Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, will my friend yield?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me.

Mr. Speaker, I agree with everything the gentleman said. Maybe he is not the best floor director--I have got a pretty good one myself--but he is a very, very good floor director.

Mr. Speaker, I was going to say that one of the problems that I have with Mr. Bravo is that he thinks that Louisiana crabs are better than Maryland crabs, but loyalty is an important aspect of our service.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to join my friend, Mr. Scalise, the majority whip, and thank Matt Bravo for the leadership that he has given on this floor, and particularly on behalf of my floor staff with whom he has worked very closely, both when he was with Mr. Cantor, with whom I worked very closely, and now Mr. Scalise, with whom I work closely. We thank him for his service to this House.

Every time I rise, I say, whether it is a Democratic or a Republican staffer who works this floor, they work with all of us, and they work in a way that tries to facilitate the doing of the people's business.

They are not always as successful as they would like to be. It is the fault of the Members, not of the staff. They have good plans that go awry because the Members do not cooperate. Mr. Speaker, I would like to tell Matt that I understand that very well.

Mr. Speaker, we want to thank Matt for the very collegial, positive, constructive way in which he has worked with my staff, with the leader's staff, with other staff on this side of the aisle, as well as staff on his side of the aisle to assure that we can, to the best extent possible, work in a constructive way on behalf of the American people.

I am sure that Matt will be as successful in future endeavors as he has been here, and, if so, very, very successful indeed.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the majority whip for yielding me time, and I wish Matt Bravo the very best.

Mr. Speaker, I was here in 1981. They said the 1981 bill would pay for itself.

David Stockman, a former colleague from Michigan, was here. He was at OMB. A few years later, he wrote a book and he said: I said it would pay for itself, and I knew that was not true.

The same can be said of this bill.

Mr. Speaker, history will indeed remember this vote. Future generations of Americans will remember who cast their votes to raise taxes on 86 million middle class households and heap another $1.5 trillion in deficits onto our children and our grandchildren.

They will remember who cast their votes for a plan that gives 83 percent of its benefits to 1 percent of the American people.

They will remember that President Trump promised that the middle class would get a tax cut and wealthy individuals like him would not, before turning his back on that promise.

They will remember those who cast their vote to kick 13 million Americans off their health insurance coverage.

They will remember those who acted with the full knowledge that their votes would trigger a $25 billion cut to Medicare. I know you said you are going to waive it, which would simply add $25 billion more to the deficit.

Posterity will also remember those who stood up in the face of this dangerous and partisan bill and said ``no.'' Those of us who vote against it are doing so not because we oppose tax reform. On the contrary. We recognize, as most Americans do, that this bill is not tax reform. It is a tax giveaway to those who don't need our help, paid for by those who need it the most. This is reckless and dangerous deficit spending at its worst.

In 1986, Democrats and Republicans worked together in good faith and over many months in an open, transparent, and regular order process to craft real, bipartisan tax reform that helped the middle class without adding a dime to the deficit. Not a single dime.

This has not been an open process. This has not been bipartisan. This has not been transparent or through regular order.

This raises taxes, as I said, on 86 million Americans, who will pay more taxes 10 years from now than they do today. It gives 83 percent of the tax cuts to the top 1 percent, not the $59,000 family that Paul Ryan talked about, but to those families making over $900,000 a year.

This bill adds $1.5 trillion to the deficit. This is not tax reform.

So Republicans may pat themselves on the back in the coming days for having finally passed something out of Congress. Unfortunately, it is a bad thing. I urge them to remember that this vote may be the most consequential of their careers, and not positively.

I say to my friends across the aisle: Stand up and say ``no'' with us and commit to start working on a product all Members of the Chamber can be proud of, as was the case in 1986. That is what Ronald Reagan did. In 1986, Reagan did not go down this reckless and irresponsible path.

Stand up for the principles you used to espouse but are now about to abandon. Stand up for fiscal responsibility. Stand up for the middle class. Stand up for what the American people hope we would do. This is not it.

Mr. Speaker, I rise for the purpose of inquiring of the majority leader of the schedule for the week to come.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. McCarthy).

(Mr. McCARTHY asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for that information.

First of all, Mr. Speaker, I want to say that the majority leader and I, as well as his predecessor, Mr. Cantor, have worked together on what we call a Hackathon, which is a meeting annually of individuals involved in the high-tech community in how better to communicate, how better to process information, how better to make transparent the work of this body and make the actions of this body accessible to the general public as they happen.

I want to thank the majority leader for continuing to cosponsor this effort with me and to be a leader on this effort. We just had the President sign--I think yesterday, maybe the day before--a piece of legislation, which will try to make the government more facile in bringing its technology up to date so that it can operate more efficiently and more effectively.

So I thank the majority leader for working together in a positive way to make this institution work better and to make it more accessible and better known to the American people. I thank him also for the schedule that he has put forward.

Mr. Speaker, the majority leader mentioned a number of things that the tax bill that is going to be coming before us will do. I don't believe that the conference report is available for review at this point in time.

Can the majority leader perhaps enlighten me as to whether or not the conference report is available now to be reviewed? Or, if not, when it will be available?

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. It is my understanding that that will be on the floor as early as Tuesday of next week. Is that accurate?

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. Speaker, I would simply observe that what the majority leader did not mention--again, I have not seen the conference report, so this is not based upon a review of the conference report, but this is based upon the Senate bill and the House bills that were passed by both bodies--was that it will increase the debt of our country by some $1.5 trillion and a minimum of $1 trillion. It will raise taxes on some 78 million Americans between $50,000 of income and $150,000 of income.

I am assuming that the elimination of the mandate is still in the conference report. I am not sure, but the information I have is that it is still in the report. Mr. Speaker, that will cost 13 million people to be uninsured as a result.

I have information, Mr. Speaker, that what the conference report does is reduce taxes on some of the wealthiest people in America. I am not sure how they offset that--maybe with a mandate, maybe with something else--but 62 percent of the bill's resources go to the top 1 percent in America.

Mr. Speaker, Speaker Ryan spoke on this floor about the average family making $59,000 a year. He mentioned that that family will get, under the House bill--again, I haven't seen the conference report-- $1,182 per year in a tax cut.

What the Speaker did not mention is that the family in the top 1 percent will get a tax cut of $1,198 per week. Per week, Mr. Speaker. In other words, 52 times what the struggling American will get, what the American who Speaker Ryan said may not be able to come up with $500 if they have a crisis with a refrigerator or their heating unit, something of that nature, or their car breaks down will get.

Mr. Speaker, we on this side of the aisle do not believe that this bill addresses relief for the struggling working men and women of this country.

Mr. Speaker, it is clear, in all of the polling, that the average working American shares that view. They believe correctly that this is a tax cut for the rich and a few sprinkles to the middle class. I am sure the leader will have something to say on that.

In addition, Mr. Speaker, it is ironic that what will happen in this tax bill is we will phase out. We will--again, I have not seen the conference report, so I don't know exactly whether that is true or not, but in both the House and Senate bills, we phased out--we didn't phase out, we proposed to be phased out. The benefits to those middle-income, hardworking Americans will see their benefits phased out. That will not be true of corporations. It will not be true of the wealthiest in our country.

So it is troubling, Mr. Speaker, that a bill of this magnitude is being rushed to judgment. In 1986, the gentleman, in making his announcement, said we have been working on this for 31 years. Now, I presume he was talking about from 1986 to 2017.

What he did not say, Mr. Speaker, is, in 1986, we had 30 days of public hearings on a bill. Thirty days of public hearings. What he did not say is that we had 450 witnesses during those public hearings testifying about the taxes. What he did not say is that there were nearly 4 months of hearings on the 1986 reform bill. And what he did not say is that the Ways and Means Committee conducted 26 days of markup.

This bill has received less than 7 days of markup in both bodies and in the conference. This is being rushed to judgment. The American people, by substantial numbers, believe this bill is not good for them.

Now, Mr. Collins said that he talked to a donor and the donor said: Don't call me again if you don't pass this tax bill.

I get that. I don't know who the donor was and I don't know how rich the donor was, but obviously the donor thought that he had a real stake or she had a real stake in this tax bill.

We regret that we are not doing as we did in 1986, because what the majority leader did not mention either was that the 1986 bill was a bipartisan bill with President Reagan and Speaker O'Neill supporting it, and with Chairman Rostenkowski, a Democratic chair of the House Ways and Means Committee; and a Republican chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Bob Packwood from Oregon, supporting the bill. It was a bipartisan bill. And what the majority leader did not mention is the 1986 bill did not add a single cent to the deficit. It was paid for.

Mr. Speaker, this bill is a much lesser product than it could have been. We on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, think we need tax reform. We are prepared to support tax reform. We believe we need to bring down the corporate rate. We believe we need to make sure that small businesses can prosper and grow into large businesses.

What we don't believe in, Mr. Speaker, is simply having a bill that advantages the best-off in our country and says that the advantages we give to the middle class will be phased out in a little bit, about 5 years.

So, Mr. Speaker, we will, according to the majority leader, consider this bill next week. It will not be bipartisan, and that is a shame. It will not be positive for the country because it will put us even more deeply into debt, and the people who pay that bill, ultimately, will be our children.

And on both sides of the aisle--we don't have a lot of Members on the floor, but I say to every Member on the floor, every Member on this floor, I am sure, at some point in time you have given a speech somewhere that said: ``We care about the debt. We are going to bring down the debt.'' This bill does not do it. This bill exacerbates the debt.

Anybody who believes that this bill is going to pay for itself through dynamic scoring and economic growth is kidding themselves. It is a rationalization to vote for a bill for which the main imperative is political, not policy, because my Republican colleagues, Mr. Speaker, believe that, if they don't pass this bill, they will lose the next election.

I have heard that argument over and over and over again. That is not a reason to vote for this bill. It is a reason

to say: Let's go back to the table. Let's include Mr. Neal in the consideration, the ranking member. Let's include Mr. Wyden, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. Let's include Mr. McCarthy and me to try to see if we can reach a bipartisan, positive, constructive piece of legislation which will, like the 1986 legislation, enjoy the support of a wide range of the American people and their Representatives.

Mr. Speaker, we had an election yesterday in Alabama. Mr. Jones won that election. Mr. Strange, the incumbent Republican representing Alabama right now, lost the primary. He has no mandate.

Why rush this bill through? This bill, if it were passed on December 31 of next year, would affect the 2018 taxes that would be filed in April of 2019. The need to rush this bill, Mr. Speaker, seems to be that, and the reason for having no hearings, the reason for having no witnesses, is because this bill, on its merit, cannot sustain itself.

Now, let me read you a quote, Mr. Speaker: ``I think the message of the moment is that the American people, all across the country, are asking us, even in the most liberal State, Massachusetts, to stop this healthcare bill. I think that means there will be no more healthcare votes in the Senate prior to the swearing in of Scott Brown, whenever that may be.''

That statement was made on January 20, 2010, by the present majority leader who was then, of course, the minority leader. And his proposition was: You ought to wait until Scott Brown is here so that Massachusetts can have its vote counted. But hypocritically, he has changed his tune today when Alabama, a very conservative State, the opposite of Massachusetts, has voted to elect Doug Jones to the Senate.

I don't hear Mr. McConnell or anybody else saying: Let's wait for the duly elected Member of the United States Senate from Alabama to be seated so that he will have an opportunity to vote on this extraordinarily consequential vote and, in my opinion, negative consequences to our country.

Mr. Speaker, I am sure the majority leader might have some comments he wants to make in response, and, therefore, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. McCarthy).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments. He made a number of points.

First, generally, I have been here long enough to have heard the debate for the 1981 bill, the so-called supply side, Jack Kemp. Vice President Bush referred to it as ``voodoo economics.'' And point of fact, as the gentleman knows, because I am sure he knows the record, we increased the debt under Ronald Reagan 189 percent. Larger than any other President with whom I have served over the last 37 years; 189 percent. Stockman said: We knew it wasn't going to balance the budget. We just said that for political purposes. Stockman said that. He was Director of the OMB under Ronald Reagan.

