Servicemembers Home Ownership Tax Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. GREGG. I certainly respect that the Senator from Montana worked very hard to have a bipartisan initiative here, but this bill we are dealing with has no bipartisanship to it at all. Was this not written in camera behind closed doors for 8 weeks by the majority leader? Was there a Republican in that room at any time? And we have now been on it for what, 8 days or something, while they wrote it for 8 weeks. And furthermore, is there not rumored to be floating around this Congress somewhere, in some room, again--that we have not been invited to--a major rewrite of this bill called the managers' amendment, which supposedly is going to expand coverage to people under Medicare to 55 years of age, with Medicare already being bankrupt, and already cannot afford the people they have on Medicare? It is going to expand it. We have not seen it. Yet this is going to change this bill fundamentally and change health care fundamentally.
Is that bipartisan? I ask the Senator from Wyoming if that is the case? Was this bill written in a bipartisan manner? Were any Republicans in the room? Did it go through a committee process? Was it amended? Did it not take 8 weeks to write it, and it has now been on the floor for 8 days, and all of our amendments are being pushed to the side? And are we not hearing about a massive--a massive--rewrite of this bill that is going to appear deus ex machina from the majority leader's office and fundamentally change the way health care is delivered in this country? Is that going to be bipartisan?
Mr. ENZI. The Senator is absolutely right. We have not even seen this new piece. Nobody wants to show us the new piece.
They keep talking about it. They have leaked it to the newspapers, but they will not show it to us, and then they keep talking about how this bill is going to solve the deficits for this country; that there is $157 billion or something saved in the first 10 years. That is only--only--if you use the phoney accounting they are using. It is only if you don't do the doc fix. It is only if you don't solve the myriad of other things we have brought out.
We have a bill they keep talking about as being the solution. America has figured it out, but the Democrats haven't figured it out.
I see the leader is on the Senate floor. I yield the floor.
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Mr. GREGG. On that last point, it does seem there is a slowdown occurring on amendments. As I understand it, we have four or five very substantive amendments dealing with taxes, dealing with employer mandates, that we are ready to go to, and we are ready to vote on; is that not correct?
Mr. McCONNELL. I say to my friend from New Hampshire, that is absolutely the case. We waited around all day to get a vote on the amendment by the Senator from Idaho, Mr. Crapo. We were told there would be a side-by-side, and it mysteriously has not yet appeared. But we are here ready to work. We share the view of the majority leader that this is an extremely important issue, and we want to vote.
Mr. GREGG. I hope at some point today maybe we should propound a unanimous consent setting those four items up for votes on Saturday and Sunday.
Mr. McCONNELL. Well, I think that is a good idea. Of course, we would prefer to vote today. We are going to be voting Saturday and Sunday too. I think the sooner the better. The American people are actually expecting us--they thought we were here voting and debating amendments on this bill, and we are going to continue to press forward and try to get that done.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I am privileged to join the Senator from South Dakota, the chairman of the Budget Committee, on this initiative. We have worked on it for a while, and we have come to a position of having a piece of legislation that accomplishes the goal as outlined by the Senator from North Dakota. That is good news.
The outpouring of support in the Senate--over 31 cosponsors in just a brief period of time--is a sign that there is a willingness to move in a bipartisan way. That is good news.
Right now, for this country, after the possibility of a terrorist getting a weapon of mass destruction and using it against us in the United States, the single biggest threat we have as a nation is the fact that we are on course toward fiscal insolvency. You cannot get around it. If we continue on the present course, this Nation goes bankrupt. We are already seeing the early signs of it. The early signs are devastating enough. We are seeing some of the nations who lend to us--and remember we are a debtor nation now of massive proportions--saying: Hold on, you folks are not being responsible, especially about your outyear debt.
Two days ago, we saw one of the rating agencies, Moody's, say England and the United States now are going to be put into a special category relative to the rest of the industrialized world because their fiscal situation is in such risk, and they are not managing their fiscal house correctly.
