt that wants to be racked up between now and next December.

Again, I would urge that all of that new spending doesn't happen, that we come together and negotiate what budget limits should be like we have done in the past under Republican and Democrat Presidents. Those were bipartisan deals. There has been no bipartisan attempt to do that this year.

Why is there opposition to infrastructure? Well, first of all, if there was a desire to do bipartisan infrastructure, you are going to find a lot of takers over here. I know the gentleman made an assertion--probably not realizing it--but there would have been no threats, no threats made on our side of the aisle on a bill.

Now, I see people being followed into bathrooms on the other side and all kinds of other things being done. There are no threats on this side. What we said is, we want an infrastructure negotiation. But the day that the deal was reached in the Senate with the President, he turned around about an hour later and undermined that deal by tying it, linking it, to the tax-and-spend bill.

That is when it became a problem because taxing and spending trillions more dollars would be a problem to this country. It would hurt middle-class families and lower income families to have that natural gas tax, to have all the additional inflation on top of the inflation they already see. It became a problem for all of those reasons, that package, not the individual bill.

As the President himself has said multiple times, as the Speaker herself has said multiple times, it is not a standalone bill. It is not two standalone bills. It is a package. They are married together at the hip.

That is where the opposition comes from. By the way, there is a really

good bipartisan infrastructure bill that is out there. S. 3011 came over from the Senate unanimously. $500 billion of infrastructure is authorized in this bill. If the gentleman would bring this up for a vote, it would probably fly overwhelmingly. It would allow for, again, about $500 billion immediately that could be spent on infrastructure all across this country, plus an additional large sum next year--maybe $100 billion next year--on top of the $500 billion.

It just passed out of the Senate unanimously; every Republican, every Democrat supported this bill. This is real infrastructure. This is not tied to some tax-and-spend bill that maybe the gentleman might think is a good idea. We surely don't. We know how damaging it would be to our country and to our economy and to middle and lower income families.

This is a very bipartisan bill that could be bipartisan here, where we could be a part of a negotiation on something really good, where States wouldn't have to wait months. They have the money ready to go today. This gives them the flexibility to make their own decisions on what is best for the infrastructure in each of these States.

Maryland would be able to control their own destiny on over $1 billion. Louisiana would be able to control their own destiny on over $1 billion today if this bill passed.

So, absolutely, we support real infrastructure. If it is tied together and married to something that would be devastating to the economy, of course not. Maybe if the majority would look at delinking those two and abandoning the bill that would raise taxes--and even internally in the Democrat Caucus those discussions have been going on. That is not just Republicans asking for that. There are a number of Democrats asking for that, too. That would be a bipartisan initiative to say we are jettisoning this idea that we are going to raise hundreds of billions, if not multiple trillions--whatever the number--if it is $1 trillion, $5 trillion it would be devastating to our economy and middle-class families.

Let's abandon that and go work on something that would actually be real infrastructure that we could all rally behind. It would pass overwhelmingly. It would be good for the country. President Biden would get to sign it into law. We would support that.

I ask the gentleman to look at S. 3011, and if he is not a supporter of that plan that passed with 100 Senators, maybe there is a better idea. But this one is a really good one that got every Republican and every Democrat in the Senate earlier this week to say yes. We would be happy to say yes to it as well if we are given that opportunity. I yield to the gentleman.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman again for his comments.

There is clearly a bipartisan bill on infrastructure that we would be happy to support, S. 3011. Nobody in the House on the Republican side was included in any of those negotiations, including the ranking member of the Transportation Committee who he himself has been urging a large bill. $450 billion was put on the table, which, by the way, if that were passed, it would be the largest infrastructure bill in the history of the United States. He was pushed out of the negotiations.

Again, the majority has that ability because they are in the majority, but they surely never tried a bipartisan negotiation, as well the gentleman knows, on those prior budget agreements.

It wasn't just voted for or against because of who was in the White House. It was voted for by both parties because the negotiation on what that spending limit was was agreed upon by the leadership of both sides.

The House, Senate, Republican, Democrat, we came to agreement on those budgets, and that is why the gentleman voted for it. That is why I voted for it, because it was a negotiated agreement. There was give and take on a number of items but ultimately agreed by a date certain but under a budget agreement.

There is a date certain of December 31 of 2022 that has no bipartisan agreement. We know what a lot of the spending will be, because trillions have already been spent that we were not included in and we strongly opposed. The gentleman knew that when he brought the bills to the floor, but he wanted to bring them to the floor anyway because you had the votes. I get it. That is the way majorities work.

But if you decide to exclude one party from negotiations and go spend the money anyway and then have a whole list of trillions more in spending down the road and include that in a bill, I don't really think anybody expects the people who were pushed to the curb to vote for the credit card limit being increased with all the spending that is going to continue to be racked up--not that has already been racked up--that will be racked up between now and December 31 of 2022 is going to be done in a partisan way. That is what the record has been so far this year on the trillions that have already been added by bills passed by this majority. They weren't bipartisan. Again, that is the prerogative of the majority.

We have stood here ready. We have listed bill after bill to address crisis after crisis, none of which have been brought to the floor. We are still ready to go to solve these problems. We have

talked about a bipartisan bill on infrastructure that we can support. Ultimately, the majority makes that decision.

I yield to the gentleman.

Madam Speaker, we need to do this in a bipartisan way, which hasn't happened. But partisanship is not patriotism, and we have seen a lot of partisanship.