Then in 2001 and 2003, we had tax cuts. We heard the same arguments, how it was going to grow robustly the economy. It brought in the deepest recession anybody in this Chamber, other than perhaps Sam Johnson, who I think is probably our oldest Member, because the rest of us didn't experience the depression, it ushered in not the biggest growth rate in America, but the least job-producing 8 years of any American President whom I have served with, and the deepest recession that anybody in this body has experienced, and a hemorrhaging of jobs.

In fact, the stock market, which the gentleman refers to, had a 25 percent decline in value over the 8 years of the Bush administration, with two tax cuts where exactly the same argument for growth was made, and it didn't happen.

On the other hand, I was here in 1993, when we raised taxes, not much, but a little bit, particularly for infrastructure, and the prediction, Mr. Leader, on your side of the aisle: we would tank as an economy; we would have a terrible recession.

Exactly the opposite happened. You were dead, not you personally, but those who made that representation were 180 degrees wrong.

First of all, we balanced the budget 4 years in a row. Nobody has done that other than President Clinton. Now, you can say you were in charge of the Congress, you were, and I would respond to you: Why couldn't you do it under George Bush when you had everything? There is no answer to that.

In terms of the experience that we have had when we had tax cuts, the debt did, in fact, explode; 189 percent increase in the national debt. That was approximately 2\1/2\ times the increase under Obama and the increase under George Bush. But we continue to argue there is going to be great growth. No reputable economist agrees with that proposition. Well, you read them out to me. I will be glad to hear them.

The stock market increase under this President has gone up. It went up 300 percent under Barack Obama. Three hundred percent. Three hundred percent, from 6,500 to over 18,000.

He had the largest job production, and I told my friend, in 2016, as opposed to 2017, hear, my friends, there were 279,000 more jobs created in 2016, under Barack Obama, than have been created under this President. Mr. Speaker, 279,000 more. Now, that is not a great deal, but in terms of growth, there was more growth of jobs in 2016, when Obama was President of the United States, than has occurred under Donald Trump. Check the records. I am sure you will review and say: Let's see if Hoyer is just giving us some malarkey.

The gentleman talks about this great tax benefit. What he didn't mention, and what I was referring to, by the way, was when you were giving the schedule, not in response to the question, but that aside, doesn't mention the State and local taxes.

Now, I am not exactly sure what has happened to State and local taxes, but in my State, it will have a very substantial negative effect. Why? Because we have a significant income tax. Why? Because it is a progressive tax, and it puts the burden on those who have more.

Now, you may disagree with that. Just have a flat tax no matter what

you have, and you pay the same thing. I am not sure exactly what you have done.

The shutdown you talk about. You had 90 people vote against a CR that you recommended they vote for in September, which was a clean CR. You would not have passed that CR. You would have shut down government. You are responsible for keeping government open, ``you'' being your party. You are in the majority. The only reason that CR passed was because we voted for it. You had 90 of your people vote against it; 90, who apparently didn't want to pay the military, apparently didn't want to protect them overseas. That proposition, like they say, won't hunt, because the chairman of the Armed Services Committee voted against that CR. Why? Because he thought it was harmful to the national security of our country. Secretary Mattis believes the CR is damaging.

It is inappropriate, in my view, when we do something and say: We don't like this bill, and the only party with whom I have served who would consciously, purposely shut down the government, I tell my friend, Mr. Speaker, is the Republican Party. They did it in 1995, under Newt Gingrich, and they did it last year with Mr. Cruz coming over here and saying: Shut down the government unless they repeal the ACA. Shut it down, consciously.

We have never done that. Have we had to shut down because we couldn't get agreement? We have done that for a few days. But for 16 days you shut it down consciously. And guess what? When you voted to open up the government, guess who voted against it? Mr. Mulvaney, the Director of the OMB. He voted against opening up the government. I guess he was against the Armed Forces. I guess he was against defending our country, if that's your proposition.

CHIP. You are right. You waited. We didn't get an agreement. But we waited long after September 30, when the gentleman says he is very concerned about funding it. The authorization expired. Now, you passed, ultimately, a bill that we didn't vote for. You passed it on your own. If you really were that concerned, you would have passed it before the authorization expired on September 30. We passed it some weeks later, and we passed it with a piece of funding in there that is going to undermine, for instance, just as one example, vaccinations for children, because you funded it, in part, by reducing substantially the Prevention Fund, which seeks to prevent illness.

On bipartisanship, very frankly, we had a 2-week CR, you are right, a 2-week CR. You got a 2-week CR. The only thing you have worked on, from our perspective, is the tax bill, and you did not include us in those discussions. You had closed hearings.

We had a conference hearing yesterday. Mr. Neal tried to move an amendment out of order. It wasn't accepted. It was a done deal. Done deal in secret.

I tell my friend, I reread a little bit of ``Young Guns'' last night. It talked about transparency. It talked about openness. It talked about doing things one at a time, not packaging a lot of bills.

The reason we all hate CRs is because nobody knows what is in a CR. We lard it down, and this CR is larded down with numerous bills. We are talking about the tax bill, but the CR that the gentleman talked about is five or six major pieces of legislation put in one package. Take it or leave it.

That is not the way to run this organization, and that is what you guys said in ``Young Guns.'' And I agree with you, but it is not what you have done. It is what you said, but it is not what you have done.

Let me just close on this. Frankly, I was going to talk about the CR, but I am talking about it now.

We don't have a budget caps deal. Today is the 14th; so we are essentially 17 days from the end of the year. We don't have a caps deal. We don't have a disaster supplemental for Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands that is proposed to be in this CR, as I understand it, and the fires in California. The gentleman is absolutely correct, and we are going to support helping the folks of California who have been devastated by these fires. The gentleman is absolutely correct.

We don't have anything on DREAMers. We think that is critically important. I said to the majority leader 4 months ago that we felt this was critically important and we needed to get this done. I think, as I have said to the gentleman, we have over 300 votes on this floor for a bill to get this done.

Alexander-Murray. I don't think, I don't know, I haven't seen the conference report, but Alexander-Murray, which tries to stabilize the availability of healthcare at a reasonable price to the American people, I don't think that is in the tax bill, as I understand it.

VA Choice funding, I think, is in the CR. I haven't seen exactly what it says.

Opioids funding. I have a crisis in my district. In every district in America, opioids is a critical issue. There is no funding in the CR, as I understand it, for that.

The fire grants program for our emergency responders, no money for that.

Perkins loans, nothing for that. The debt limit is going to come later.

National Flood Insurance Program, nothing for that, as I understand it.

Medicare and other health extenders, 702 of FISA to keep America secure and strong and safe. As I understand it, none of that is being dealt with.

The reason we voted against the last CR is because we are tired of kicking things down the road. We are tired of kicking the can down the road. We want to get to an agreement on a bipartisan basis to pass legislation that is positive for our country, and that is why we may vote against this next CR, because we ought to stop just kicking the can down the road. And we are going to kick the can, as I understand it, down the road to some point in time to January 19, is the discussion.

Mr. Leader, Mr. Speaker, we are prepared to sit down to try to reach agreement on these issues that have got to be reached. If we don't reach them, America will be less safe, less secure, less healthy as an economy and less healthy, literally, in terms of making sure that the healthcare available to America is on a stable path.

Mr. Speaker, I will yield to the majority leader and then make a few comments, and then we will close. I yield to my friend.

Well, I keep pushing it for you.

``Come back, Shane.'' Maybe many of you are not old enough to remember that wonderful movie. Shane rode off and the little boy intoned, ``Come back, Shane.''

I haven't gone anywhere. Democrats have no ability to shut down the government on the floor of this House. Hear me: We don't have the votes to shut down government and we don't want to shut down government.

Maybe the leader also wants those 90 of his--he is not our leader. He is the leader of the majority party, and 90 of his people did not follow him. I presume he must be much more concerned about that.

With all due respect, he is my friend, but not my leader. We voted to give 90 days and nothing was accomplished in that 90 days other than working on a tax bill that we think is a disaster for this country. Nothing.

The gentleman talks about passing these appropriations bills. We knew they wouldn't pass the Senate and we told him so. We said: Let's do it on a bipartisan basis.

But, no. By the way, Mr. Speaker, it was the least regular order prior to an omnibus at the end of a year in dealing with appropriations bills that I have ever seen. They packaged, I think it was four or five the first time--four, I think, and then the balance of eight.

We didn't consider them individually. We didn't have an opportunity to consider them thoughtfully, no. It was one big package, for or against. I said I read that book. It was anything but regular order.

By the way, Mr. Speaker, the majority party that passed them is the majority in the United States Senate; and not a single one of those bills, not a single one, has passed out of the Senate. Not a single one has gone to the President of the United States. Not one. The Republicans are in charge of the House and the Senate. Not a single bill has gone to the President of the United States.

Harry Reid is no longer there just to beat on: Oh, it is Harry Reid.

Now, what it would have taken to pass some of those appropriations bills in the Senate is some compromise, but that didn't happen. So don't wring your hands about how bad it is that we haven't had bipartisanship on the appropriations bills--we haven't--or bipartisanship on the CR when you lose

90 of your people. Ninety Republicans voted against a simple CR. You say simple CR, nothing to be partisan about, et cetera. Ninety of your people voted ``no.''

I yield to the gentleman from California.

Let me reclaim my time just so the gentleman can further explain.

Does that mean 90 of your people did not want to pay the bills of the United States and default on our debt?

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend.

Reclaiming my time, let me say to the gentleman very respectfully: Do not expect cooperation from our side if we don't get cooperation from your side, if we don't get some inclusion in making decisions.

We are, after all, 194 Members of this body. From time to time, you and I do work together. When we work together, we get majorities and we pass pieces of legislation.

You have not passed a single controversial fiscal bill on this floor without our substantial help until last week. You got about 230 on that last bill. But let me tell you, the reason we voted against it is because we knew exactly what was going to happen: nothing. There would be no agreement to CHIP; there is no agreement on CHIP. There would be no agreement on FISA; there has been no agreement on FISA. There would be no agreement on flood control; there has been no agreement on flood control. So we knew that we were not going to get any bipartisan buy- in, so all we were doing is delaying the inevitable.

Let me tell you, when we did defeat the homeland security bill--you remember that, I am sure; we did, and you were in the majority--you came back to the floor and said that we are going to meet tomorrow. We reached an agreement, and we passed it.

Very frankly, you have never heard us say that, as a policy, in order to get the ACA repealed or Gingrich wanted to get some fiscal thing done, that we would shut down the government. Three times you shut it down in 1995 and 1996. Three times, intentionally. That was your policy.

Yes, if you are going to take the government hostage and force us to do something that we think is inimical to the best interests of this country, yes, Mr. Leader, you will leave us with no other option: to pretend that we are keeping government moving but not getting any agreement.

I talked to you very sincerely 4 months ago about one of the things that we wanted to get done before the end of this year is getting DREAMers protected who are now vulnerable and very scared that they are going to be sent back to someplace they do not know, have not lived in, brought here as children through no fault of their own, gone to elementary school, junior high school, high school, college, served in the military, working at jobs, and vetted to make sure that they haven't done anything wrong. They are afraid of being sent back home-- not back home. Excuse me. I say that. That is not their home. This is their home.

Nothing has been done on that. I know you have a task force and talked about it, but we haven't done anything. There is no reason why we can't. I think we have 300 votes on this floor to get that done.

I yield to the gentleman from California.

Reclaiming my time, I don't know who the gentleman is relying on for that information, but I will tell you I have talked to Mr. Pallone. That is not correct.

I don't know who you think directed him not to reach an agreement, but I will tell you, after you made that assertion, I think last week or the week before, I went to Mr. Pallone. I asked him that, and he said absolutely not.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I reclaim my time for just a second, and then I will yield back to the gentleman.

Is the gentleman proud that you control the House, you control the Senate, and you haven't sent a single appropriations bill to the President? Not a single one. Not one.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, what it would have meant, you would have had to compromise. That is why the Senate has that 60- vote rule. I am not crazy about it myself, but that is why they have the 60-vote rule. They think it is good because that is why they kept it. They think it is good because it requires

compromise; it requires agreement; It requires moving ahead on a piece of legislation.

