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ECONOMIC POLICIES CRUSHING TO WORKING POOR
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2021, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, yes, it is one of those last names. I have family members that have trouble pronouncing it.
Parliamentary Inquiry
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, may I make a quick parliamentary inquiry?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman will state his parliamentary inquiry.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, my question is, just because the Democrat leadership here changed the rules sometime last night, do I have to wear this thing while standing here alone during my 1-hour Special Order? May I take it off when I am at the mike?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy, the gentleman may remove his mask while under recognition.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the clarification. I know we are all trying to get our heads around it because things keep changing around here.
Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from Oklahoma had a couple of things she wanted to share tonight. This is the first time she and I have had a chance to talk. She is really smart and incredibly charming.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Oklahoma (Mrs. Bice).
Mrs. BICE of Oklahoma. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Arizona.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address the ongoing crisis happening at our southern border. Since President Biden took office, he has stopped building the wall, brought back catch and release, and ended the remain in Mexico policy.
As a result, this administration has created the worst humanitarian, national security, and public health crisis ever seen at our Nation's southern border.
In the past 3 months, each month, we have seen more than 170,000 border encounters, a new 21-year high, totaling over half a million illegal border crossings. These numbers are resulting in overcrowded shelters, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and violence.
In addition, the surge of unaccompanied children coming across the border shows no signs of slowing down.
In June, the number of children arriving daily rose to 530. A journey like this is not only unsafe; it could lead to sexual exploitation or forced labor.
Despite the continuing increase of border encounters each month, House Democrats want to defund Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement by nearly $1 billion. Our CBP, ICE, and DHS officers have been putting their lives at risk protecting Americans. Calling to defund them during the worst immigration crisis in U.S. modern history is deeply troubling.
Mr. Speaker, the open border rhetoric from the Biden administration has encouraged hundreds of thousands of people to make the dangerous trek to the U.S. We must secure the border. We must protect our border cities. We must support the men and women who honorably protect our border. We must end this heartbreaking crisis.
In addition to the immigration crisis that we are seeing on the southern border, we are now dealing with a COVID crisis that is not being addressed. The number of individuals crossing into this country with COVID has increased exponentially.
These individuals are not being tested. They are not being offered vaccinations. They are being put on buses and shipped across this country.
With the number of cases on the increase, it is imperative that this administration addresses the border crisis issue immediately.
Mr. Speaker, I again thank my colleague from Arizona.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, to the gentlewoman from Oklahoma, I only got this in an alert just about 2 hours ago, and I will send her a copy of it.
Apparently, we now have a whistleblower, a formal whistleblower complaint. They were there to help take care of these children, and they were instructed not to disclose how many of these people in the housing unit had COVID.
If that is true, once again, we are back to the duplicity of what has been going on at the border.
As we talk about just what this is doing, the impact to the country--
and I am going to talk a little bit about what it does to the working poor--that might be a really interesting thing, because you touched on it, this whistleblower complaint that may expose that they are being told not to disclose the level of COVID that is in this population crossing the border illegally.
Mrs. BICE of Oklahoma. I had not heard that, so that is incredibly interesting information.
I think that with the mandates that are being put in place by the administration, asking for vaccinations of Federal employees, vaccinations of our military, how about we test and vaccinate people who are illegally coming into this country if we are going to ship them all over the U.S.?
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It is a great irony, isn't it?
Mrs. BICE of Oklahoma. It is an incredible irony.
I will say I appreciate this whistleblower coming forward and providing that information to us because you are right, we are not being given accurate or timely information about what is happening on the border currently.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. What do you think the likelihood is that the Democrat majority here, in their constitutional oversight responsibility, will take that whistleblower complaint seriously and look into the fact that, if it is true, we have been lied to?
Mrs. BICE of Oklahoma. I guess it remains to be seen.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman and wish her a great evening.
Mr. Speaker, we are going to do a couple of things this evening, and I am going to try to tie it together. Hopefully, some of this makes sense. I am going to start off with just a one-off.
Last week, I had a gentleman knock on my front door of my home. For all of us who are elected in this sort of time where things are a little anxious, you always stand up a bit when someone you don't know is at your front door.
Turns out, it is a really smart gentleman. He has a Ph.D. in amphibians and lives down the street from me. He had something he wanted to share, and this was something I didn't expect. It was a complete one-off.
He told me the story of what had happened just a couple of weeks earlier. He had this beloved dog. I am going to screw up the breed. I think it was some type of malamute, just this big, beautiful, fuzzy white dog. Apparently, the canine had gotten his wife's purse and chewed up some gum.
I know this seems like a weird thing to do on the floor of the House, but it killed the dog. I think the more technical term is a sugar alcohol that is used. It is pronounced xylitol, which we see in certain gum products and candy products. It is an artificial sweetener. Apparently, it kills our canines.
We have drafted a letter to the FDA and the appropriate agencies, asking if there is knowledge of this. If there is also knowledge of this, should there at least be some warning put on these packages? Because I had never heard of this.
Then, when I went to the internet and looked, there was story after story after story after story of just heartbreak about people with their puppies getting some gum, getting one of these artificially sweetened candies, and dying. I guess it shuts down the liver incredibly aggressively.