I have served in leadership under three different Presidents now. When we had to negotiate how to come together on the priorities of our government, how to properly fund things and deal with our debt, under President Obama, we had those bipartisan meetings in the White House. When President Trump came in, we had those bipartisan meetings in the White House. Still to this day, late October, 10 months into his Presidency, there has not been a single time where President Biden has brought a bipartisan group of our leadership together.

I understand he has met with Democrat leadership many times in the White House. Again, that is his prerogative. He is the President; you are in the majority. If you want to do all of this in a partisan way, I don't suggest it is healthy and I don't suggest it is the right way. Every President I have served under in leadership has had bipartisan meetings to have these conversations and come to an agreement. That has not happened under this President.

He ought to go and live by the words that he promised during the campaign, that he would work with both parties in a bipartisan way. To not have met with House Republican leadership once during his Presidency, 10 months in, is not an acceptable way to run this government.

Then all of a sudden, things end up partisan, and everybody throws their hands up and goes: How did this happen? Just reach out. He is the President of the United States. If he says let's go tomorrow, we will be there tomorrow. But he won't do that. We have asked for meetings. At some point they have to have them.

Again, if he doesn't want them to happen, that is his prerogative, because the same party controls all levers of government. But if the same party controls all levers of government and wants to just toss aside the other party in either Chamber--oh, we worked with Senators. Even some of those Senators that were mentioned are not supporting what is happening with debt, because there has been no negotiation with both parties on the debt, on the spending that gets us to the debt. So there can be proposals for trillions more in spending. If we oppose it, we have been very clear why we have that opposition.

It wasn't us that married those bills together. President Biden came here just two weeks ago. They said he was going to be closing the deal. He was going to be the closer. We were going to have a vote on the House floor. The Speaker promised there would be a vote on the House floor.

Instead, at that meeting, it has been reported that he said the two bills are tied together. Since then, he said: I want both of them coming to me. He has tied them together. I wish he wouldn't. That is the President's prerogative. He has made it very clear. The Speaker has made it very clear. It has not been our side that has done that. We want to separate those as a package, but they have been kept together as a package. Until then, at least we have been looking for other opportunities, and we found one in S. 3011 that passed the Senate unanimously. That would be $500 billion in real infrastructure today. Every Governor of every State would have the ability to start doing $500 billion in new infrastructure projects. We think that would be really good for our country. We support it. We are ready to negotiate.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.

Madam Speaker, we stand ready to work, if there is bipartisan efforts made. We will see if that develops.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

On Monday, the House will meet at 12 p.m. for morning hour and 2 p.m. for legislative business with votes postponed, as usual, until 6:30 p.m.

On Tuesday, the House will meet at 10 a.m. for morning hour and 12 p.m. for legislative business.

And on Wednesday, the House will meet at 12 p.m. for legislative business.

On Thursday, the House will meet at 9 a.m. for legislative business.

Madam Speaker, the House will consider several bills under suspension of the rules. The complete list of suspension bills will be announced by the close of business today.

With the short-term extension of the Surface Transportation Program through October 31, the House will aim to consider the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Build Back Better Act this work period.

In addition, the House will consider H.R. 2119, the Family Violence Prevention and Services Improvement Act of 2021, sponsored by Lucy McBath of Georgia. That bill modifies and expands and reauthorizes, through fiscal year 2026, the Family Violence Prevention and Services Program, which funds emergency shelters and supports related assistance for victims of domestic violence.

Madam Speaker, if time allows, the House may also consider H.R. 3992, the Protecting Older Jobs Applicants Act, which allows applicants to bring disparate impact claims under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 when they experience discrimination while seeking a job.

Lastly, additional legislative items may be possible when and if they are ready.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments and question.

Let me say that I mentioned two bills that will have a very, very substantial impact on the welfare of Americans, of their families, of their health, and yes, even of their environmental security in the Build Back Better plan and the BIP plan, which is a bipartisan bill on the Senate side.

I hope to bring both of those bills to the floor next week, if they are ready. Unfortunately, we don't have help from your side on either of those bills so it is more difficult to get unanimity on our side of the aisle.

Madam Speaker, I will tell my friend, all those problems that you mentioned, would be extraordinarily worse if we hadn't passed the American Rescue Plan in March of this year, which helped families extraordinarily and generously to stay above water. Not a single person on your side of the aisle voted for those.

So when the gentleman asked me, are we going to bring legislation to the floor, we brought it to the floor. You all opposed it, however-- unfortunately--that helped families, helped childcare, helped healthcare, helped health workers, helped States all to meet the pandemic that this administration inherited.

The pandemic was not the previous administration's fault, obviously, but the failure to deal with it effectively was their fault.

So I tell the gentleman that 5 million jobs have been created since this administration took office. Some people lamented the 233,000 jobs last month, how awful that was.

In the best year that Donald Trump had, that was his average production of jobs--in the best year he had, which was from January 2018 to January 2019.

So I will tell my friend, we hope to be able to bring these bills to the floor. We think they will have a very substantial, positive impact. We inherited, of course, because of the pandemic--again, not the fault of any--well, we don't know whether it was the fault of somebody purposely, but in any event, for whatever reasons, extraordinary amounts of people were laid off around the world.

Then, because of the American Rescue Plan, we finally gave some people the resources that they could buy things that they had needed and wanted for them and their families, and now we have a supply shortage.

The President acted through executive order, as the gentleman knows, to make sure that we had a 24/7 operation at the ports off Long Beach, off other ports in our country, to try to make sure that we, A, got goods on those ships that you say are to China--I don't know whether they are to China, but there are a lot of them; you are absolutely right on that--to get them offloaded, to get them on trucks, and to get them to where they could be distributed and available for businesses.