I will tell you, I served on the Appropriations Committee for 23 years, and we reached agreement between Republicans and Democrats on almost every bill. And when we had the bills, they weren't partisan bills, and they got a lot of Republican votes, almost always, when we were in charge--not all the time, almost always.

If you are a party of no compromise, then you can't move things in the United States Senate. I get that. But that is the reason. That is the reason, because you couldn't reach compromise.

Very frankly, a lot of the bills have come out of the committee. Do you know why they came out of committee? Because they were bipartisan. But they haven't been brought to the floor by Mr. McConnell, and they haven't been sent to the President of the United States, so somewhat crocodile tears.

Yes, you passed those 12 bills just like you can pass the CRs, on your own, without any help from us. If the government shuts down, it is because you can't get the majority of your party to pass bills.

You are in charge. There is no doubt when we were in charge and you didn't support us, we passed every piece of legislation we wanted to pass on this floor with 218 Democrats. We were united as a party. Now, we lost some, but never enough to make it so that we didn't get 218. You lost 90. You can say it was on the debt; you can say it was on national security; you can say whatever you want on it; but you brought a bill to the floor, and 90 of your people voted against it to keep government open and to keep government operating.

Very frankly, we voted with you so that we could get some work done, and we haven't gotten work done. That is what frustrates us. That is what frustrates the American people.

I will tell my friend, at the end of the day, after this Congress is gone, historians are not going to be kind, notwithstanding the fact you say you passed so many bills. You passed so many bills on a partisan basis, and you used, essentially, the 51 vote because you didn't want to compromise. We get it. You don't want to compromise. You don't want to work with us. You didn't have any hearing on this tax bill. We were not included in any phase of the marking up and fashioning of this tax bill.

Now, I am about ready to yield back the balance of my time. I am sure that everybody who wants to give a 1-minute or a Special Order is very happy to hear that.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend.

Mr. Speaker, in reclaiming my time, does the gentleman remember President Trump saying that a good shutdown will be good for government? Do you remember him saying that, when you tell me about how he has been down here lobbying? He said: A ``good shutdown'' may be good for government.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments.

Mr. Speaker, I would, again, reiterate: the majority party can do whatever it wants on this floor. It could have kept government open. It could have kept policies moving with its votes. Time after time after time on critical issues confronting this country, they couldn't come up with a majority.

As a matter of fact, on one occasion, Mr. McCarthy was the whip, Mr. Cantor was the majority leader, and Mr. Boehner was the Speaker. They offered a bill to keep government moving. They only got 84 of their colleagues, approximately one-third of their colleagues on their side of the aisle, to vote with them.

I don't want to hear about us shutting down government. We can't shut down government. They are in charge. The majority has the votes. You can do whatever you want. We get it. We may not like it any more than you liked it, but we get it.

But we voted on the hope that we would get some work done. We haven't moved anyplace except on the tax bill, which we think is bad for this country, in the last 90 days since we passed--and we passed. The CR would not have passed without us.

And, yes, we will not be held hostage. Yes, we will oppose what we think is a very, very bad tax bill and we think is an effort to avoid getting the work of this House done.

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

I thank the gentleman for yielding and for taking this opportunity on the Special Order. I think, as an aside, I need to apologize to him for making him wait so long for this Special Order.

I also want to tell the American people, Mr. Speaker, that the gentleman who has taken this Special Order is probably the constitutional expert not only in this body, but one of the constitutional experts in our country. He is a great legislator himself. Although he is new to this body, he is not new to being a legislative leader at all. He has been a legislative leader in our State for many years. He is a wonderful teacher and somebody who has great political courage and is willing to stand and say that the emperor has no clothes. He is willing to call attention to the fact that our democracy is at risk, that our due process is at risk.

He used the phrase ``trumped up.'' What an interesting phrase that is that we have used for many years. I don't know that it has had as much relevance in years past as it now may have.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend, Mr. Raskin, for leading this Special Order. Our system of government, as he has pointed out, is based on the rule of law. We are a government of laws, not of men.

What that means is that it is not personalities, not dictators, not kings that rule our land. It is the law, the law of our Constitution, the law of our legislators, and the common law that we pursue as interpreted by our court systems. Its foundation is the constitutional principle that all are equal under the law. No one is exempt.

The appointment of a special prosecutor earlier this year to look into the possibility of the administration or Trump campaign officials colluding with a foreign adversary or obstructing justice falls into a long tradition in our country of using independent counsel to investigate those in the most senior offices of our government.

Our Founding Fathers would say that is a check and balance; that is a protection against the usurpation of democracy.

The choice of former FBI Director Bob Mueller to be that independent investigator was an extraordinarily wise one; a decision greeted with support from across the political spectrum, precisely because Mr. Mueller is so widely respected for his independence and his commitment to the law above all else.

And, parenthetically, although it is not necessarily relevant, he is a Republican. He is not, however, driven by the politics of left or right or Republican or Democrat. He is a man of the law, a man who seeks the truth, a man who has dedicated his career to assuring that we remain a land of liberty under law.

We have already seen a demonstration of that commitment in the prompt firing of a subordinate investigator for an act that was not illegal, as the gentleman from Maryland, our constitutional scholar, has pointed out, but, however, threatened to impugn the objectivity of the investigation.

In other words, he removed somebody who he thought might undermine the credibility of this investigation because he is so committed to this investigation being objective and unquestionably fair. Mr. Mueller has made it abundantly clear that he will not tolerate any hint of bias in this investigation.

So far, it appears that his investigation is bearing fruit, having uncovered serious crimes and secured three indictments as well as guilty pleas from two key subjects. Guilty pleas.

This was not a question of: We had a trial and somebody convinced 12 people that he was guilty.

This was a case where the individual said: ``I am guilty. I did what was alleged. I know that it is illegal, and I should bear the consequences.''

That included, of course, the National Security Advisor--who was National Security Advisor, I think, for 25 days, or close to that number--Mr. Flynn.

As the investigation has advanced, Mr. Speaker, we have seen troubling statements from the President and his advisers seeking to sow uncertainty about the legitimacy of the special counsel's activities and undermine confidence in him.

But it is not so much the confidence in him that is critical. It is confidence in the law. It is confidence in the process. It is confidence that, in fact, we are a nation of laws, and whether we are President or peasant, we will be held accountable if, in fact, we break the laws.

What is being done to undermine this process threatens the independence of the investigation and those who are undertaking it. It is dangerous to our democracy and to our freedom.

Now, in recent days, we have heard calls by the President and his allies to launch a counterinvestigation of the special prosecutor's investigation. Those of us who know history know that that is so often the defense of those who seek authoritarian power, of those who believe they are above the law, of those who believe they can intimidate others so that they will never be held accountable for wrongdoing.

This preposterous suggestion has but one purpose: to cast a shadow of doubt over the findings of Mr. Mueller's inquiry by attempting to frame it in a partisan way.

In fact, Mr. Mueller was appointed by a Republican-appointed Deputy Attorney General. It is tactics like this one that we see so often overseas in countries ruled by dictators and those seeking to become dictators. This willful effort to erode confidence in any institution that must be seen as impartial is harmful because if nobody and nothing is impartial, if everyone and everything is tainted by politics and interest, then no one can possess the moral authority to hold accountable one who wishes to be entirely unaccountable.

That, Mr. Speaker, is the reason I think that the President has also attacked the fourth estate, the newspapers, the broadcasters, the people whose duty it is to bring facts to the people so that they, the people, can make a rational judgment in a democracy, for it is in their hands that the power ultimately resides; and if you undermine those who give them the facts, then you undermine their ability to make decisions.

This ultimately is what the special prosecutor's work is all about: accountability, ensuring that every person is held to the same high standard of behavior under the laws of our Nation.

So, Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues in both parties--this is not about party. This is about country. This is about patriotism. This is about the rule of law. If we lose that respect

for law, we will lose our country. It will be a different, lesser country.

I urge my colleagues, from both parties, from every ideological corner, let us not forget the most fundamental principle that binds us together as Americans and as public servants: That all are created equal; that all of us, all Americans, are equal under the law.

That doesn't mean we are the same, but it means, in the eyes of the law, we are equal as we stand to be held accountable, or to be held innocent, or not involved, or not owing somebody else for wrongdoing. We need to uphold it by our words and by our deeds.

The special prosecutor's work must continue unimpeded, and it must continue to be respected. Yesterday, in the Judiciary Committee, that was not the case. To defend the indefensible undermines respect for law.

I want to thank my friend again, Mr. Jamie Raskin, from Montgomery County, Maryland, for this Special Order. As I said, he is a great constitutional scholar and teacher, a great legislator. More importantly than that, he is an individual who loves his country and, throughout his life, has fought to make the country all that the Founding Fathers meant it to be.

I thank him for coming to this floor and for his efforts to ensure that Mr. Mueller's investigation can continue to be seen as impartial and with its objective unquestioned, and that is accountability, accountability and justice, and equal justice under the law. That is our bedrock. That is our touchstone. That is our guiding star. That is what Professor Raskin, Congressman Raskin, Citizen Raskin is talking about today, and we all ought to thank him for that.

Mr. Speaker, we should not shut down the government of the United States. Democrats do not want government to shut down. It is, however, not in our hands. It takes a majority to pass any bill in this House: 218 votes. Our Republican colleagues have over 240 votes. We have 193. So it is not in our hands, Mr. Speaker.

The Republican Party has been given the responsibility and the duty to enact legislation to ensure the proper functioning of government. As the governing party, they can pass whatever they want to pass on this floor. Indeed, as the governing party, they have a responsibility to use their votes to keep the government running. They control the House, they control the Senate, and they control the White House. All the levers of power of legislating are in their hands.

But, we are here, Mr. Speaker, on the verge of a shutdown because of a familiar pattern where Republicans cannot

unite as a party. They cannot agree among themselves on spending priorities. This has happened again and again and again. In fact, each time Congress has successfully enacted a funding bill since the majority took the majority in 2011, they had to have Democratic votes to pass that legislation every single time.

When we passed the continuing resolution in September, just about 3 months ago, we did so because Republican leaders asked for more time to work on the priorities that confront this country and, responsibly, keeping government working. They had 3 months to do so, yet here we are with 1 day remaining and nothing to show for it.

Instead, they have spent the past 3 months--on priorities that I will outline in just a minute--working on a tax bill that is reckless, deeply unpopular, and harmful to the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans and the economic well-being of our country that I call a death tax because it will explode the debt of the United States; a bill that would raise taxes on 78 million middle class households and kick 13 million Americans off of their health insurance coverage; a bill that would increase, as I have said, the deficit by $1.5 trillion-- indeed, much more than that, because we have to pay interest on the money that we are going to borrow to do the tax cut, while we fail to pay our bills--a bill that would trigger an automatic cut of Medicare by $25 billion next year; a bill premised on a falsehood that tax cuts magically pay for themselves.

That is what the past 3 months have been wasted on, Mr. Speaker.

Not a single appropriations bill has been enacted by this Congress, not a single one. There are 12. They control the House, they control the Senate, and they control the Presidency.

Now our Republican colleagues, Mr. Speaker, are asking for 2 more weeks. Two more weeks, they say. Republicans are asking us for 2 more weeks because they claim they haven't had time to write a funding bill they can pass.

Ninety days. Every Democrat voted for what I call the ``no drama'' CR in September. Ninety Republicans voted ``no'' on an agreement we had to use the next 90 days to address the priorities of America. But 90 Republicans voted ``no.''

They have had time to write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite again a tax bill that advantages the wealthiest in America at the expense of the majority of Americans. That, Mr. Speaker, is how they have spent their time these past 3 months.

Write a funding bill to avert a shutdown?

No.

Reach an agreement that is responsible to fund the priorities of America?

No.

Write a tax bill that kicks millions off of their health coverage and raises taxes on millions more. That is what they have done for 90 days. That is what they chose to do.

