In Senate floor remarks on Thursday, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) slammed the GOP budget resolution.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Madam President, Senator from Oregon, families lose and billionaires win. That is the Republican
00:20plan. A plan slashes $1.5 to $2 trillion from programs that families depend on. And why?
00:30To fund tax cuts for the very richest Americans. But that's not all the bad news. Because there's
00:40additional tax cuts for the best and richest in the country, the richest Americans. And
00:47those are unpaid for. And that means debt. How much more debt does this bill create?
00:55Well the current estimate, and the estimates keep going up, $5.3 trillion unpaid for tax
01:01cuts over the next 10 years. $5.3 trillion, trillion with a T, over the next 10 years.
01:11But that's not all. Their plan provides for $37 trillion, at least $37 trillion, in additional
01:23debt over the next 30 years. This is a phenomenal, phenomenal number. And third, they say we
01:39will tell the American people it adds no new debt. Passing this bill adds no new debt.
01:46Well that's quite a set of plans. Slash programs for regular Americans, enrich the richest
01:54Americans, run up an additional $37 trillion in debt, and then lie to the American people
02:03and say it doesn't cost a thing. It's become clear over the last two days about how Republicans
02:13are going to justify this. They say they're going to use section 312, section 312 of the
02:21law. And section 3-cell, they say, says that the cost of a program or the impact of a revenue
02:32cut through a tax giveaway to the wealthy only costs what the budget chair says it costs.
02:40Just take the chair's word for it. This is the magic wand. It'll add $37 trillion to
02:49the debt, but if the budget chair says it doesn't, then you just pretend it doesn't.
02:57It's kind of like the situation where the king wears the magic robes. At least he thinks
03:04he's wearing magic robes, but he's actually walking down the street naked because he doesn't
03:09have magic robes. In this case, again, lying to the public about the cost. You know, in
03:16the real world, you have real math. In this special new world of the Republican plan,
03:23you have the magic math. Well, this was not the vision that was laid out back 51 years
03:30ago in 1974 when the Senate created, along with the House, the Budget and Impoundment
03:37Control Act. You know, that act had three pillars. The first pillar was that in a 10-year
03:43period, you have to decrease the deficit with the provisions that are in the bill. And then
03:51every year after, in every category, it either has to be deficit neutral or reduce the deficit
03:59according to the provisions that are in the bill. And then it said we're going to use
04:05honest numbers. Now before, there'd been, you know, a lot of smoke and mirrors. There'd
04:10been a lot of gimmicks. And people on both sides said, no, no, we don't want to do that.
04:16Democrats and Republicans said, let's use honest numbers. Let's create a Congressional
04:20Budget Office to give us impartial numbers so we can be honest among ourselves, have
04:24a real debate about any given policy provision or any particular revenue provision, and we
04:32can be honest with the American people. Because otherwise, we'll just keep running up more
04:36and more deficits while pretending we are not. Now, my Republican colleagues initially
04:44said, you know what, we'll just put a clause into the budget resolution. It's called a
04:51scoring rule. And that scoring rule will simply say that we're going to say this costs nothing,
05:01that there's no additional debt. Well, a scoring rule has been used in the past. Okay, it's
05:09been used in multiple years. But it was used to resolve little anomalies in tricky little
05:18twists and changes in revenue bills or in policies, programs. It was always narrow.
05:29It always was honest about what it was trying to solve and explainable to the public. It
05:35was always consistent with the law. And it was always involving modest sums, modest by
05:43standards of the national budget. Certainly now, this scoring rule that had been proposed
05:50by the Republicans, it was not bipartisan, it was not narrow, it was not improving the
05:56budgeting and in fact lying about the budgeting. It was not consistent with the law. And it
06:02was massive, 37 trillion. So my colleagues across the aisle, when we pointed this out,
06:10they said, yeah, we better not do that, that's just wrong. Okay, thank you. Thank you for
06:18deciding not to put in a scoring rule that was completely wrong and designed to destroy
06:23the budget process. But now, my colleagues across the aisle have said, we'll use a different
06:31provision called Section 312. We won't use a scoring rule. Instead, we're going to go
06:38a different direction that says simply that the cost is what the chair of the budget committee
06:45says it is. Now, I want to turn back the clock a little bit. I want to turn back the clock
06:53and point out that there were core principles in that 1974 bill and they were driven by
07:02growing bipartisan concern about deficits and debt. In the 1958 to 1968 decade, the
07:11average deficit was about $5 billion per year. That doesn't sound much by now, our standards
07:17when we're looking at $2 trillion per year, but it was a lot compared to the past. And
07:24folks said, you know what? That $5 billion per year over that 10 years exploded to an
07:29average of $20 billion a year in 1971 through 1973. Oh my goodness, it quadrupled. We've
07:35got to get a handle on these deficits. We don't want to run up this debt, this fourfold
07:40increase in annual deficits adding to the debt. So Democrats and Republicans came together
07:46and they passed the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act. It created a super highway for
07:55this special effort to reduce deficits, a super highway, a super filibuster-free highway.