Then, of course, we have a substantial shortage of chips, which the gentleman knows, which was caused by a lockdown for major producers-- Singapore being one--of chips.

So, we are dealing with that. The executive is dealing with that as well.

I very much hope the gentleman will help us get that legislation passed, which will make a major difference. Who says? Fourteen or 17 laureates who wrote to the White House and said if these bills passed, it is not only going to help jobs, it is not only going to help climate, it is not only going to help health, but it is also going to help bring down inflation, which is a problem.

Why do we have inflation? Because we have too many dollars chasing too few goods, so prices go up. That is true of employment as well, which probably is good news in terms of salaries going up for people around the country.

I tell my friend that we do have some very substantial, important legislation

that we are trying to get done. It would be a lot easier to get it done if we had help from your side of the aisle. And your answer will be, well, it would be very helpful if you would take some of our ideas. I get that.

I will also tell you, if the gentleman is concerned about all of those issues, if we don't protect the full faith and credit of the United States of America, they will all get disastrously worse. And not one of you is prepared, in a debt that we all created, all of us, not all on the same thing--it may have been cutting revenues, increasing spending, this, that, and the other.

We all essentially voted for very substantial spending last year to meet the crisis of the pandemic. All of us did. The CARES Act, the largest of those, $2 trillion, was unanimously passed by a voice vote in one instance.

The only thing I would say to the gentleman is that we are very, very concerned about what is happening. We are very glad that we created 5 million jobs. Nine million jobs were lost the year before under Mr. Trump. He had a net loss of 2 million jobs over his 4 years--a net loss of 2 million jobs. This President has a net gain, and we are going to try to continue that. I hope we get some help from your side of the aisle.

I don't think I can respond, nor do I intend to respond, to each one of those assertions. I noticed that the gentleman totally ignored the facts.

The presentation the gentleman made, Madam Speaker, was as if the Republican policies were in place, we would be in high cotton.

Let me remind the gentleman, Donald Trump was President; the Republicans were in the majority, Madam Speaker; and over those 4 years, we lost a net 2.876 million people from jobs. The last 12 months of the Trump administration, 9,416,000 jobs were lost. Let me remind you, the best year you had, you had 2,820,000 new jobs. That is about an average of 235,000 jobs a month. Last month, when we were all wringing our hands because it came down substantially from expectations, it was 233,000.

In other words, the wringing of the hands over the poor job performance you seem to reflect was the average of Mr. Trump's best year. In fact, under this administration, helped by a bill, the American Rescue Plan, that every Republican voted against--what was the difference between the first five bills that were passed and the bill of 2021 that every Republican voted against? Donald Trump was President, and then Joe Biden was President.

It is like the debt limit, Madam Speaker. They know the debt limit has to be raised, or all the things that the gentleman just referenced are going to be hurt very, very badly.

Before you start criticizing people for not doing things to help, why don't you stop hurting the ability of the United States to present a balanced fiscal posture to our own economy and to the rest of the world and have some certitude that America is going to remain fiscally responsible and viable and pay its bills? I don't know the answer to that question. Perhaps, Madam Speaker, the gentleman from Louisiana knows.

The gentleman from Louisiana comes from a very important and critical energy producing State of our Nation. I don't blame him for being concerned about energy. He ought to be. We all ought to be. But, very frankly, we ought to also be very concerned about global warming, which the national security apparatus of the United States of America, even during the Trump administration, said was one of the biggest existential threats to the welfare of our people and the global community.

So, yes, we are very concerned about reaching an environment which is not dangerous for life on this planet. That is a very big issue for us. My friend is right, and we are going to deal with that in the Build Back Better plan. We are dealing with it, and we are dealing with it in the BIP plan.

Now, the BIP plan is a plan to spend $1.2 trillion on infrastructure investment over the next 10 years which will make our country more competitive, will increase our ability to produce goods here in America, Make It in America, which will make us more independent and self-sufficient. We found during the pandemic we weren't as self- sufficient as we should be and wanted to be.

These bills that we are considering will do that.

I don't expect many Republicans to vote for it. Even the transportation bill that I think they ought to be for--Donald Trump said he was going to spend $1 trillion, have a $1 trillion infrastructure program during his campaign, and then we went down to the White House, we had a meeting with him, and he said: No, $1 trillion is not enough, we ought to do $2 trillion.

He did zero, Madam Speaker, zero when the Republicans were in charge. Zero.

We are going to pass this infrastructure bill, and it is going to make a real difference. It is going to make a real difference on jobs, it is going to make a real difference on inflation, and it is going to make a real difference because we can increase the supply chain. It is going to make a real difference on the health of our globe.

So I tell the gentleman that he raises a lot of issues, and I would hope his party would start returning to a sense of bipartisanship in dealing with legitimate problems that the gentleman raises which we did in 2020.

Now, we did. We were in the minority. We voted with President Trump. Actually, we were in the majority, but President Trump was President, and we helped support his and the Treasury Secretary's objectives and our own objectives, and we came to an agreement, a bipartisan agreement.

Very frankly, it is unbelievable to me, Madam Speaker, that in the debt limit the minority leader of the United States Senate--and, very frankly, the gentleman just said that we all understand we don't want to--I presume he doesn't believe we ought to not raise our debt limit. I believe he wants us to pay our bills because he knows the catastrophic impact if we don't. But I don't understand why they won't support this. That is not an issue of Democrat or Republican. We all created that debt in one form or another. Certainly, last year we did a big number because we thought we needed to meet the pandemic. We did, and we saved millions of jobs in the process.

