Raising A Question of the Privileges of the House

Floor Speech

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Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, this is a serious time. My mind immediately goes to the young deputy from Cochise County who 2 nights ago, while trying to apprehend a runaway vehicle smuggling humans across the border, suffered major injuries. He was transported to Pima County where he is in a Tucson hospital fighting for his life.

I am talking about a border that remains wide open where drugs come through. The Tucson sector has the most got-aways known and unknown of any sector along the border. There are terrorists coming in, people conducting criminal conduct coming in, criminal gang members, human smugglers, and sex traffickers. They are coming across our border to the tune of hundreds of thousands every month.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleagues and their position, but I would suggest something: I don't think you can just skip to last weekend and say, oh, my goodness, a CR came out last weekend on Saturday. I think we need to go back to January.

I will say this. This body came together on the Republican side and we passed a good border security piece of legislation, H.R. 2. That is good.

Last week we passed the DHS bill and the DOD bills which had funding for our CBP, ICE, military leaders, and military men and women. Why were we successful in doing that? What happened to motivate us to get there?

Well, for one thing, we didn't bother to pass the 12 appropriations bills as required under the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. We didn't do it. Do you know how many times that has not been done?

That has not been done 25 years in a row.

Do you know how many CRs this body has passed in that same period of time?

It is 130.

Do you know what that gets you?

A $2 trillion-plus structural deficit like we had in fiscal year 2023.

Do you know what that leads you to?

A $33 trillion national debt, which is where we sit today. It leads you to somewhere north of $700 billion in interest payments.

Do you know why that happened?

Because this body is entrenched in a suboptimal path and refuses to leave it. It refuses to leave that path. You cannot change if you are unwilling to change. We had every opportunity to change. We were promised change.

We were promised we were going to go ahead, and we were going to get those 12 bills done. If we got those 12 bills done--do you know why you do 12 bills?

Because it allows you to reduce spending and get rid of wasteful duplicative programs. It allows you to set an agenda to restore fiscal sanity. We chose to not do it again. We were promised we would do it. That is why at the end some people said: We will vote present. We will go ahead. We are going to put our trust in Mr. McCarthy to become the Speaker. That didn't happen. I suspected that would be the case. That was my struggle. That was my struggle last November and December. I iterated it to this body, our Conference anyway.

When we got to the debt ceiling, again, that seemed to spring upon everybody like a surprise. When that happened, I was in there for some of those negotiations on where that number would be, and I was astonished how that $1.5 trillion number was negotiated. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

However, I will tell you this: To his credit, the Speaker told us one thing that I believe to be true. He said that is basically the ante in a poker game. You can sit down at the table.

I told my colleagues who supported that: That $1.5 trillion in 8 months that you are willing to raise the debt ceiling, that is the opening marker.

Indeed, it was. Now, projections are many trillion dollars above that.

Yes, I think it is time to make a change. I am not the only one, and thus, it is somber. But what have we failed to accomplish? Why didn't we get this stuff done?

When we are campaigning, we are talking about an extension of the debt ceiling to January 2025.

We are talking about additional Ukraine funding. Maybe that is good in your districts. Maybe it is not. That money is not offset. We are not paying for it. We haven't designated how we are going to pay for that--the same with the disaster package.

The IRS remains 80 percent increased. I could go down the list, but I will just tell you why this happens. When you don't do your 12 budget bills and you rely ultimately on a CR--and I will get to the calendar in a second--what happens is, you cannot leverage this administration to actually enforce the border laws that you need to have enforced.

This is a lawless Biden regime. They will not enforce border laws. We can pass them until we are blue in the face, but until you leverage the budget and the spending, you will not see enforcement by this administration.

Now, take a look at the calendar that we were just provided last week. We are supposed to finish our 12 bills by November 3. By November 17 is when we are supposed to see that the conference committees have come together, both sides, and we have resolved this. I don't believe that that is going to happen.

It wasn't going to happen before. You were betting on the come again. At some point, I would urge you to stop betting on the come and bet on the reality. That is why I can't support the Speaker any longer, and I will be voting for the motion to vacate.

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