08:03Now you all may remember Robert Byrd of West Virginia, and Robert Byrd was always the fiercest
08:10defender of the filibuster. But he, along with 99 other senators, said we will create
08:17one exception, and that exception will be to reduce the deficit. And it had these three
08:24pillars, which I'll mention again. It has to reduce the deficit. The provisions of the
08:29bill have to reduce the deficit over the first 10 years. They have to be deficit neutral
08:33in every category in each year after the first 10 years. And we have to use honest
08:39numbers. And to have those honest numbers, we will create the Congressional Budget Office
08:43in partial body. We will no longer use smoke and mirrors, pretend things don't cost money
08:49when they do cost money. But then what happened? Well, I'll tell you, for 22 years it worked
08:55pretty well. Then along comes Gingrich Revolution, 1994 election. Now we have the 1995 through
09:041997 biennium. And some things happened then that, well, one maybe couldn't have foreseen,
09:12maybe we could have. There was an effort to do a balanced budget amendment. It fell one
09:17vote short here in the Senate chamber. It needed 67 votes. It only got 66. And then
09:22there was, they will do a line item veto, and that was passed. But that gave the power
09:28to the President to strike down any line. And the Supreme Court said, no, you can't
09:33do that. You can't delegate the power of the purse. The power of the purse belongs with
09:37Congress. So that fell. And then the Republican caucus in charge said, we are going to instead
09:44do a big tax bill giving enormous benefits to the richest Americans. And then they said,
09:50but you know the problem with that is the Democrats won't work with us. They won't give
09:55us 60 votes to do that. Oh, I know, they said, we'll do a nuclear option. We will repurpose
10:03the deficit decreasing bill from 1974 and say that it can be used in order to actually
10:10increase deficits with tax cuts. And they succeeded. They had the votes. They repurposed
10:18the bill. They blew up the first pillar of those three pillars. That first pillar was
10:24the reconciliation process, a special process created in 1974. It can only be used to reduce
10:30deficits in the first 10 years. They blew it up and said, okay, nuclear option, we've
10:35reinterpreted the rule. It can be used to increase deficits. Well, that was a huge,
10:43huge damage to the goal of reducing deficits. And deficits have gone up ever since. And
10:51when that happened, when that happened, there was a big protest on the floor. The first
10:57budget committee chair who passed a reconciliation bill consistent with decreasing deficits was
11:03South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings. And he said, the whole idea of reconciliation
11:12and I am giving you firsthand history, it is honest as the day is long, was to, by gosh,
11:20cut back on the deficit. That's what it was for. So the Republicans blew up that pillar,
11:30all designed to reduce the deficits, instead repurposed it for increasing the deficits.
11:36Pillar number one drops. But at the same time, the second pillar, that no increase
11:42in deficits could occur after 10 years, was sustained by the chair sitting and presiding
11:50over the Senate. And that was Senator Daschle. And Senator Daschle said, well actually he
11:58asked the question. He was asking the question of the Republican chair. He said, if this
12:06reconciliation bill does not find a way to end or offset its tax cuts in the years beyond
12:152002, that is beyond 10 years, would the bill violate the Byrd Rule? And the presiding officer
12:22responded, yes it would. So pillar two, no deficits in any category beyond 10 years was
12:29preserved. Until now. Now in 1996, and here we are, 29 years later, and now there is a
12:39goal to destroy the second and third pillars of the 1974 bill. I must say, this is extremely
12:47extraordinary and disturbing, that my Republican colleagues who run on fiscal responsibility
12:56destroyed the first pillar of the special system to reduce deficits in 1996, and tonight
13:04they are proposing to destroy the second and third pillars. In that second pillar, no deficits
13:12beyond year 10, every category, every year has to be deficit neutral or reduce the deficit.