Two more weeks?

If they want 2 more weeks, they have 240 votes to give themselves more time. But I am certainly not going to vote to give them 2 more weeks simply to work on the tax bill, which they have pledged to pass by Christmas.

However, if they passed it a year from now, it would have the same impact on America's taxes. The critical they have ignored and delayed. The political has been their sole focus.

I say to my Republican friends, Mr. Speaker: You won control of the government. Govern, govern. Be responsible. Focus on that which is critically important to the American people. Don't say you haven't had time to do the most important job you had. You had time. We voted-- every one of us--to give you 90 days, to work either in a partisan sense, as you have done so much of the year; or in a bipartisan sense, which was much more positive and would have been much more productive.

There is a to-do list, Mr. Speaker, of critical legislative items that this House has to complete before the end of the year. It is a long and compelling list. Six of them have hard deadlines and must be done before we leave for the end of the year. For 90 days we didn't do them.

None of the six is a surprise either. Neither are any of the others that the American people expect us to do by the end of the year as well.

The majority has had months to work on bringing legislation to the floor on each one of them--months--yet here we are, in December, pushed up against the wall of a funding deadline.

And Republicans want 2 more weeks so they can focus on passing their tax bill before Christmas?

Not the priorities of America, but a tax bill, a deeply unpopular, appropriately so, tax bill.

Mr. Speaker, let me list what we need to do, what we ought to do, and what we should have done over the last 90 days. Let me just share with the American people who sent us here what the Republican majority has not gotten done in all of the months they have had complete control of the government:

Keep the government open and functioning by passing funding bills and sending them to the President for signature;

Reauthorize the Children's Health Insurance Program so that millions of our children will not lose healthcare insurance;

Provide funding for VA Choice to help care for our veterans, which must be done;

Reauthorize the flood insurance program, which is so critical to so many millions of Americans;

Extend expiring health programs, such as community health centers, on which so many others rely;

Reauthorize portions of the Intelligence Act to protect America's security, which will end before the end of the year.

Ninety days we have had to consider all of those items.

The American people also expect us to:

Provide the necessary resources to address the opioid addiction crisis, which they had 90 days to do that;

Reach an agreement on spending levels for critical priorities of the American people. We call it dealing with sequester, which is somewhat jargon, but we haven't done that;

Pass funding to keep government effectively serving our people. Ninety days to do that, and here we are;

Pass the Dream Act to provide certainty for those young people who were brought here as children and have grown up as Americans;

Take action to stabilize our health insurance markets. We haven't done that. We had 90 days;

Extend the expired Perkins Loan Program so college students, with the most need, can complete their degrees. We haven't done that in the last 90 days;

Reauthorize fire grants so that our domestic defenders and our first responders can have the resources they need for training, for personnel, and for equipment to keep our communities safe. We had 90 days to do that;

Prevent nearly 1 million people from losing access to Medicaid in Puerto Rico;

And I will end with: making sure that the people of Texas, the people of Florida, the people of Puerto Rico, and the people of the Virgin Islands have resources to rebuild and restore their communities devastated by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria.

All of this we need to do by December 31.

What do we focus on?

A tax bill.

When will that tax bill take effect for taxes in 2018? When will you pay those?

By April 15, 2019.

Yet that is what we spend all of our time on. That is what we have spent all of our time on, not the priorities that I have just read, but a tax bill that will hurt America, hurt its financial status, hurt its middle-income workers, and, most of all, hurt the children who will pay back the money we will borrow to give the wealthiest in America a tax cut, those people making over $900,000 a year. That crowd will get 62 percent of the resources, yet the Speaker says that we need to help struggling Americans.

I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, there is not a person at any one of my town meetings who came up to me and was worried about the people making $900,000 or more--not one. Maybe it has happened to you, Mr. Speaker, but it hasn't happened to me.

Why are we at this point?

Because we have a governing party that refuses to govern; because we have

a majority that has failed to do the business of the American people, even for something as fundamental as providing for the operations of government.

Mr. Speaker, we Democrats welcome the opportunity to sit down with our Republican colleagues and reach a compromise agreement to meet our responsibilities and address many of the pressing issues I have outlined earlier in this address.

My time is about up. Had we utilized the 90 days that we all voted-- we on our side of the aisle, the Democrats voted--with our Republican friends, although 90 Republicans voted ``no,'' but we all voted ``yes'' to take 90 days to meet our responsibilities to the American people. It hasn't been done. We have no confidence that giving 2 more weeks will make it happen.

Let's get to work right now. Not on the tax bill. That could be passed at some point in time. I am against it. I will vote against it. I hope it fails. It is a bad bill. But let's address these priorities. That is not what the intent of these 2 weeks are. It is to give 2 weeks so we can pass a bad tax bill that will hurt America, will hurt our children, and will hurt the middle class.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank the majority leader for yielding.

Normally, of course, we would have a scheduling discussion tomorrow at the end of business, but in light of the fact that we are not meeting tomorrow, we will not have that colloquy.

Mr. Speaker, can the leader give us some indication of what might be considered next week? As we know, there are numerous items that need to be resolved before we leave here this year, and we need to obviously have some BCA, Budget Control Act, numbers arrived at so that the Appropriations Committee can move forward either on an omnibus or appropriations bills. We need to do flood insurance. We need to do FISA section 702. We need to do, obviously, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and other matters.

Mr. Speaker, can the leader, who has just said that we will be in--is he anticipating 4 days next week? Four days next week, and presumably 4 days or 5 days the following week? So let's say we have 9 legislative days.

Mr. Speaker, can the leader give us some idea of how we might accomplish the work that needs to be done in that timeframe?

Mr. Speaker, I hear the majority leader's hope that we will move appropriations bills on the Senate side. Obviously, one of the things that we have been trying to work on for the last 90 days, Mr. Speaker, has been trying to get to an agreement on the numbers that will replace the sequester numbers that certainly many people on your side don't want for the defense side of the budget.

Obviously, we believe that we had an agreement over the last 4 years for parity in spending. We would hope that we could reach an agreement similar to that agreement.

Furthermore, Mr. Speaker, I am sure that Mr. McConnell, the majority leader, could bring appropriations bills to the floor, and he has not done that. We don't control the Senate, and those bills have not been brought to the floor. You can't pass them if they aren't brought to the floor.

Furthermore, Mr. Speaker, they need to be bipartisan bills, because the history is that the majority party, Mr. Speaker, has not been able to get a majority of votes. They did today, but the history is, since 2011, that has not happened; therefore, failing that, you need to work in a bipartisan fashion, Mr. Speaker, the Senate does, in order to get these bills done.

Mr. Speaker, in addition, I won't go into all the pieces of legislation that are pending that need to pass for the welfare of our country, the security of our country, and the assistance to our people. I would hope that we could proceed and proceed now. Frankly, I am available tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, and I am sure others are, to start talking about how we reach agreement on these critical issues, because 9 days, as we all know, is not very much time.

We have had 90 days. We unanimously voted for a continuing CR. Ninety of your members voted against it. I say respectfully, the reason we got 90 days to hopefully reach agreement on a number of critical issues, critical to us, and I think critical to you, was because every one of us on this side of the aisle voted for the CR, and 90 of the Republicans voted against it. It could never have gotten to a majority but for our votes.

I would hope that now that we have another 2 weeks that we start sitting down together, reaching agreement, and are prepared next week to start voting on bipartisan bills that both sides can support. Neither side will get all it wants, but that is the way I think that this House will proceed as a credit to the House and a credit to the American people.

I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, my presumption is that the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who voted against the CR in September, did not do it because he wasn't for funding the troops; did not do it because he didn't want to protect the security of our country; did not do it because he wanted to shut down the government, I presume. None of us did either.

We did it because we are very concerned about the fact that 90 days ago we voted for a CR that was noncontroversial, notwithstanding the fact that 90 on your side voted against it. It was noncontroversial, however. The President agreed to it. You agreed to it. I agreed to it. We had an agreement.

But the fact of the matter is that we have not used those 90 days productively in a bipartisan way to get to constructive resolutions of these issues. I agree with the gentleman, we ought to do that.

I will pledge to the gentleman that I and my leadership here and our Members will come at least 50 percent of the way. You are in charge. You have the responsibility. We understand that. But, as we have in the past, almost every time, whether it was Speaker

Boehner or Speaker Ryan, it was this side of the aisle that kept the government open. It was this side of the aisle that made sure we didn't default on our debts.

So I want to be constructive. There is no point in further argument on this. It is to say, however, to all of us, I have talked to some of your Members privately. They are shaking their heads.

Why are we in this position?

We ought not to be in this position. Every one of us who sits in this body--every one of us ought to be saying to ourselves: we need to act constructively. Confrontation is not constructive; the failure to reach agreement.

You say you passed SCHIP. I pleaded with the gentleman not to put a partisan bill on the floor. We had agreed on the authorizing side. Unfortunately, we couldn't agree on the funding side because you wanted to cut things we thought ought not to be cut. Clearly, we could have gotten to an agreement.

In fact, you passed a bill on IPAB, $17.6 billion unpaid for that would have paid for all of that. So, Mr. Leader, I will yield to you, if you want to; but I just plead with every one of the Members of this body: This is not good for the American people. You say you don't want a CR. You had 90 days to come to an agreement with us or with yourselves. You have 218 votes. You just showed us.

I yield to the gentleman from California.

Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, I didn't hear my friend saying that when John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and the whip asked for votes to keep the government open.

They got 84 of their colleagues on your side of the aisle to join them, making a total of 87, and the majority of your Members voted against your own leadership on the bill that they were proposing. So don't lecture me about voting ``no.''

I voted ``no'' because I think we should not have had a CR. I voted ``no'' because I think there are too many things left undone. I voted ``no'' because the American people expect us to get our work done, not to twiddle our thumbs while Rome is burning.

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

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Mr. Nadler for yielding to me.

Mr. Speaker, that is just the way it is. Since the start of 2017, more than 14,340 people have been killed by gun violence in the United States, more than any other country on Earth. That is just the way it is.

More than 29,150 have been wounded. More than 680 of those have been children.

In October, 58 people were killed and 515 wounded in Las Vegas in the worst mass shooting in our Nation's history.

But we don't have a bill on the floor to prevent the creation of machine guns, which are illegal, by bump stocks.

Just 5 weeks later, a gunman entered a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and killed 26 worshipers, while wounding 20.

The majority's response?

Bring to the floor a bill that makes America less safe, more replete with people carrying and concealing weapons in our communities. This bill says: If you want to carry a concealed weapon in a State that doesn't allow it constitutionally, no problem. Get your concealed carry license in another State that does.

In other words, every State, no matter their own judgment, talk about States' rights, no matter their own judgment, must be subjected to the policies of the least protective State in the Nation.

Instead of addressing the very serious problem of rampant gun violence in a constructive way, the Republican majority is bringing to the floor a bill that makes it easier to hide dangerous weapons in public.

Newtown, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, and community after community after community. What will it take for this Congress to act? What will it take to face this challenge instead of ignoring it? How many more will not live to see the new year or begin it with debilitating injuries they will carry for the rest of their lives? How many times will we have a moment of silence and a year of no action?

Mr. Speaker, defeat this bill. Its rational provision of NICS, making sure people report, does not justify the danger it expands. Support the rights of States to protect their residents from hidden firearms. Do not ignore the crisis that confronts our country. Have a moment of action, a moment of legislating more safety, not less; not simply a few seconds of silence to lament the loss of life, whether it be in Las Vegas or Orlando or in our own communities. Defeat this bill. Come back and do some positive, constructive work that makes America safe again.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Neal for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Pennsylvania, as he well knows, is one of my favorite Members. He is a good friend. He is a man of great integrity. But, Mr. Speaker, both the House and Senate bills are bad bills, and this is a sad day in the House.

Hypocrisy is on stark display. Responsibility is absent, and politics--and donors--have subverted policy.