So my friend has these bills, we have bills, we are prepared to talk about proposals, as I have told my friend in the past. But, very frankly, there needs to be on some issues--that ought not to be political at all, like the debt limit--a statement that we are loyal to our country, not to Democrats. I said this the other day to the gentleman, the loyal opposition, not to Democrats, not to me as the majority leader, not to any of us, but to the country.

I would implore my friend, because we are going to have to do the debt, we are going to have to do the omnibus, we are going to have to do the debt limit, we want to do Build Back Better, and we want to do the infrastructure bill, those are four pieces of big legislation we want to do before December 30, I am hopeful that we can get some cooperation from the Republicans.

I mentioned the debt limit because that is an issue that the gentleman came to us under the Trump administration and asked us to help with. We knew it was critical for the interests of the country, and on three different occasions we voted with the President at the Secretary of the Treasury under the Trump administration's request and voted to make sure that America did not default on its bills.

Can I ask if the gentleman will at least, Madam Speaker, indicate that

they will support making sure that America continues to pay its bills?

The gentleman continues to say facts that are not true.

They are not true.

I do not disagree with it.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

The reason I said he was misstating the facts is we have a bipartisan bill. It wasn't done by the Democratic leadership. It, frankly, wasn't done by the Republican leadership. It was done by Members of the United States Senate on the Republican side and on the Democratic side.

That bill was sent over here with almost half of the Republicans in the United States Senate voting for it, and my friend's leadership is lobbying against that infrastructure bill which would help all the issues the gentleman raised.

My friend is urging a ``no'' vote on that, and he is threatening Members who are going to vote for it--maybe not very many--because they know it is a bipartisan bill.

Madam Speaker, the whip is talking about bipartisanship. There has been so little bipartisanship, and when there is bipartisanship, their Members are disciplined. When there is bipartisanship on saying that it wasn't a protest, it was an insurrection, there was no bipartisanship on that.

It was a: ``We don't care what it was. We don't care that some people were killed. We don't really care that they were trying to stop the counting of votes for the President of the United States of America. It was just a protest.''

That is what former President Trump said the other day. What a bunch of hooey. There clearly has been a conscious decision made by the leadership on the other side of the aisle, Madam Speaker, against a bill that had 69 votes in the United States Senate. We only have 50.

And it is being lobbied against. Why?

To hurt Joe Biden.

Yes, they voted, Madam Speaker, for the five bills.

Why?

Because ultimately Donald Trump was for them. Not everybody voted for them, but the majority. And as I said, CARES, $2 trillion, absolutely essential, was passed. But the gentleman refuses to answer the question except to say: Well, the credit card was maxed out.

The credit card was maxed out by date in a couple of those votes which we helped as the responsible opposition, as we did with John Boehner and Paul Ryan when they couldn't get votes to pass bills to keep government open or to keep the United States from defaulting. Yes, we cast the responsible vote.

It is not a popular vote because it is demagogued, Madam Speaker. It has nothing to do with the debt. The debt happens when you pass spending or pass revenue cuts. That is what affects the debt, and that is what all of us do one way or the other.

So we are all responsible and we ought to all be responsible. But the Senate leader on the Republican side of the aisle has said he is not going to do anything.

Not only will he not do anything, Madam Speaker, he will not allow the majority to do it on their own because he is going to filibuster so it requires 60 votes. We don't have 60 votes. We have 51.

Not only will they not do the responsible thing on debt, which would adversely affect, if we do not extend it, all the things that the minority whip lamented were wrong; it would all be adversely affected if, for the first time in history, Madam Speaker, we fail to extend the debt limit, which, by the way, very few countries have--one or two-- because it is a phony issue. The debt is not phony, but the limit is controlled by what budgets we pass, what tax cuts we pass, what policies we pass.

Once we do that, we go in the store, or as Jim McGovern, the chair of the Rules Committee said, we go in the restaurant and buy the steak. You need to pay for the steak. The argument, Madam Speaker, of, oh, well, you are proposing a lot of spending in the future, is totally unrelated. The debt limit is caused by the debt that we already incurred. The two bills that we had, they don't affect the debt limit. We have met it now, not when we passed these bills, not after we make that commitment.

We have a debt limit coming up now on December 3, which was totally irresponsible in and of itself, for political reasons only, coterminous with the funding of government. In 2019, when we took over, the government was shut down. We spent a lot of time opening it up. That hurt the economy. That hurt jobs. Now, at that point in time, it didn't hurt inflation. And I have been amazed over the years, over the last 10 years, that we haven't had more inflation for a number of reasons.

But he didn't answer the question, whether he would help on that. That is not for us. It is not for Democrats, not for Republicans. It is for our country. It is for our economy. It is for global fiscal stability.

So I would hope at least in that area--not for us. I am not asking you to do it for me, Madam Speaker. I am not asking anybody to do it for me or for my party or for the President of the United States. Mitch McConnell says it is the country and the global community that could not afford default, and that is true.

Let me tell you, I think that is the first step to showing bipartisan responsibility together; not for one another, but for our country, Madam Speaker. And I hope that at some point in time we can show that kind of good faith.

I included this morning the remarks that President George W. Bush made in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on the kind of America that he wanted to see. I would hope all of my Republican colleagues would read what George W. Bush had to say. It is so different from the rhetoric of the current leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, in terms of bringing us together as a country.