13:20We can compare that to the law that has just been put forward, or the guidance that has
13:25just been put forward. We can look at year 11, the instructions that go in every category,
13:31year 12, 13, year 20, year 100, that goes on forever, into the future. And the Republican
13:39bill, guidance, fails the Byrd test. Now the Byrd test really gets applied in a second
13:47stage of the reconciliation process. We're in the budget resolution that sends instructions
13:51to committees. Those committees will send back specific revenue provisions, increase
13:57this revenue here, reduce it there, proceed to add this policy program, reduce this policy
14:05program. When it comes back, every category, that is every title of the reconciliation
14:12bill, in every single year, by the Byrd rule, has to be deficit neutral or decrease the
14:18deficit. So we will have that debate. But we will have that debate when the reconciliation
14:24bill comes back from committee to this floor. Because my Republican colleagues decide to
14:30postpone that debate by taking the scoring rule out of their proposed budget resolution
14:35and said we'll kick it down the road to the next stage. And certainly we will be here.
14:41Fiercely defending the deficit reducing vision of pillars 2 and 3. Pillar 2, no deficit in
14:50any category, any title of the bill beyond year 10. And pillar 3, use honest numbers
14:58from the Congressional Budget Office. That pillar has survived since 1974. We even put
15:04that pillar into law specifically in 1985 in a bipartisan way. We wanted to emphasize
15:13how important that was. Just think about how much more important this process of deficit
15:19reduction special rule of the reconciliation bill is today than it was back in 1974. In
15:261974, the debt to GDP ratio, 23%. Tonight, in 2025, it's 100%. Equal to the entire gross
15:38domestic product of the United States. In 1974, the annual deficit was about $6 billion.
15:44Today, it's 2 trillion. 1974, total debt, 475 billion. Today, it's 37 trillion. Now,
15:55consider this. All of the debt run up over the last 249 years since the Declaration of
16:02Independence, right now, is just a little bit less than $37 trillion. In this single
16:09bill, this single bill, Republicans are saying we will add 37 trillion more. At least that
16:22much. When the numbers really come out, we expect it to be higher. 37 trillion more to
16:28the debt. That's a much bigger burden on the future. And what do the economists say about
16:34that bigger burden? They say it will increase the interest rates that families have to pay
16:40on their mortgage and on their car loan. It says it will decrease the capital available
16:46to private industry and slow down our economy. This magic math goes by the name of current
16:54policy baseline. It sounds very academic. But it is essentially the big lie. Consider
17:02this. You sign a contract to rent a home for a year. And renting that home costs $2,000
17:10per month. So you know you're going to have to pay $24,000 over the year. And at the end
17:16of the year, you say, you know what? I'm going to renew that agreement to rent this apartment.
17:25And your spouse says, you know what? That's going to cost us another $24,000 in rent.
17:32And you say, no. I'm using the Republican magic math. It won't cost a single dime. Because
17:39we'll just pretend that a year ago, we had planned to rent the apartment for a second
17:44year. And therefore, it's no more than we thought we would pay a year ago. Except a
17:50year ago, you said you're only going to rent the house for a year. In other words, it's
17:54a big lie. It is the very smoke and mirrors, the very gimmicks that Democrats and Republicans
18:03came together and stopped back in 1974. 51 years ago, we said this game of lying to the
18:13public has to end. But tonight, my Republican colleagues are saying that game will continue
18:23if they have their way. Well, we say they must not have their way. We are going to stand
18:33up and say no to families lose and billionaires win. We are going to say no to magic math
18:43that lies to the American people about the cost of their bill driven by massive tax cuts
18:50to the richest Americans. It's a simple request. Honesty and integrity. We should not be engaging
18:59in a big lie. And Democrats will have no part of it. We are going to be honest about what
19:05every provision of the reconciliation bill costs. We are going to be determined to make
19:12sure that the Byrd rule stands. Thank you, Madam President.