This conference is a sham: an attempt to make it appear that the House and Senate are going through regular order. Sadly, we have not gone through regular order. The thought is we will reconcile the two versions of the dangerous Republican tax increase and deficit bill. I call this a death tax because it will explode the deficit, as happened in 1981, when, under Ronald Reagan for 8 years, we increased the debt of this country 189 percent.

The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee mentions Mr. Obama, who increased it 88 percent, or less than half of the Reagan increase in the debt. And we were promised then, as we are promised now, that cutting these taxes would grow the economy. It would if that were the case.

But there won't be any real regular order in this conference, just as there hasn't been throughout this entire process. There will only be further closed-door, backroom antics by Republican leaders on their own, asking Republican Members to take it or leave it. And this motion to instruct, of course, will be defeated.

But Democrats are offering it because, from the very beginning, we have made clear that we are here to work toward the kind of tax reform that the American people want: tax reform that I worked with in 1986.

And they don't want an elimination of the deduction for State and local taxes, which our motion would instruct the conferees not to do. The deductions for State and local taxes support schools and first responders in our communities, and the American people don't want to kick 13 million people off of their health insurance coverage.

So our motion would instruct conferees to take that dangerous provision out. But no motion to instruct can address all of the ways that the Republican tax bill has put our people, and our future, in danger.

The Senate bill raises taxes on somewhere around 78 million middle class households, not as a pejorative, but as an income spectrum. Why? To offset massive tax cuts for those not with whom we are at war, but who are doing very well and don't need our help.

It plunges our children and grandchildren--of which I have a number-- an additional $1.7 trillion in debt--and I think that is the minimum-- making them pay tomorrow for what Republicans refuse to pay for today.

And for what? For what, Mr. Speaker, are we being asked to do all of these things? For economic growth? For jobs?

We know it won't grow our economy in any substantial way faster. Why? Because almost every economist tells us that. And we know that the few jobs the Senate bill would create--and listen to this: that they claim that they will create--will cost $1.9 million per job.

The vast majority of Americans won't benefit from this plan; but those who are already extremely wealthy will benefit greatly--as a matter of fact, 52 times what the gentleman will tell us.

Mr. Speaker, there is a saying that Texans like to use: ``That dog won't hunt.'' It doesn't do what it is purported to do. It doesn't take Einstein to predict what will happen this time around, when he defined insanity as ``doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.''

I have been here. I have seen this. I have heard this argument. It has always resulted in the same thing.

I have more to say, but my time is up.

Mr. Speaker, let me say to the gentleman from Texas, the chairman of the committee--he is going to tell me how much people in my district get a tax break--tell me about my children and my grandchildren whose debts he will pile on them to borrow money from China, or someplace else, to give this tax cut that they will then have to pay off in their time. Tell me how much my children will have their taxes raised.

He apparently doesn't know. That is sad.

Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the majority leader for yielding.

As the majority leader knows, we have 9 days remaining under the present schedule. I understand that an extension of that to the 22nd may be contemplated, but we have 9 legislative days remaining.

The gentleman has now just indicated that we are going to be voting on Monday. I would join the gentleman in urging every Member to be present on Monday. We are going to be casting very consequential votes over the next few days. Whether we are voting on them in a timely fashion or not, they will all be critically important, so I would urge all my Members to be here.

We have much that needs to be done in the days that remain, as the gentleman knows.

I want to raise two issues. Obviously the gentleman has indicated that we are going to vote to go to conference on the tax bill if the Senate passes the tax bill.

In addition to that, of course, there are two major pieces of legislation and, frankly, many more, and I am not referring to, obviously, the omnibus or a CR so that we can keep the government funded, which everybody on this side of the aisle and I am sure everybody on that side of the aisle wants to do. I hope we are able to keep the government funded in a nondramatic way.

But as I have indicated to the majority leader on numerous occasions, we feel very strongly, as the gentleman knows--and we have had positive discussions on this--that we need to also pass before the end of the year--and many of my friend's Members have raised that issue as well and urged that we pass before the end of the year a resolution for the children who were brought here as minors, some as young as 1 or 2 years of age and who know no other country but the United States of America, that we resolve their status

before the end of the year so they do not continue to twist in the wind and agonize about whether they are going to be sent to a place they do not know and they do not perceive as their country. They perceive themselves to be American. So I would hope that we can deal with that.

In addition, my friend and I have had a discussion--there has been much over the last 11 months--about healthcare. I think one of the things that I think the gentleman and I agree on in a bipartisan way is that we all believe that the children of our country ought to have assurance of access to affordable, quality healthcare.

We passed the CHIP bill through the House. As the gentleman knows, it was passed not in a bipartisan way. It sits now in the Senate and has not moved yet in the Senate. I would hope that those two issues at the very least--and there are many others, including the fiscal bills and the omnibus--that need to be moved. I would hope, whether we are 9 days or 13 days, however many days that we have remaining, that those two issues in addition to others will be resolved before we leave.

I thank the gentleman for his announcement and giving us a heads-up about Monday, but I would hope that we would also in the few days that remain to us work very hard to try to get those issues and others resolved before we leave for the year.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his time.

Mr. Speaker, I want to say to my friend, the majority leader, with all due respect we raise a lot of heat in this town. Unfortunately, on the cusp of a meeting that was convened to try to reach some agreements on very important issues to the American people, the heat was raised very, very substantially by the President of the United States. That was unfortunate.

Anybody who thinks that the heat wasn't raised and was saying that there was not going to be a deal I think is incorrect.

But that is not why I asked for the 1 minute. Why I asked for the 1 minute is, Mr. Speaker, the American people are relying on us to come together and agree on things they know are very important to them: their families, their community, and their country.

Let us not accuse one another back and forth of bad faith, and let's lower the heat and let's try to get that work done.

The gentleman wouldn't yield to me, but I am glad to yield to him.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise to talk about a bill that poses a great danger to our country and a great danger to our people, particularly our people who are struggling, who are living from paycheck to paycheck, because this bill, contrary to the assertion of our Republican colleagues, will not help them, and we are going to talk about that.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin), a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee, and my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his kind comments and for the information he gave. As a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee he is, I think, as knowledgeable about the history of these tax cuts as anyone can be, so I thank the gentleman for joining us in this effort to educate our friends and colleagues and the American public on the consequences of this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Larson), one of the senior members of

the Ways and Means Committee, who has been very focused on sound tax policy, on policy to save Social Security for generations yet to come, who is one of the more responsible leaders in this House, and my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Connecticut for his comments and particularly highlighting how the majority party, in considering this legislation, cut out the public entirely.

Speaker Ryan, when he took the speakership, talked about transparency. He talked about regular order. He talked about doing things so that the people would know what we are doing.

Not only were there no hearings in the House, not only were there no witnesses in the House, as the gentleman knows, there were no hearings in the Senate, there were no witnesses in the Senate.

In a short timeframe, the Republicans are trying to pass a massive increase in the national debt so that, in effect, as the gentleman knows, they say they are cutting taxes. I am going to talk about how that is not really true. Particularly for the middle class it is not true. But they are substantially raising taxes on every one of the children in this country who will become more indebted and in their time will have to pay back the money that is borrowed to give this tax cut.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for highlighting those very important facts and I thank him for his service on the Ways and Means Committee.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, at this time I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and to include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.

Mr. Speaker, the subject of my Special Order, as we have seen, is the very dangerous tax bill that this House passed and that the Senate is now considering. In fact, of course, the Senate bill is worse than the House bill, if one can imagine that.

On November 16, the Republican majority in this House passed a bill to raise taxes on 36 million middle class households and place our country another $1.7 trillion in debt.

Now, you will hear $1.5 trillion and you will hear $1.7 trillion.

What is the difference?

The difference is about $200 billion that we will pay in interest to others to effect this tax cut. So not only is it going to be the $1.5 trillion immediately impacted by the tax cut itself, it will be the $200 billion additional that we will have to pay to borrow the money to give the tax cut and, as I am going to point out, give that tax cut essentially, for the most part, to the wealthiest enterprises in America.

227 Republicans voted to do that to their constituents. Every single Democratic representative who was present, joined by 13 Republicans, did what, in my opinion, many of their colleagues wanted to do, but for political reasons, not policy reasons, chose not to do.

They did so, Mr. Speaker, following impassioned remarks by Majority Leader McCarthy and by Speaker Ryan. Both addressed this House and the American people and claimed to be pushing these tax bills in order to help the working people of our country, a worthy objective, an important objective.

Perhaps one could justify this extraordinary escalation of the national debt, probably the largest increase in the national debt of any single bill that has been passed. They cited struggling families and the need to provide a leg up to those in our middle class. Those, of course, are very resonant messages, very important messages. Frankly, we ought to be talking about how we create jobs, not debt. They are being employed to sell a tax plan that would do exactly the opposite of what they say.

In his speech on the floor, Speaker Ryan lamented: ``Seventy-eight percent of our workers in this country today are living paycheck to paycheck. . . . Instead of thinking about getting ahead, families are struggling just to get by.''

He is right about that and he is right to be concerned about that. What he is wrong in is his response.

Those living paycheck to paycheck will be the ones hurt the most by this tax scam. Let me repeat that. The Speaker talks about those living paycheck to paycheck. That concern is an absolute legitimate concern for every one of us in this House and every Member of the Senate.

Unfortunately, he has offered a bill, however, that will hurt the very ones he says that he wants to protect. They will see their taxes go up over the next decade. In that same period, as middle class families are struggling to get by, they will watch the wealthiest get farther and farther ahead.

This is not about class warfare. This is about a judgment of who needs help, who needs lifting up.

He talked about the people who need lifting up. The problem is that he didn't lift them up. They will watch the wealthy be lifted up, and they are very high right now. God bless them.

Why, I ask, would the Republican tax plan take $1.7 trillion away from our children and grandchildren and give 62 percent of it to the top 1 percent?

Mr. Speaker, the people get it. The people think this bill is not going to help them. That is what polls show, and they are right.

Under the Republicans' plan, it is wealthy individuals like Donald Trump who win, and regular working Americans and our middle class who are trying to get ahead who lose.

House Republican leaders cajoled their members. Cajoled is a very polite word. They pressured and they scared their members. They said: If you don't pass this bill, you are going to lose the election not because the people are for it, but because, as one Member said from New York, their donors demanded it.

They urged their members to vote for a flawed bill many of them did not want and that none of them believed would become law. They did that so they could hand the reins to the Senate to send back a version no one had yet read or contemplated. They put their House majority on the hook to accept whatever the Senate would pass word for word. We will see whether they do that.

That Senate bill that is now being considered would deeply harm middle class families, particularly those in congressional districts across the country where more taxpayers choose to deduct their State and local taxes, like my State and other States.

Dozens of House Republicans from such districts voted enthusiastically to move the process along. In other words, they voted against their taxpayers and for their party--party above people--to move it along by supporting the House tax bill with the promise that it would be improved in the Senate.

These members would be asked to make further concessions against the interests of their constituents to vote for the Senate bill, were it to come to this floor, because it is worse for their constituents, not better.

That is not how Congress is supposed to work, Mr. Speaker. That is not regular order.

The American taxpayers and American businesses seeking to grow in our economy have been asking Congress to enact tax reform that is bipartisan and permanent.

You heard Mr. Larson talking about the 1986 bill. It was a bill that was worked out between President Reagan; Speaker Tip O'Neill; Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, a Member from the Democratic Party from Illinois; and the gentleman from Oregon, the chairman of the Finance Committee, a Republican.

The Republican bills in the House and the Senate can be called neither bipartisan nor permanent.

So what can we call them?

In his floor remarks before the vote on their House bill, Speaker Ryan called it: ``The single biggest thing we can do to grow the economy, to restore opportunity, and to help middle-income families that are struggling.''

That is not true, Mr. Speaker. However, it is the single biggest thing we can do to put our children and grandchildren further into debt. I have heard so many of my Republican colleagues stand on this floor and say that we cannot spend this money because our children will have to pay the bill, and they are right.

We have a pay-for problem, Mr. Speaker. We ought to be paying for what we buy. Here, we are not paying, we are borrowing $1.5 trillion, as I said earlier, to give to some of our wealthiest citizens; for that is what their plan would do, raise taxes on the middle class today, and on our children and

grandchildren tomorrow, to pay for the wealthiest few to get tax cuts that they don't need and that won't grow our economy.