We know, as the Senator from North Dakota has outlined so correctly, that within 10 years--maybe sooner--we are going to get to a point where our debt has gotten so large we simply cannot pay it or, if we have to pay it, we are going to have to do some extraordinary things to do that, such as inflating the currency or raising taxes to a level where we reduce productivity and the opportunity for jobs. It is akin to a dog chasing its tail when you get your debt to a certain level. When you have spent so much more than you have taken in and you have promised so much more than you can afford to pay and your debt gets to such a level, as a nation, you only have two choices: You inflate the currency and destroy the quality of people's lives, destroying the value of their savings, and you put in an inflation economy, which is one of the worst things that can ever happen to a country or you have to radically increase your tax burden to levels that are simply going to choke off the capacity of the Nation to create prosperity because people will not be able to be productive. You will start to lose tax revenues as a result of that.
This is not a theoretical case. This is no longer something that is over the horizon. This problem is directly in front of us. We are hearing it from the people who lend us money, from the rating agencies, and we know it from intuitive common sense. Most Americans know this is an extraordinary problem.
We talked about this for a long time and we worked on it for a long time. Yes, regular order should take care of this, but we know it will not because we have seen what happens. When you put an idea on the table to deal with major entitlement programs that affect so many people, in such a personal way, immediately, those ideas are attacked and savaged, misrepresented, exploited, exaggerated, and hyperbolized by the interest groups that populate this city and other parts of the country for the purpose of making their political agenda move forward or their money-raising formula move forward.
When substantive, good ideas have been put on the table to try to correct this fiscal imbalance by dealing with questions of Social Security and Medicare or tax policy, we get clobbered on the policy side. We came to the conclusion from the right and the left that it is equally outrageous and equally destructive of constructive public policy. We came to the conclusion that the only way you can do this is to create a process that drives the policy, rather than put the policy on the table first, saying here is the policy and everybody jumps on it and kicks it and screams at it and so it never even gets to the starting line. We decided let's get to a process that leads to policy and leads to an absolute vote.
The theory is, basically, threefold: One, the process has to be absolutely fair and bipartisan. Nobody can feel they are being gamed. The American people will not allow major policy to occur in these areas unless they are comfortable the policy is bipartisan and fair. So this process we have set up is a bipartisan affair. There will be 18 people. We decided to go with people who actually have a responsibility for making decisions and understand the issues intimately; 16 from the Congress, as was mentioned--8 Republicans and 8 Democrats--and the 2 from the administration, with a supermajority to meet, to report, and there will be cochairmen from each party. That gives us the bipartisan nature.
The second part that is critical to the exercise is that it be real and that it not end up being a game. We have seen so many commissions end up being just commissions. They put their report out and it ends up on a shelf somewhere.
Something has to happen. What happens is, when this Commission reports with a supermajority and comes to Congress, by supermajority it must be voted up or down. So there is an absolute right to a vote, and the vote occurs on the policies proposed. That is critical. It is much along the lines of what we did for base closures, for many of the same reasons. You couldn't close bases politically, so we did it by fast-track approval.
Third, there will be no amendments. Why? Amendments allow Members to hide in the corners. It is that simple: Somebody throws an amendment up--even if it is well intentioned--and people vote for the amendment and then say it didn't pass or I will not vote for the final product. You have to have a policy put forward, and it will either attract a bipartisan supermajority and be a fair policy or it is not. If it doesn't attract a bipartisan supermajority, clearly, it wasn't well thought out.
That is the process we have come to. The amount of sponsors we have reflects the fact that it is viable and that it is bipartisan. We have 12 Democratic sponsors already and 19 Republicans. What else around here has that with serious legislation? This is it.
I congratulate the Senator from North Dakota for his efforts. I am hopeful we can get a vote on it. Then, I hope it can pass, and I am hopeful we can get White House support and House support to do this.
We are running out of time. If we don't accomplish this fairly soon, the outcome is very simple: We will pass on to our children less opportunity, a lower standard of living, and a weaker Nation than we received from our parents. No generation in American history has done that. But that is what we are going to do if we don't take action. That is exactly what is going to happen. How can one generation do that to another? In American history, that has never happened. This is an opportunity to avoid having that occur or at least help avoid it. I hope it will move forward.
I reserve the remainder of my time.
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