Madam Speaker, I think that bill passed the Senate Wednesday, so we will look at it, but we haven't had a chance to look at it at this point in time.

I want to get back--and I know this sounds like a broken record on the debt limit, but the gentleman makes the point, Madam Speaker, that somehow we have raised the debt to accommodate spending. That is what you always do because if you reach the debt limit, you are done. You stop Social Security. You stop veterans' payments. You stop any support payments. You stop paying the armed services of the United States. That is the spending you stop when you can no longer incur debt. Why? Because we spent a lot of money. We put it on the credit card, and it is coming due. It comes due on a regular basis, and we have to pay it on a regular basis.

The gentleman has voted for bills that do exactly what the bill he lamented, and none of his colleagues voted for, Madam Speaker, exactly what he asked us to do, extend it by a date, not a number, by a date. Then he hypothesizes, well, in that timeframe, you are going to incur additional expenses. He is absolutely right.

So, he is lamenting and giving as a reason for his not voting for it is because there are some proposals to spend money in the future. There are lots of them from all sides.

Then he brings up this ``tied together.'' Let me tell you who has tied it together. The Republican leadership has tied these together. Yes, the President talked about it. He said, no, they are not tied together. He said, first of all, they are tied together, and then he said, no, I negotiated this bill; don't do it.

But I will tell the gentleman, as the majority leader who brings bills to the floor, their infrastructure bill passed overwhelmingly in a bipartisan vote and put together in a bipartisan vote Republicans, Democrats, and the President of the United States.

Now, he is the President of the United States. I know the gentleman voted against certifying his election in a bipartisan move, I suppose.

But, Madam Speaker, that bill will be brought up separately, and you vote for that bill on its merits and vote against it on its merits. Do not hide behind the fact that you don't like some other bill.

Donald Trump said he was going to do a trillion dollars on infrastructure to help our economy. He didn't do it. Then he said it was going to be $2 trillion. He didn't do it. Republicans were in the majority. They controlled the House and the Senate. They didn't do it.

We have a bill they can vote for. I would urge them to vote for extending the debt limit so our country meets its full faith and credit obligations and for the infrastructure bill because I think it is a bipartisan bill negotiated by Republicans, by Democrats, and by the President of the United States which will help our economy and, as I said and will reiterate, every issue that the gentleman raised, Madam Speaker, in his opening remarks.

That is not accurate, and you know it.

Madam Speaker, if this Congress had never met this year, we would have to extend the debt limit at some point in time this year. That is a fact.

Mr. McConnell has said it is inconceivable that we would not extend the debt limit of the United States of America and fail our obligation under full faith and credit. As a matter of fact, the Constitution, in the 14th Amendment, says it shall not be questioned, but we have to take some legislative action.

The issue is what is our responsibility to the United States of America, not all this argument that pretends that somehow some bills that are proposed on spending or some that may have been passed this year, if they hadn't been passed, somehow we wouldn't have to do this. If anybody on either side of the aisle believes that to be the case, they ought to be defeated by their constituents because they don't know what is going on here, on either side of the aisle.

This is a very serious issue with respect to jobs, infrastructure, inflation, healthcare, and environment. All of those will be adversely affected, and the global community itself, if we do not extend this debt. We can argue about the other issues, but there is no argument about this issue.

Every Republican President has asked that this be done. Every Republican Secretary of the Treasury, since I have been in this Congress, 41 years, has asked that we extend the debt limit; every one of them, without fail. Every one of them has said--President Reagan on--that if we did not do it, the country's economy, reputation, and well-being would be put disastrously at risk.

I don't want bipartisanship. I want patriotism. I want people committed to their country and their country's well-being to stand up and say: I am not going to demagogue an issue that is so critically important to the welfare of my Nation.

I say to the gentleman again: Exactly what they passed when they were in the majority, and we voted for it, setting a future date--not a number, a future date. Exactly. We didn't ask them to do anything more than we did.

In terms of bipartisanship, I will again say: You have got a bipartisan bill negotiated in a bipartisan way that will be coming to this floor at some point in time, I hope earlier rather than later, separately--not tied to I don't like this bill, I don't like that bill, I won't do this, I won't do that, I won't do the other--which will substantially grow jobs in our country and deal with the climate crisis in our country.

I would ask you to support both of those propositions when they come to the floor in a show of bipartisan support for our country, not for each other, but for our country.

Madam Speaker, this needs to come to an end, obviously, but I will tell you this, as I stand here, as somebody who sat on this floor on January 6 and the question was would the House perform its function of accepting the electoral college vote to elect this President--it wasn't that there hadn't been voices in the past who had raised questions. But there was no effort by Ms. Clinton, who received the majority of the votes, or Mr. Gore, who received the majority of the votes, to raise a question about the legitimacy of the election.

But we had an insurrection incited by, invited by, and deployed by the President of the United States. So we didn't start on a very good bipartisan basis, again, not because Republicans should have been happy that their candidate was not elected or any more than we were happy that our candidate was not elected in the Clinton and Gore campaigns.

It was, at least, that we ought to uphold the constitutional principles. Vice President Pence did, and there were people in this Capitol on that night who wanted to see him, apparently, eliminated. That wasn't a good bipartisan start, Madam Speaker. The majority of Republicans voted against certifying the electoral college results in State after State. But we ought to put that behind us. That is done. What we are doing now is we are acting on behalf of the country.

The two issues that I dwelt on, because I think we have agreement on that, rhetorically and intellectually but not electorally, not in terms of voting, is the debt limit should never be breached and that we need to invest in infrastructure, two simple propositions.