Let me stress, I think everybody in this room, everybody in the country, would like to be wealthy. This is not talking about penalizing the wealthy. It is simply to say: God bless you. You have done well, but we need to make sure that others do well as well.

The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business released a survey, Mr. Speaker, on November 21, just a few days ago, in which 42 expert economists were asked whether the Republican tax bill would produce the higher economic growth promised by its authors; 42 of the most prominent economists. Only one--only one--said that it would do so and, ironically, later admitted he had misread the question.

None of the 42, not one, agreed that the tax cuts for the very wealthy included in the Republican bill would eventually pay for themselves; and that is why we say, it is one of the greatest debt- creating pieces of legislation that any of us have considered.

Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who presided over the basis for 4 years of balanced budgets, so he has some real credibility on how to bring balance to our fiscal posture in America--he served at the time of historic budget surpluses. He pointed out this fallacy in his op-ed in The Washington Post on November 15. He said this: ``The tax cuts,'' he wrote, ``will not increase growth and, given their fiscal effects, would likely have a significant and increasing negative impact.''

He went on to make several compelling arguments about the dangers of the Republican tax proposals. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record a copy of his op-ed piece.

[From the Washington Post, Nov. 15]

Op-Ed: The Republican Tax Plan's Five Worst Dangers

(By Robert E. Rubin)

The deficit-funded tax cuts advancing through Congress are

a fiscal tragedy for which our country will pay a huge price

over time. While the details of the tax plan remain in flux,

its fundamental contours will not change. Nor will its $1.5

trillion of deficit funding, the amount stipulated in the

recently passed budget resolution.

Perhaps it's hopeless to expect those in Congress who have

long bemoaned deficits and the debt to oppose the plan. If,

however, as a matter of conscience or renewed reflection they

decide to take heed, here are the fiscal dangers posed by the

plan.

To start, the tax cuts will not increase growth and, given

their fiscal effects, would likely have a significant and

increasingly negative impact. The nonpartisan Tax Policy

Center's latest report estimated that, over 10 years, the

average increase in our growth rate would be roughly zero,

counting the crowding out of private investment by increasing

deficits but not counting other adverse effects of worsening

our fiscal outlook. The Penn Wharton Budget Model, using the

same approach, estimates virtually no increase in long-term

growth. Goldman Sachs projects an increase of 0.1 percent to

0.2 percent in the first couple of years and an average

increase over 10 years of just 0.05 percent per year, not

counting any of the adverse fiscal effects.

These estimates reflect three underlying views held by

mainstream economists. First, individual tax cuts will not

materially induce people to work more. Second, corporate tax

cuts will likely have limited effect on investment or

decisions about where to locate business activity, given the

many other variables at play. Third, deficit-funded tax cuts

will have little short-term effect on growth, except perhaps

for some temporary overheating, because we are at roughly

full employment.

With no additional revenue from increased growth to offset

the tax cuts' cost, the publicly held debt of the federal

government would increase by $1.5 trillion. An additional

danger is that the actual deficit impact would be increased

by abandoning the Congressional Budget Office's nonpartisan

evaluation that has been used for decades by both parties in

favor of partisan calculations by those pushing the tax cuts.

Adding $1.5 trillion or more to the federal debt would make

an already bad situation worse. A useful measure of our

fiscal position is the ratio of publicly held government debt

to economic output or gross domestic product, called the

debt/GDP ratio. In 2000, the debt/GDP ratio was 32 percent.

The ratio is now 77 percent. Looking forward, the CBO

projects the debt/GDP ratio to be 91 percent in 2027 and 150

percent in 2047. After $1.5 trillion of deficit-funded tax

cuts, those future ratios have been estimated to increase to

roughly 97 percent in 2027 and 160 percent in 2047. These

estimates likely substantially understate the worsening of

our fiscal trajectory. That's because they do not account for

the increasingly adverse effect on growth of the difficult-

to-quantify effects of fiscal deterioration.

Exacerbating our already unsustainable fiscal trajectory

with these tax cuts would threaten growth in five respects.

These are highly likely to be substantial and to increase

over time.

First, business confidence would likely be negatively

affected by creating uncertainty about future policy and

heightening concern about our political system's ability to

meet our economic policy challenges.

Second, our country's resilience to deal with inevitable

future economic and geopolitical emergencies, including the

effects of climate change, would continue to decline.

Third, funds available for public investment, national

security and defense spending--a professed concern of many

tax-cut proponents--would continue to decline as debt rises,

because of rising interest costs and the increased risk of

borrowing to fund government activities.

Fourth, Treasury bond interest rates would be highly likely

to increase over time because of increased demand for the

supply of savings and increased concern about future

imbalances. That, in turn, would raise private-sector

interest rates, which could also increase due to widening

spreads vs. Treasuries, further reflecting increased concern

about future conditions. And even a limited increase in the

debt/GDP ratio could focus attention on our fiscal

trajectory's long-ignored risks and trigger outsize increases

in Treasury and private-sector interest rates. The ability to

borrow in our own currency, and to print it through the

Federal Reserve, may diminish these risks for a while, as

might capital inflows from abroad. But these mitigating

factors have their limits; at some point, unsound fiscal

conditions almost surely would undermine our currency and

debt markets.

Finally, at some unpredictable point, fiscal conditions--

and these market dynamics--would likely be seen as

sufficiently serious to cause severe market and economic

destabilization.

We have an imperative need to address our unsustainable

longer-term fiscal trajectory with sound economic policies.

Few elected officials want to face this fact, but, at the

very least, they should not make matters worse. We can only

hope that responsible elected officials will prevent this

irresponsible tax plan from being adopted.

Mr. Speaker, furthermore, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan group, Speaker Ryan was flat wrong, flat out wrong, to say that their plan would ensure that ``the average family at every income level gets a tax cut.'' The Joint Committee on Taxation says that is not true.

I presume the Speaker was misinformed, because taxes would go up on all income groups below $50,000. Perhaps the Speaker misspoke.

Speaker Ryan said: ``I am a chart guy.''

Well, I like charts myself, Mr. Speaker, and I want to bring up this first chart. I will bring this a little closer so I can explain this.

The Speaker claimed that a family of four making $59,000 would get a ``$1,182 tax cut in the first year alone.'' Well, now if you hear that, that sounds, I suppose, like a pretty good deal.

Unfortunately, for that family, their cut would shrink every year. This is the shrinkage. And then it would drop precipitously. By 2024, it would become a tax increase, increase, increase, increase. And, as you see, that increase escalates the 4 years: 2024, 2025, 2026, and 2027. So starting in the seventh year of this program, middle America, $50,000, you get a tax increase.

But guess what? That is not what happens to the wealthiest in America.

It is even worse. The Speaker mentioned the family making $59,000 a year, and what he said is: They get $1,182 a year in a tax cut. What he didn't say is what the upper 1 percent get. They get $1,198 per week-- 52 times more than the middle class families that the Speaker spoke about and lamented the fact that they needed more dollars in their pocket.

He didn't talk about the wealthiest. He didn't say what they got. I don't blame him because, in his bill, he decided to give $1,198.52 a week to the wealthiest, and $1,182 a year to that middle class family he says is struggling and living paycheck to paycheck.

What kind of fairness is that? What kind of rationale is that? What kind of real help to the middle class is that?

That is about, by the way, $25 per week versus $1,198.52 per week.

Speaker Ryan showed us a chart that highlighted how, under the House bill, those middle class families promised a tax increase get to see an extra $1,182 in savings the first year. We put it down, and then we put 52 layers above that for the people in the upper 1 percent.

Under that same plan, as their cut shrinks--you saw that in the last

chart--the wealthiest taxpayers would see an average tax cut of $1,198 every week. And it is even a wider disparity under the Senate bill. Now, that is a gulf of disparity, a gulf of unfairness, a gulf of not helping the average working person in America. But the Senate bill--the Senate bill--is even worse.

The Senate GOP tax scam would increase taxes on 82 million--remember I said in the House bill, 36 million middle class taxpayers got an increase? Well, the Senate has doubled that, actually more than doubled that. Eighty-two million middle class households will get a tax increase under the Senate tax bill.

And with substantial tax increases on 36 million middle class households over the next decade in the House bill, it is hard to imagine a worse plan, yet, somehow, Senate Republicans achieved it.

The Tax Policy Center, another nonpartisan analytic group, found that, under the perverse structure of the Senate bill, sunsetting individual benefits in a few short years, even as it offers permanent-- get this, follow this. We are talking about--Speaker Ryan spoke from that rostrum, talked about these struggling Americans living paycheck to paycheck. He offered a bill, and the Senate is now doubling down on the proposal of making sure those struggling Americans got, over the life of this bill, less and less and less, and then finally, paid more and more and more, while the wealthiest had no cut.

The Tax Policy Center said that the sunsetting individual benefits in a few short years, even as it offers permanent corporate tax cuts, 82 million middle class individuals and households will pay more in taxes than they would under the current system.

Mr. Speaker, I want to make that point again. The Tax Policy Center says people are going to pay more under this tax bill, some 82 million of them, than they would under the current system.

On top of that, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has pointed out that, under the Senate bill, undermining the Affordable Care Act--so not only will their taxes be increased over the life of this bill, but 13 million Americans would lose their healthcare under the Senate bill--not the House bill, but under the Senate bill. And that is what the House is going to be asked to vote on. I hope the Senate doesn't pass that.

Mr. Larson talked about sequester and the PAYGO Act requiring a $25 billion cut in Medicare as a result of this bill. The Senate has added in there legislation to adversely affect the Affordable Care Act, which will adversely affect 13 million Americans; some of them may be the same people who get the tax increase, some may not. They would kick 13 million off healthcare.

So the Republican tax plan is not bipartisan, and it is not permanent tax reform. The way you achieve those, as I said at the beginning, is through bipartisan cooperation. But, as Mr. Larson pointed out, there was no intention to do that, no intention to include the public, no intention to have markups over a period of time. They did have markups, but they were very short in duration, and no American had the opportunity to weigh in and give their opinion. There were no hearings, and there were less than zero witnesses. I guess there can't be less than zero. There were zero witnesses.

So the bill is not a tax cut. Speaker Ryan has also tried to describe it as a job-creator. Now, again, we are talking about, correctly, the folks in this country who are living paycheck to paycheck and having a hard time, and we need to help them. We need to work on creating them jobs.

By the way, there is no jobs bill that has been sent down here from the President, but they claim this is a jobs bill. As a matter of fact, they claim that it not only explodes the debt, costs taxpayers $1.9 trillion, but it would create, they say, 890,000 new jobs.

Now, in order to create what they say are 890,000 new jobs--and, by the way, going back to Secretary Rubin, he does not believe that will happen. He is the one that led us to balanced budgets.

In fact, every one of those jobs, every single job is going to cost $1.9 million to create. That is what the Speaker said. This is going to create 879 million, we are going to borrow $1.7 trillion to do it. By golly, you could give everybody 100,000 bucks, and you would be way ahead of the game. But that is not what was done.

We are creating large, large debt, and we will not create the jobs the Speaker said. And if we did, they would cost $1.9 million per job.

According to the conservative Tax Foundation, using the most optimistic model projecting economic growth so far presented, that may be technically true, over 10 years now.

But with a price tag of $1.7 trillion in added debt over the same period, that means that each job would cost $1.9 million, while 82 million working Americans, those struggling Americans of which Paul Ryan spoke, would get a tax increase under the Senate bill--nearly $2 million of added debt to create a single job. Nearly $2 million of added debt to create a single job. So this clearly isn't a jobs bill either.

This has already been discussed, but let me reiterate the key point I made earlier.

It can't be called bipartisan. Republican leader after Republican leader after Republican leader has lamented the fact that we passed the Affordable Care Act without it being bipartisan. The difference, of course, was we had literally thousands of meetings, scores--well over 60--of hearings, amendments offered by Republicans and Democrats. It took over a year of consideration by the country, well vetted-- controversial, but well vetted. This bill has been rushed through without hearings, without any kind of consideration and input from the public--in 1986, 30 hearings; in 2017, zero hearings.

