Interior, Environment, Financial Services, and General Government Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CRUZ. Madam President, one of the most significant victories for the American people that was in the tax cut legislation we passed last year was that this body and the Congress came together and repealed the ObamaCare individual mandate.

The individual mandate is one of the cruelest and most unfair aspects of ObamaCare. Every year, the IRS fined about 6.5 million Americans because they couldn't afford health insurance. Sadly, the reaction of Democratic politicians in the District of Columbia is to reimpose those fines on the poorest residents in DC. My assumption is that many, if not all, of our Democratic colleagues will vote to do exactly that right now, but let me point out that in DC in 2015, 7,150 people were fined by the IRS and that of those, 75 percent made less than $50,000 a year in income and 33 percent made less than $25,000 a year in income. So if you vote to table this amendment, you are voting to raise taxes on low-income DC residents who are struggling to make ends meet.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source