The Senate minority leader says: We should never breach the full faith and credit of the United States of America, but I won't help you do it. I don't get that. Frankly, it seems to be kind of irrational.

And then an infrastructure bill passed overwhelmingly by the United

States Senate, which we are putting on the floor unchanged, as it was, not coupled--as it is and was--and saying let's vote for that.

Mr. Speaker, on Monday, the House will meet at 12 p.m. for morning-hour and 2 p.m. for legislative business, with votes postponed until 6:30 p.m.

On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the House will meet at 10 a.m. for morning-hour and 12 p.m. for legislative business.

On Friday, the House will meet at 9 a.m. for legislative business.

Mr. Speaker, the House will consider several bills under suspension of the rules. The complete list of suspension bills will be announced by the close of business today.

Mr. Speaker, the Budget Committee has announced a markup for the Build

Back Better Act for tomorrow and Saturday. It is my intention to bring it to the floor next week.

This legislation will help move tens of millions of Americans closer to economic security while also making transformational investments in making childcare more affordable, helping Americans access healthcare, and addressing climate change with the seriousness that it deserves and demands.

On September 27, pursuant to the rule passed on August 24, the House will consider the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This legislation passed the Senate on a bipartisan basis last month and would create millions of good jobs all across America by investing in critical infrastructure.

That bill and the Build Back Better America Act are the essence of the vision and program that has been proposed by President Biden, which, as I said, will grow millions of jobs and make the lives of Americans more secure and safer.

Mr. Speaker, if time allows, the House may also consider three bills from the Committee on Education and Labor:

H.R. 3110, the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, which amends the Fair Labor Standards Act to provide workplace protections for mothers to pump breast milk in the workplace.

H.R. 3992, the Protect Older Job Applicants Act, which allows applicants to bring a disparate claim under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 when they experience age discrimination while seeking a job.

In addition, H.R. 2119, the Family Violence Prevention and Services Improvement Act of 2021, which modifies, expands, and reauthorizes the fiscal year 2026 Family Violence and Prevention Services program, which funds emergency shelters and supports related assistance for victims of domestic violence.

Mr. Speaker, lastly, there may be additional legislative items as possible and as necessary.

The Budget Committee is going to take it up tomorrow. They don't need a CBO score for that. The Budget Committee chairman is seeking a CBO score as soon as that can be attained, but I don't know that particular date that that will occur.

Clearly, this bill has been under consideration for a very long period of time, and the President proposed it a very long time ago, in the early part of this year. So it is something that the CBO has been considering, that the committee has been considering. Hopefully, the CBO can produce a score relatively quickly. But I don't, in answer to the gentleman's question, have a specific time or date.

Mr. Speaker, it is my expectation that we will be getting a score. I want to tell the gentleman it is also my understanding that the expenditures that will be proposed will be paid for.

New revenue.

As I said, the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on Finance have worked on revenues to pay for what we are going to buy so that we do not create additional debt. That is my view, that they continue to have that intention.

There are use taxes on a lot of things, and there are also corporate taxes in that bill. There are some additional revenue items in that bill as well. But I can't tell you exactly because they have not offered a manager's amendment, which I expect to have offered at the Committee on Rules. That does not come out of the Budget Committee, as the gentleman knows.

The Budget Committee is going to put together the 12 bills and send them to the Committee on Rules, and then the Committee on Rules will act on them. I expect a manager's amendment, but I cannot predict for the gentleman what that manager's amendment will be at this point in time.

It is possible.

Well, we have to see what the Budget Committee does tomorrow.

We all will.

We will have to see how the debate goes on Monday, see how long that takes.

I have advised Members that, obviously, we have a lot of work to do and that we have scheduled a number of workweeks, committee workweeks--which, by the way, I think have been very successful. We started those in June of last year, and I think they worked out very well, giving the committees an opportunity to meet uninterrupted by having to come to the floor.

With votes, as we know, we continue to have the challenge not only of COVID but the variant, an additional illness spike, so we are still having votes longer than we otherwise would have. So I think that those work periods have worked very well, and there are some scheduled for October.

But I have also advised Members that we have a lot of work to do, and if we need more legislative time, we will provide for that, and Members will get sufficient notice for that. But I did want to put them on notice that we may have to have more floor time than is currently provided for by the committee workweek schedule.

But as soon as we have a sense of when those days will be needed, we will let Members know.

Well, obviously, the government funding authority ends on September 30 at midnight, the end of the fiscal year, and it would be our intention to deal with whatever bill the Senate sends back to us-- if, in fact, they do not take our bill--as soon as it comes to us.

We believe that it is absolutely essential not to shut down government, which is costly, disrupts the lives of the American people and those who are expecting services, and is irresponsible.

Even more irresponsible is not increasing the debt limit. I have been saddened on a regular basis that our Republican colleagues are prepared to vote for debt limits when you have a Republican President and not when you have a Democratic President, as if somehow it is the President that creates the debt.

The President doesn't create the debt. The Congress creates the debt. This is not for debt that we may create in the future. It is for debt that we have already created, either by cutting taxes, therefore cutting revenues, or by spending money.

As you know, the debt limit was substantially increased under the Trump administration in a bipartisan way. But unlike this year, Democrats joined with Republicans to ensure that the full faith and credit of the United States of America was not put at risk. And the President of the United States signed that legislation, a Republican President.