I am repeating what Mr. Larson said, but it is important to understand the dramatic difference: a bipartisan bill with President Ronald Reagan and Speaker Tip O'Neill leading the way for bipartisanship and agreement on a bill that, by the way, was revenue neutral, it did not create any new debt, as opposed to the $1.7 trillion--that is with a T, trillion--that will put every child in America deeply in debt for decades to come.

In 1986, 450 witnesses; in 2017, zero.

Bipartisan support, yes; bipartisan support, no.

Markup, I mentioned markup. That is when you put the bill together, when you give it thoughtful consideration. You offer amendments. You try to perfect it. Twenty-six days in 1986; 4 days in 2017.

This is a bill of over 600 pages. I remember everybody saying how long the Affordable Care Act was and you possibly couldn't do it. Again, over a year and a half of consideration of that bill; 4 days, introduced, the next week markup, 4 days, on the floor.

I was here in 1986, Mr. Speaker, the last time we rewrote our Tax Code. That was a truly bipartisan process. I hope everybody read the remarks of Senator John McCain when he came back to the Senate and voted to move the process forward on the Affordable Care Act but then voted against the final product.

He voted, and he gave a speech in which he said, speaking to the president of the Senate:

Mr. President, I have been here for some period of time,

and my experience has essentially been that, when we did

things in a partisan way, they were neither lasting nor very

good. But when we do things in a bipartisan way, they are

much better and they are much more permanent. There is much

more competence in that product that was reached in a

bipartisan way.

Speaker Ryan made a point in his remarks about how long overdue we are for a tax overhaul, and he said it has been 31 years since we last did this. Now, of course, he didn't say: I was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee for 11 months and didn't report out a single tax bill.

I am not sure why, but that was the case.

We did bipartisan in 1986. We did permanent tax reform. We did it together, and we did it in a way that was paid for. That is not what this is. Neither the House bill nor the Senate bill achieves those key aims.

The Republican tax overhaul process is dangerously flawed precisely because it is partisan, because it rejects the benefits of compromise in favor of the pitfalls of expediency.

I called it, in my speech in opposition to its adoption, ``reckless and feckless.'' It was reckless because it would

heap that $1.7 trillion with a T, $1.7 trillion of additional debt on our party, on our country, on our children, on our people. Bob Rubin, in that column which I referred to, said that that debt would undermine expansion because it would rob the capital markets of money that could be used to build small businesses and to build medium-sized businesses and invest in large businesses to create and keep jobs.

It is feckless because the same people who used to call themselves fiscally responsible--Senator McConnell, Speaker Ryan, Senator Hatch, others whom I could name--have all stood on the floor of the House or in a press conference and said we need to have the debt reduced, and yet they offer a bill that adds $1.7 trillion to the debt; feckless because the same people who used to call themselves fiscally responsible are now choosing to ignore fiscal sustainability in favor of a short-lived political win.

This is not about policy. It is about politics. It is about appealing to a relatively small group of very, very connected people, but it is our country that will lose.

I told people during that speech that I have been in office for some time. I served in the State senate and now in the House. It takes no courage--no courage--to vote for a tax cut. What takes courage is to pay for what you buy, whether it is national security, which I support, whether it is education, which, if we don't invest in, our country will not be great. It is great in part because we have invested in our education system.

Unless we invest in the health of our people, which is the health of our society, we will not be great, and unless we invest in the security of our people domestically, in law, in order, enforcement, in protection for our people.

It will not be great unless we invest in basic biomedical research to make sure that the diseases that exist now and that may exist in the future can be met with medical cures and palliatives.

We will not be great if we sink our country deeply, deeply, deeply into debt and do not have the courage to say, in this generation, we will pay for what we need and not simply buy and pass the debt along to our children and to our grandchildren, because that is what we are doing in this tax bill.

It is not only an intellectually bankrupt policy, it is an immoral policy that we pursue. As the Senate version takes shape, Mr. Speaker, Republicans who voted grudgingly for the House bill ought to be deeply concerned; and I hope, for the sake of their country, they are good people.

There are good people on both sides of this aisle. There are conscientious people on both sides of this aisle. There are Americans on both sides of this aisle, Americans who have sworn to protect and defend the Constitution of our country and have, as well, sworn to protect the people of this country.

There ought to be deep concern among people of good conscience, concern that it does not meet the very same criteria that Speaker Ryan set forth in laying out what tax reform ought to achieve and what he claimed their House bill achieved. Neither does it adhere to the Speaker's clear promise not to package together separate matters into the same legislation.

Make no mistake, the Senate bill House Republicans will be asked to vote for isn't just a tax hike for the middle class, although that it is. It is also a repeal of a significant component of the Affordable Care Act, which will hurt that same middle class. It may have been difficult for Republicans to cast their votes for vague promises on November 16, but I suggest to you, Mr. Speaker, it will be even more difficult to do so for a legislative product that puts their constituents, those the Speaker talked about struggling just to get by, people who, if they have a $500 debt, are not sure they can pay it, it will affect those folks and put them in even greater danger should the Senate bill make it back to the House.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues in the Senate to reject this bill. I urge my colleagues in the House to look deeply into their souls and not at their polls and reflect upon what they are doing to their country by perpetuating the fiscally irresponsible policies of borrowing, of borrowing, of borrowing and not having the courage to pay this generation's bills now and not pass them along to our children and to our grandchildren.

Every Member of this House and of the Senate, Mr. Speaker, ought to look themselves in the mirror and say: When I gave those speeches, when I referenced that to the press, was I being honest? Am I following a policy today that is consistent with that assertion? I think they will come to the inexorable answer: No. If I vote for this tax bill, I am not.

Therefore, I hope that all of us will reject this partisan piece of legislation that vastly increases our debt, increases the taxes on middle class workers, threatens Social Security with a $25 billion cut, and threatens our economy.

Let us have the courage to serve our people honestly and take the tough vote and then come together in a bipartisan fashion and do what we showed we could do in 1986: pass a bipartisan bill that, yes, makes our corporations competitive internationally and, yes, gives the bulk of the tax cuts to those who the Speaker referred to as struggling. They are the ones who need relief, and we could do that in a bipartisan fashion, and we can pay for it.

David Camp showed us the way. I didn't agree with all of his bill, but he showed the courage--a Republican from Michigan who was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee--and put up a bill on tax reform that was paid for. The Republicans were in charge of this House and they dismissed it out of hand, too tough.

Mr. Speaker, let's do the right thing. Let's reject this bill.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

This is the most irresponsible bill that I will have been confronted with in the 37 years that I have been in the Congress of the United States.

This bill, Mr. Speaker, is both reckless and feckless. It is reckless because it would add more than $1.7 trillion--the chairman says over $2 trillion--to the debt over a decade in a shameful act of hypocrisy for its supporters who, for years, have called for fiscal responsibility. It is feckless because its authors write it with an eye toward politics, not policy.

There is no courage in voting for this bill. It is easy to vote for a tax cut. What is hard to do is paying for what we buy. Neither side does that particularly well.

There is no courage in voting for this bill, only a suspension of common sense and their now abandoned commitment to fiscal sustainability.

Furthermore, my Republican friends call this bill a tax cut. The gentleman who just spoke, the whip, said it is a reduction in rates, but 36 million working Americans will receive a tax increase under this bill. It was a very careful articulation of reduction of rates, but taxes for 36 million Americans, working Americans, will go up.

Furthermore, they call this bill a tax cut. It is not a stretch of the imagination to presume that, given Republicans' urgency to reject bipartisan compromise and deflect public input, the Members of this House will be asked to accept whatever version of the tax bill can pass the United States Senate.

Yesterday, the Senate Finance Committee rejected this bill 36-0. The Senate Finance Committee, headed by Republicans, rejected this bill 36- 0.

I am reminded of what Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican, said last month about the budget resolution that teed up this tax plan. He said that we were being ``asked to vote for a budget that nobody believes in so that we have the chance to vote for a tax bill that nobody's read.''

Mr. Speaker, I won't ask anyone to raise their hand if they have read this bill.

One hand.

Those who take this vote will have to live with it and just hope that whatever mystery tax package their Senate colleagues send over here won't gut whatever concessions they have extracted

I heard the whip say no special provisions in this bill. I don't have the time to go through every special provision that has been used to get people to vote for this bill.

Mr. Speaker, this isn't the tax reform the American people were promised or the tax reform the American people want.

Mr. Speaker, let's sit down together. Let's sit down together, the chairman and Mr. Neal, two responsible, good Americans, sit down together not in a partisan way, but in a bipartisan way. That is the way we did the 1986 bill. That is why it was such a responsible piece of legislation.

Let's enact tax reform that focuses on the working class, the middle class, the people who need the money, not give over half of it to the richest people in America. I don't have any beef with them, we would all like to be rich, but they don't need a tax cut, and the middle class does. Why give 50 percent of the revenue to them?

Let's enact tax reform that focuses on the middle class. Let's enact tax reform that doesn't give half the benefit to those making more than $900,000 a year.

Let's enact tax reform that improves our long-term fiscal position rather than adding the $1.7 trillion to our debt that the CBO projects that this bill would add.

As former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin pointed out in an op-ed in today's Washington Post--and, by the way, he was the Secretary of the Treasury during the only 4 years of balanced budgets that we have experienced in the last 50 years.

Vote ``no'' on this bill. Look to your souls, not your polls or your political accounts.

Reject this sellout of America's future.

* * *.

Mr. Speaker, I was here when Democrats and Republicans came together to enact bipartisan tax reform in 1986. We paid for our tax overhaul and never once asked future generations to foot the bill.

President Trump said in July that tax reform is, and I quote, ``going to be easy.'' I will admit that, to someone like him who is new to government and who may not understand fully how Congress works, what we achieved in 1986 may, in hindsight, appear to have been easy. It wasn't.

It was difficult because it required compromise; it was difficult because it required trust; and it was difficult because it required both parties to make tough choices and share the burden of taking responsibility, along with the benefit of claiming victory.

Somewhere along the way, Mr. Speaker, it seems that many in the Republican Party lost sight of this truth. First on healthcare, and now on taxes, they have decided that it would be easier not to work with Democrats at all, so they have chosen a partisan path, where the only ones with whom they have to compromise are themselves. It is ``going to be easy,'' they said.

And the result: We now expect, on this floor, a bill so dangerous and so reprehensible to the taxpayers of this country that nearly every major organization representing taxpayers, small businesses, workers, farmers, seniors, home builders, realtors, teachers--and I could go on--oppose this bill.

There are more serious problems with the Republican tax bill than time to address them on this floor, so I want to highlight the three that make it so utterly dangerous to our economy and to the middle class.

First, most of the benefits of the tax cuts Republicans are proposing will benefit only those at the very top 1 percent; the 99 percent left behind. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center's latest analysis, under the Republican plan, 47 percent of the tax cuts will benefit that top 1 percent, just 1.2 million households making more than $900,000 a year.

Let me repeat: the top 1 percent will get nearly half of all the tax cuts in this bill, and 50 percent for the 99 percent.

Second, the Republican plan raises taxes on 36 million middle class families. That is not what the Speaker said it was going to do. He said he would give everybody a tax cut. That was not true, and is not true. 36 million middle class American households will see their taxes go up over the next 10 years as a result of this Republican plan.

And third, the Republican plan will explode the debt by more than $1.7 trillion over the next decade. This bill is the granddaddy of all debt creators. This means that those tax cuts, more than half of which benefit only the top 1.5 percent, will be paid for by a huge tax increase on our children and on our grandchildren.

The late Senator Russell Long from Louisiana liked to cite an old ditty about who gets stuck with the pain of tax increase. He said: ``Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree,'' meaning, of course, that none of the voters want a tax increase, so if you raise taxes, make sure it is someone else who is out of sight and out of mind.

