FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY

On 2025-05-01, Representative Chip Roy (R-TX-21) delivered a floor speech titled "FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY" in the House.

FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY

Congressional Record, Volume 171 Issue 73 (Thursday, May 1, 2025) [Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 73 (Thursday, May 1, 2025)] [House] [Pages H1801-H1804] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY (Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. Roy of Texas was recognized for 30 minutes.) Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert). We have engaged in a colloquy on his time. I am going to start my 30 minutes. He, of course, is welcome to stick around a little bit if he wants. I am going to just jump off from where he started, or I am going to start from where he left off, and that is to talk about what we are debating on the floor right now, which is the reconciliation bills that we are debating in the House and in the Senate as we speak. For the average viewer out there, you don't understand what we are talking about. Let me put it in basic terms. The reconciliation process is a part of the Budget Control Act, which basically gives us the ability to reconcile current policies with what we are dealing with, with respect to our spending, debt, and deficits. We have to make that all add up, and we are supposed to do that in a way that would yield deficit neutrality or deficit reduction. That is the general purpose of why we have reconciliation. Reconciliation, though, because there is a 60-vote threshold in the Senate and that means that certain policies that the majority wants to get in place in the House and the Senate if they control both Chambers, often hit resistance by the minority party in the Senate, that then reconciliation is used to end-run what we call the filibuster--even though it is really just a 60-vote threshold, end-run that in order to get policy even though we are supposedly not doing policy on reconciliation. That is how stupid your Congress is, America. That is how you are developing policy: through a bunch of arcane procedures, some of which are great and designed to have cooling effects, and some of which are really stupid. Yet, what we are doing is trying to find every which way possible to avoid accountability and responsibility, and that is, as I have been putting it around here to reporters and getting reported out, to do basic math because that is, in fact, our obligation, is to do basic math. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of my colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle and a whole bunch of my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle refuse to do basic math. They want to say that, through magic fairy dust and through money trees, they can just wish away the reality that we are going to have a certain amount of inflows and a certain amount of outflows every year. Do you want to know why we are $37 trillion in debt, or soon to be? That is why. Now, we are having a big debate, America, on what we should do in this so-called reconciliation process. We are going to have tax policy in there that is going to affect our tax revenues to the government but, more importantly, affect the tax bill you receive. Let me stipulate for the record that when I am attacked a lot in the coming weeks for saying, allegedly, I want to have taxes go up, I am emphatically for cutting taxes. I would like to zero out the tax code, eliminate the income tax, and get rid of the IRS. I would like to do all of those things, and I have legislation to do it. I will vote for tax cuts, but I refuse to ignore math. If you are going to do a certain amount of tax cuts, which will create a certain amount of economic growth, yes, you still have to model how much revenue will come into the Treasury versus how much you are spending because my Republican colleagues love to spend. They campaign on tax cuts. They deliver on most of the tax cuts. They campaigned on balancing the budget and cutting spending, and never do it, ever, in the history of ever, with the possible exception of the late 1990s when the Gingrich Republicans, combined with Clinton and, by the way, a dot-com economic explosion, to deliver us a balanced budget. They did it through welfare reform and through some spending constraint. That is the only time in modern history when we have done it. Here is the problem. This chart shows you what we are dealing with. A whole lot of people are saying: Well, Chip, you and all of these fiscal hawks, these fiscal conservatives, you guys want to do all of these massive cuts, and we can't do it. It is crazy what you want to do. Let me be clear what we are talking about. We are currently running close to $2 trillion deficits. If we do all of the crazy stuff we are trying to do, we will be running what? Close to $2 trillion deficits. That is the truth. That is what the models show. That is what we know. Look here. These are the projections of the way things will be if we do nothing. {time} 1315 The blue line, we do nothing this year. We let the tax cuts expire, taxes go up--let me repeat, I am against that--taxes go up, revenues are projected to do what they do, and we will have the amount of debt over the next 10 years we see here growing from almost $30-something trillion all the way up to $50 trillion. What do these other lines represent? The orange lines are the House bill. The red lines are the Senate bill. We just did a thing where we combined the House and the Senate bill into one budget. We are now negotiating that, and this is all yet to be determined. Why am I saying all this? No one wants to read all of this. Nobody is going to pay attention to a chart. All of my staff and everybody says, ``Don't use charts on the floor. Just go down and say things that will get clipped and sent around.'' Let me try to say something that will get clipped and sent around. Even if the House Republicans are successful in working with the President and the Senate to achieve the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in spending restraint over the 10-year budget window, which is a mere $150 billion to $200 billion a year, even if we are successful, we are going to massively increase the debt in the United States all the way to pushing well over $50 trillion by the end of this budget window. That is it. If we fail, then debt will go up a little higher. We have an obligation to do better. Everything we are fighting for right now in the House is for crumbs. I haven't decided whether I will vote for it or not vote for it. Why? Because I am one vote. Out of 220 Republicans, I am one vote, and I have to figure out how we build a majority and how the Senate builds a majority and then work with the White House to get a bill signed. I recognize that. There is a limit that I can accept. I just want the whole world to tell me, should I vote for a bill if we are successful at fighting for what we are fighting for on Medicaid reforms, on unwinding the student loans, on cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, on finding savings and fees on illegal aliens here so that we can pay for continued enforcement of the law at the border? If [[Page H1802]] we are successful for all of those things in terms of revenues and expenses, I am still going to burden my kids and grandkids with over $50 trillion in debt. What does that mean? It means more interest. It means likely higher inflation because, at some point, we can't afford this. That is the fundamental question. Now, I have a bunch of my colleagues, to the point of the gentleman from Arizona, running around saying that we can't touch Medicaid. Why can't we? Medicaid was expanded under ObamaCare, which we all opposed, and the Medicaid expansion was a big reason why we opposed it. Why can we now not demand reforms to the broken pieces of ObamaCare that expanded Medicaid such that we are giving 90 percent Federal match to the able-bodied, the people who are not the most vulnerable, compared to the vulnerable population who only get 50 to 60 to 70 percent? Why would we do that? Why would we give more to Medicaid recipients than Medicare recipients, which we often do? Why would we continue to allow States like California and other States to game the system, to get Federal dollars sent back in a money- laundering scheme, as has been reported widely by The Wall Street Journal and others? They are openly and knowingly doing it. Why wouldn't we fix that? Why wouldn't we apply eligibility rules and work requirements, combined with lowering that abusive Federal match rate subsidizing blue States to game the system when they are using Federal borrowed money to prop up their weak State budget? Why wouldn't we fix that? I don't have a single constituent I know who thinks we ought to continue doing that. Even more so, my colleagues are running around giving in to these arguments that we are somehow cutting Medicaid. That is a lie. We could have a debate about whether we should actually reduce Medicaid and give more money in other places or free up the States to provide better service or empower Americans to go get the doctor of their choice and be able to afford healthcare without having an employer- or government-provided, insurance-run bureaucratic system enriching insurance bureaucrats and pharma and hospitals because that is what we have. We don't have free healthcare anywhere in this country. The freest country in the world, and we do not have the freedom to go to the doctor of our choice. We don't. The average family in this country is paying $25,000 a year to go to insurance bureaucrats to tell them what handful of doctors they can go to, what lousy deductible they get, what ridiculous copay they have. I have a constituent who died from cancer last year who couldn't go to MD Anderson because she was covered under ObamaCare. Think about that, covered under ObamaCare, sick with cancer, can't go to the best cancer hospital in the world 2 hours from her house. That is your healthcare system, and we won't touch Medicaid. Our budget contemplates Medicaid going up 25 percent. I am not going to say whether