So it is, I think, very sad that our Republican friends did not join every Democrat in saying we will not put at risk the full faith and credit of the United States for debts that have been incurred.

Now, I have been here for some time, and just in terms of the public debt going up, under Bush 1, it went up 55 percent; Clinton, 37 percent; Bush 2, 86 percent; Obama, 88 percent; Trump, 39 percent.

Now, obviously, those figures all are based on a lower base than their successor had, but it is interesting that under Ronald Reagan, the debt went up 189 percent, and he signed every one of those. And he also urged us not to put the credit at risk.

In addition, on September 8, 2017, the Republican-controlled House voted 316-90 to suspend the debt limit through December 8, 2017, under a deal endorsed by President Trump. The ``yea'' votes included Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, and Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers.

Again, on September 8, the Republican-controlled Senate voted 80-17 to suspend the debt limit through December 8, 2017. The ``yea'' votes included Majority Leader McConnell, Majority Whip Cornyn, Finance Chairman Hatch, and GOP Conference Chair John Thune all voting in favor of that.

In addition, on February 9, 2018, a year later, the Republican- controlled House voted 240-186 to suspend the debt limit through March 1, 2019. Voting ``yea'' were Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Majority Whip Steve Scalise, Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, GOP Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, all voting for the measure.

Leader McConnell has stated that it would be irresponsible not to extend either the date or the amount of the debt limit. The business roundtable has said this: Failure to let the U.S. Federal debt limit to meet the U.S. obligations would produce an otherwise avoidable crisis and pose unacceptable risk to the Nation's economic growth, job creation, and financial markets. Goldman Sachs has essentially said the same thing, the American Bankers Association, and numerous other organizations that I can mention.

So I am sorry that earlier this week the Republicans voted unanimously against keeping the government open and making sure that we did not compromise the full faith and credit of the United States of America. But I will assure the gentleman, as soon as a bill is sent back from the Senate, that we will take that up. I hope it is a responsible bill.

I hope it does what Senator McConnell, under President Donald Trump, said ought to be done. Perhaps now that we have a Democratic President, somehow the fiscal responsibility does not seem as important as it did when Donald Trump was President, and I think that is unfortunate.

I, personally, by the way, think that the debt issue is a phony issue. There are only very, very few countries that have a debt limit. The debt limit is decided when we spend money or cut revenues, not in some other venue. And once we do that, the assumption ought to be, and I think has been, that we are going to pay our debts as a country.

And the only time we came close to not doing that was about a little less than 10 years ago, and for the first time since I have been a Member of Congress, which is over 40 years, the rating of the United States was reduced, minisculely, but nevertheless reduced. A shocking consequence of playing games with the debt limit.

So I would hope that my friend would urge his party to not treat this as either a political issue or partisan issue, and would treat it as the issue it is, an issue of the fiscal responsibility and full faith and credit to the United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

It is hard to respond, Mr. Speaker, to a not-responsive issue on why we are not voting to extend the debt limit. McConnell said he wasn't going to vote for the debt limit long before there was anything about Iron Dome. In fact, we passed Iron Dome. We passed it overwhelmingly with over 420 votes. It is now over in the Senate, and I hope they pass it immediately, which would, by the way, be faster than they would have done the CR.

Having said that, the gentleman voted for $5 trillion of debt in 2020. It wasn't paid for. We were confronting a great crisis called COVID-19. And in a bipartisan way, we passed $5.4 trillion of spending, the largest amount of spending, I think, in any year that I have been in this Congress.

We did it in a bipartisan way with the expectation that we would borrow that money to meet the emergency that confronted us, and that we would pay for that debt. It didn't have anything to do with politics. It didn't have anything to do with who was President of the United States. And all that verbiage was to mask the fact that, frankly, my Republican friends don't like voting to pay the bills.

They do like to cut revenues, whether or not they balance the budget. And the good news, from their standpoint, was they inherited an economy that was going up incrementally every year.

The gentleman talks about jobs on his tax bill. Under President Obama, who inherited a tanking economy from George Bush, not withstanding the tax cuts that they had effected, during the Obama administration we created 10,838,000 jobs. During the Trump administration 6,688 net jobs. About 35 percent less. But that is irrelevant, it is a smokescreen. It is to distract.

The fact of the matter is we have incurred debt, we have incurred it in a bipartisan way. Whether the objective was defense or whether it was domestic or tax cuts, we created the debt on behalf of the United States of America. We borrowed money and we said to our creditors: we will pay you back.

It had nothing to do with Iron Dome. The Republicans had said if the debt limit was in there, they weren't going to vote for it. They were not going to take responsibility for the debt that they, in a bipartisan way, $5.4 trillion last year, incurred, signed by Donald Trump.

Donald Trump could have stopped every nickel of that money from being spent. He did not. It was a bipartisan agreement.

I believe, although I don't have the figures in front of me, that Mr. Scalise voted for every one of those bills. He can correct me if I am wrong on that.

But the debt limit is a pretense that somehow if you vote against raising the debt limit you will somehow, Mr. Speaker, solve the debt problem of the United States.

No. The way you solve that is paying your bills.

I would urge the gentleman--I don't know what is going to come back from the Senate, but I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, my experience has been, particularly over the last, about 15 years, it has been Democrats who have responded to the fiscal responsibility call of Republican Speakers--Mr. Boehner and Mr. Ryan--who couldn't get the majority of Republicans in their own party to vote for their bill exercising fiscal responsibility. I am proud to say that Democrats were there on behalf of bills sponsored, essentially--I don't know the name of the sponsor on the bill--but supported by both Speaker Boehner and Speaker Ryan. I don't have those figures in front of me, but I can bring them up perhaps next time we talk.