In this case, sadly, Mr. Speaker, that fellow behind the tree is a child. This is a tax increase on all those children. It is a child who can't vote and doesn't have a voice in this debate.

The Republican plan asks Members to pile $1.7 trillion or more of debt onto our children and grandchildren and put the fiscal sustainability of our country at further risk. When confronted with this fact, we heard only the same arguments we heard in 2001 and 2003, before the last major Republican effort to cut taxes precipitated the worst recession in our memory and a period of severe budget tightening that led to disinvestment in our country under the threat of sequestration.

That argument, flawed and false, is that these tax cuts will grow the economy so much that the ensuing growth will magically erase all the deficits we know their plan will accrue.

So easy, Mr. Speaker, so easy. The cuts will simply pay for themselves, we

are told. We have been told that before, of course. The cycle repeats: Republican promises that tax cuts will pay for themselves, followed by massive deficits, 189 percent increase in the deficit under Ronald Reagan, followed by Republicans insisting that we respond with austere cuts to investments in our people and in our opportunity. So easily they forget.

But middle class Americans will not forget who is responsible when their taxes go up, when their tax increases pay for tax cuts for the top 1 percent, and when, in the years ahead, more and more investments need to be cut to pay the interest on the debt under which this plan will bury the children and grandchildren of America.

And all because my colleagues across the aisle wanted to skip out on doing what they knew would be hard, just as they did when former Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp introduced his comprehensive tax reform that was responsibly paid for. That is Dave Camp, Republican, State of Michigan. He is retired now, but he offered a responsible bill, and it was not even considered by his committee.

He asked his colleagues to do something hard, of course, but they dismissed it, dismissed it out of hand, because it would have required hashing out a difficult compromise. But easy is no synonym for successful.

President Kennedy told us that we choose these things, that is, tackling our greatest challenges, ``not because they are easy, but because they are hard.''

So I ask my Republican friends--no, I urge them, set aside this dangerous, reckless, and irresponsible bill. Instead, let's choose the hard path that involves hard choices and trust and all of those things that made tax reform successful in 1986, which are the missing elements in this flawed bill.

Mr. Speaker, Democrats are ready to sit down with you and work on this challenge, together. It won't be easy, that is a promise, but if we do it together, if we do it in a way that doesn't balloon the debt or raise taxes on the middle class, we have a chance to do it right. Let's take that chance.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. McCarthy) for the purpose of the majority leader telling us the schedule for the week to come.

(Mr. McCARTHY asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for that information.

I am going to have some specific questions about the tax bill, but before I do that, it is our understanding that substantial changes are being made in the tax bill that was put on the floor last Thursday, a week ago.

Does the gentleman know whether that is accurate or not?

I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. Speaker, regular order is having hearings and witnesses, is it not?

I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his remarks.

I don't share his enthusiasm for this bill, which I think will be very harmful, will explode the debt, and be a bait-and-switch on the middle class whether it will get a tax cut early and a tax increase later on.

Is the gentleman aware, when he talks about growth, that in the comparable 9 months of 2016 to the same months in 2017 under Trump, that there were 326,000 more jobs created in 2016 than have been created in 2017 in those analogous months?

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, a lot more is the answer.

Why is the NFIB, Mr. Speaker, against this bill if it is so good for small business? Why is the AARP against this bill if it is so good for small business? Why is the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which is worried about the national debt, against it?

Mr. Speaker, since I have been here, my Republican friends have been talking about we have got to balance the budget. The President said he is going to balance the budget in 9 years. That was hooey.

Our Republican friends have said they are going to balance the budget. They said it in the Price budget. They said it in the Ryan budget. The budget deficit keeps getting bigger, and they have been in charge of economic policy for a long time.

The fact of the matter is, Mr. Speaker, I have got a list of 50 groups that are against this bill because they think it hurts both the debt and middle-income people.

The distribution, according not to fact-checkers but the Joint Committee on Taxation, $1 trillion of the tax cuts go to business, $230 billion to individuals, and $170 billion on estates essentially. Now, that doesn't add up to the $1.7 or $1.8 trillion that has been computed to be the deficit created--the additional debt--by this bill.

In fact, that is why this bill is being rewritten right now. I guarantee my friend--and he can call me this next week--that the bill that was introduced last Thursday will not look like the bill that we will consider on the floor. It won't.

It won't because, first of all, the debt is a problem for, apparently, some people. It is a big problem for me. We ought to pay for what we buy. That is what the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Camp, did: a bill that was paid for--an honest bill that was paid for, as was the 1986 tax reform bill. It did not add to the debt.

This adds an extraordinary amount to the debt. As a matter of fact, it adds in one fell swoop the debt that was created on the Reagan administration approximately $1.7 trillion. It is being rewritten now.

My presumption is, as we have done 49 times this year, that this bill will be presented under a closed rule in a transparent Congress, where everybody's views are going to be considered. I stand here and say that the gentleman is not going to bring this bill to the floor with an open rule where amendments can be offered, where people can discuss options, and we can see what the ramifications are to middle class taxpayers.

The Joint Committee on Taxation also pointed out that, of this figure, individuals are going to get a tax cut of

which Mr. Ryan talks about of $1,182--a typical family, he refers to them--but that figure will start to go down in 2019 and will go down further in 2020 so that it is a bait-and-switch. You get it up front, but we are going to take it away.

In the Ways and Means Committee, one of the reasons, Mr. Speaker, I tell the majority that I am not very enthusiastic is because they asked: Do we also do this for businesses? Do we also do it for the estate tax? Do we also do it for the wealthy?

The answer to that question is no. Only the middle-income worker has their tax cut reduced over the next 5 years, but not so with business, not so with the wealthiest taxpayers in America, and not so, obviously, with the estate tax. So that, I can tell the gentleman, is why I am not nearly as enthusiastic about it as some others would be.

We limit State and local tax deductions, which the middle class takes. We limit the mortgage interest deduction used by homeowners. We eliminate the student loan deduction and we eliminate the medical expense deduction. So if you have a major medical expense, you are going to lose under this bill.

It eliminates the deduction for moving expenses if your employer wants you to go more than 50 miles from your home. It eliminates the deduction for the adoption tax credit. That could be a credit of $13,570 per eligible child that you will lose. It eliminates the deduction for teachers that helps them purchase pencils, papers, rulers, and other materials for students.

It eliminates the deduction for dependent care assistance--a substantial challenge for many of our families in America. It eliminate personal exemptions, which Americans can currently deduct for themselves, a spouse and dependents that grows to the size of the family. If you have a large family, you lose under this bill. If you have one child, the majority leader may be right. When you get to two children, three children, and four children with no deductions, you are going to lose under this bill. That is why I am not very enthusiastic about it.

I tell this leader, Mr. Speaker, perhaps the changes will make me more enthusiastic. Perhaps there will be a recognition that this is not the bill that is going to do what it is purported to do.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his remarks.

Mr. Speaker, I heard almost word for word the majority party intone that vision and prediction when we passed the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts-- almost word for word. That economic policy stayed in place until 2009.

Why?

Because the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the Presidency.

And what did it bring us?

An almost Hoover-like depression. Not quite, because when we came into office, we invested in bringing back a declining economy.

Mr. Speaker, the majority leader didn't respond when I said the growth of jobs was better in 2016, under Barack Obama, than it has been under Donald Trump.

We are going to have an opportunity to debate this bill, but I will tell my friend, when he says this is the process, the process is going to be that the chairman of the committee will come in with a major amendment to this bill that none of us on this side will have seen, and the bill will be brought to the floor next week.

My friend, the majority leader--and I want to say something: he is my friend, and we do cooperate on a positive fashion--and I disagree strongly on this issue. I am against the creation of debt.

He mentions the budget. Okay. That is a fair point. But I have been pretty consistent throughout my career to join with the Peterson Foundation that says we have got to get a handle on this debt. We have a growing economy and 4.4 percent unemployment. The stock market is going up.

So what do we have here?

An extraordinary stimulus bill with $1.5 trillion, $1.6 trillion, $1.7 trillion, $1.8 trillion of debt, presumably, as the majority leader admits, to stimulate the economy. Very frankly, if Democrats were doing this, we would be savaged by the other side.

We will debate this, and we will look forward to seeing how the bill is going to be when it comes to the floor. Hopefully, we might get the manager's amendment, or, better said, the chairman's amendment, prior to its coming to the floor. I would hope we would have, at least, maybe even 48 or 24 hours' notice of what that amendment is going to look like so that not only

we, but the American people, who will have no opportunity to come in and give their opinions or testify, at least they will know what we are voting on. We will try to make sure they know.

One other issue I would like to speak about, Mr. Speaker, before we end, and that is the request that the President of the United States made to us.

He talked about the order issued by President Obama dealing with childhood arrivals who came here as minors, not on their own volition, called DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. There were a number of Republicans who had a press conference today, and they said we ought to pass that bill before the end of this year. I urge the majority leader to pass this bill by the end of next week, before the Thanksgiving break.

This, Mr. Speaker, I believe is an issue on which, as Mr. Barton said, who is one of the senior Members on the Republican side of the aisle, if it is brought to the floor, it would have over 300 votes.

Representative Barton said that, not me. I said that last week. I am glad that Mr. Barton agrees with me.

We need to take care of this issue at the request of the President of the United States, who said: I love these kids. He didn't follow that with: I am not going to send them out of the country. What he said was that they were not protected the proper way and asked the Congress to take care of this.

I have urged the majority leader, Mr. Speaker, for the last 2 months, to bring this to the floor. I know that a task force has been appointed. I don't know that the task force has reached a conclusion, but I would urge the majority leader and Speaker Ryan, who urged the President not to rescind the protection of these young people, urged him not to rescind President Obama's order. But when he did, the President said: I am going to do it because it wasn't done properly. It is the Congress' responsibility.

Mr. Leader, I would urge you to bring to the floor the Dream Act, which is the manifestation of the response to that. There are other options as well. We understand that. But something ought to be brought to the floor so that these young people are not twisting in the wind through Thanksgiving and Christmas. This is the country they know. This is the country in which they have been brought up.

When Rush Limbaugh says, ``We are not going to send these kids home,'' I can't believe that any of us on this floor are going to vote to send these young people home. We need legislation to pass to protect them and to give them the confidence.

There is a wonderful editorial--I urge all of you to read it--from Bob Gates, our former Secretary of Defense under both Presidents Bush and Obama. He wrote an editorial about the thousands of, essentially, DACA children, young people, who have served in our Armed Forces valiantly. As a matter of fact, he said the attrition rate is a lot less with DACA-protected individuals than it is with others.

Bob Gates is right. We ought to act. President Trump, in this instance, is right. It is our responsibility. We ought to act. Fred Upton said that today in the press conference. Joe Barton said that in the press conference. The gentleman from Washington State, who led the press conference, said that.

Mr. Leader, this is an issue I think on which we agree. The tax bill is going to be an issue on which we are in contention. Let's give the American people another example, as we have in the past, of a place where we can work together, get something constructive and positive done for our country and for these young people.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his remarks.

I will say on this floor--the fact-checkers check me--millions and millions and millions of middle class taxpayers will get a tax increase under this bill. Check me. Millions of people.

Why do I say that?

The Joint Committee on Taxation tells me that. Other think groups tell me that from the conservative side of the ledger.

So we will argue this bill, but I will repeat again that I have heard that argument over and over and over again. I heard it in 1981, and we exploded the debt. I heard it in 2001 and 2003, and we exploded the debt. We had the deepest recession anybody on this floor who is sitting here now has experienced. I hear it today.

The reason the Peter G. Peterson Foundation is against this is because they believe exploding the debt by another $1.5 trillion will be an extraordinary detriment to our country.

I want to say to every Member, Mr. Speaker, when you get up and say: I don't want to hurt my children, there may be people who get a tax cut under this bill, but I guarantee you the people who are getting a tax increase, in addition to the middle class I have just talked about, are the children. They are going to have to pay off this debt. We will not pay it off.

When you speak on this floor and say it is an immoral act to put our children more deeply into debt, if you believe that, you will not be able to vote for this bill.

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