So I would urge my friend, let's get off this political Biden this or--I don't even know if any of those bills have passed because I don't know what list he is reading from, but, Mr. Speaker, he lists the names of bills in Congress.

We passed the rescue plan but got no Republicans on that.

Why?

Because we were over having a Republican President. So now a Democratic President was trying to make

sure that this country didn't fall through the floorboards, that our small businesses didn't fall through the floorboards, that our families and individuals didn't fall through the floorboards, and that our childcare providers didn't fall through the floorboards. So they were through voting for those bills. They were voting for them when Trump was President but stopped voting for them when Biden was President. I get that. But the debt limit is about all of us. It is about our country.

Very frankly, as Goldman Sachs and the Business Roundtable and others have said, it is about the global economy. It is about jobs. It is about working men and women having jobs and America being competitive with the rest of the world. That is what the debt limit is about, and that is what the Business Roundtable is saying, not one of our spokes- organs. That is what the Chamber of Commerce is saying.

So, yes, we can argue the specifics, the 4 million less jobs were created under Trump than were created under Obama. We can talk about that. We can talk about a larger debt under Trump in terms of actual dollars. I am not going to talk about that.

Why?

Because we incurred them together because we needed to do so because our country was in trouble and our people were in trouble.

So I will tell the gentleman we are going to--his question was, in case we all forgot it, we probably did--that we are going to deal with the bill that comes back because we are absolutely committed to making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is not put at risk.

I have different facts.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I will not characterize the substance of that argument. However, I believe it has no merit, Mr. Speaker, none, zero, zip.

It is as if we Democrats, when we voted three times to assure that we didn't violate the debt limit under Donald Trump, as if we would say: Well, this is not our debt, this was, after all, the debt of the tax cut of 2017, so we shouldn't pay this.

In fact, the debt, of course, like family debt, is not necessarily for the car, for the mortgage, or for the clothes that we bought for our children to go back to school. It is a cumulative debt, a cumulative debt that--by the way, under Democratic Presidents since President Truman--were increased 24 percent; under Republicans since Truman, 45 percent.

It would be ridiculous, Mr. Speaker, for me to say: Well, I am only going to pay for this debt, that debt, and this debt that I agree with.

Of course, the $5.4 trillion that Mr. Scalise and I voted for in 2020 is a part of the debt that we need to have to service now. In fact, what we of course did, we didn't increase the debt limit per se because politically that was very controversial because people demagogue it. So what we did was we changed the date, which is a ruse, which is a political sleight of hand. It has the same exact effect.

So, Mr. Speaker, with all due respect, the argument that it is not my debt and your debt and this--in fact, most of those bills haven't passed and haven't created any debt yet. I don't know the list, so I don't know whether they have been passed or some have passed. I presume, obviously, the rescue plan did pass, it wasn't paid for. Of course, it was approximately 30 percent of what Mr. Scalise and I voted for in 2020.

But, nevertheless, the debt is the debt; and not to support making sure that America legally can pay that debt is irresponsible.

I don't know the status of those bills. I will check on the status of those bills.

Let me say, Mr. Speaker, there is a tragedy occurring at our border. There are people in grievous circumstances and in unbearable danger in their home countries. That has been a case for some period of time, and we have some very bad people taking advantage of that and promising them a free route to America, taking advantage of that pain, that suffering, and that fear that so many people have, in this case Haitians who fled their own country, presumably many of them after an extraordinary earthquake and they are living in places that are not their homes.

We all talk about it, and we all believe that America is the greatest

country on the face of the Earth. It is. Therefore, it is not surprising that people who are in pain and grieving and are concerned for the future of their children want to come to the United States of America. But, clearly, we cannot take all of the people who would like to come to America.

Therefore, we need a system because America is made up of immigrants. It has been made strong by immigrants. It has been made successful by immigrants. It has been made a great country by immigrants.

My own father came from Denmark at the age of 32 in 1934. Almost everybody who serves in this House, some are immigrants themselves who came themselves to the country. Some at 2 years of age and some at other ages.

The gentleman is correct. We need to deal with this. We need to deal with it in a humanitarian way, in a way that honors our values and respect for individual lives and individual persons. That is one of the great, great differences that we celebrate in America, the importance that we put on the individual.

We said that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal--today we clearly would say all men and women--and endowed not by us, not by our Constitution, and not by our laws, but by God. We have some of God's children who are fearful, scared, and running, running to a safer place. And that place for almost all the world is America.

So we have a responsibility, Mr. Speaker, to adopt a rational, comprehensive immigration reform regime where people will know the rules of coming to America. They will know the rules of how you apply, how you are processed, and how you are vetted. Whether you are coming here because you just want to come to America to succeed and to make your family live in a better neighborhood called America, or you are coming because your family and your are unsafe in the country in which you then reside, we need comprehensive immigration reform.

I would be glad to work very closely with my friend, the Republican whip from Louisiana, on seeing if we can get to that place because we have all been talking about it, all of us.

I think there is not a person in this room--I don't know about in this room, but over the years--who hasn't said our immigration system is broken, who hasn't said we need secure borders, who hasn't said we need secure borders and reveled in the fact that we are a nation of immigrants who have made us stronger so that we can get to a place where we pursue a rational policy for implementing that concept.

So I will tell my friend, I will look at those two or three pieces of legislation he mentioned and talk to the committee chairs about their status and let the gentleman know.