As almost a public service announcement, but also I am hoping that my colleagues on the left and right--if the FDA, if the bureaucracy doesn't really respond to us--would be willing to do a piece of legislation creating a directive that there needs to be some sort of warning on these products that if your puppy gets loose with this, it may lose its life.
That is a little different than talking about economics, but the gentleman was just heartbroken because this dog was truly one of his best friends, a really important family member. To go from being out there playing to, several hours later, having him pass away, I think all of us would understand the impact of that.
I had not heard about this. I think if we have gum with that sweetener sitting around our house--and I have a puppy coonhound that will munch on anything. We quickly got that in the shelves, away from the dog.
For all of us, it is something that we are thinking. Hopefully, the FDA and others will do the right thing.
Mr. Speaker, let's talk about what is going on in our Nation. We are going to touch a little bit--and it is going to be a little sarcastic and a little cranky. I am sorry about that, but I don't know another way to try to tell the story of just the absurdity of what is going on in some of our tax policy and economic policy.
Mr. Speaker, the theme I really want to try to weave through today is not being understood, I don't think, by either Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives.
So much of the public policy that is being pushed right now is just crushing to the working poor. We are going to do some really crappy things to the working poor, and it is not necessary.
There is rational economic policy. You don't cater to certain of your activist constituencies as much, but it is much more effective to helping those we say we care about here in our society.
{time} 2045
I do this slide as often as I can. What is the greatest threat in this country right now to my 5-year-old daughter, to your retirement?
The fact of the matter is our demographics. This slide is before all the crazy spending proposals that have been produced so far this year. This is where we are structurally.
And the fact of the matter is, as a society, we are getting old really fast. So think of this in 30 years in today's dollars. So I will adjust for inflation. In today's dollars, we will be $101 trillion in publicly borrowed money. Only about $3 trillion of that is what you would think of as general spending. All the rest of it is purely Social Security and Medicare.
Medicare is about $71 trillion of borrowed money. The spend is much, much, much, much larger than that, but that is how much we are going to have to borrow to finance the shortfall.
Because, once again, for those who don't pay attention to this, Medicare is a promise. We have made that promise to American workers and American retirees. But only part A, which is the hospital portion, is actually the trust fund. And the trust fund is gone in 3 to 5 years, we wiped out that money.
The rest of Medicare spending, when you see the doctor, when you get a pharmaceutical, those things come right out of the general fund. There is no trust fund for that spend.
If we don't get serious about sort of the holistic theory of how you save this country, and it turns out really aggressive economic growth, you have got to embrace technologies and new methods to crash the price of healthcare, these sorts of things. If we don't have that type of vision, these numbers become what drives all policy.
If you care about the environment, if you care about education, if you care about this, there will be no money because we will spend every dime we have just financing the retirement promise that we have made as a government, as a society to each other. But yet this isn't particularly sexy. It is really scary. It is really hard. It requires a calculator. And God knows, we all work in a place that doesn't own calculators.
So let's walk through a little bit of the reality that part of the solution to what we are doing to the working poor, part of the solution to what we are doing to these massive, massive unfunded promises is economic growth.
And one of my intense frustrations is the amount this place is willing to, what do you call it, oh, yeah, lie, about basic revenues. We call them receipts in Ways and Means, tax revenues, and these things. Remember, post tax reform a number of my brothers and sisters on the left got up behind these microphones and told stories: We are going to go into massive recession, the revenues are going to collapse, this is going to happen.
Well, what ended up happening?
Remember 2018--because remember we passed tax reform at the end of 2017--2018 and 2019 were the second and third highest, adjusted for inflation, so we are talking real math, receipts, tax collections in U.S. history. But what was more phenomenal about it is it created such an economic lift. So many of our brothers and sisters were working, particularly from the working poor. We saw things--and we are going to look at a couple of those boards--where the working poor became dramatically less poor. And because they are working, the trust funds we were just touching on, what we showed for Social Security and Medicare, their longevity revenues, because people were working, their lives got longer. This was actually, I thought, the Holy Grail for both those on the left and the right, we were going to try to find a way to mathematically make the numbers work so we can keep our promises.
Well, it turns out, post tax reform, the receipts were incredibly robust, and they were the second and third highest in U.S. history. And the only reason they weren't number one, by a sliver, was in 2015 we had some really unusual, what they call, timing effects, when certain things happened just before the end of the fiscal year that were posted in a certain fiscal year. So I won't geek out too much on that.
But often you will hear Members of the majority party here get behind the microphone, and say, well, the tax scam. It is really actually a pretty dark thing to say, because those couple of years before the pandemic were some of the most robust--actually, the most robust years in modern economic times for the poor in this country. The working poor became dramatically less poor.
But there are those that will stand behind the microphone and call it a tax scam. And the willingness to keep lying--and I am sorry, I know that is a crappy word to use, but I am so frustrated because they can't seem to stop. A couple of Members, just this last week, once again, got behind these microphones, and said: Well, 83 percent goes to the top 1 percent. That is a lie.
As a matter of fact, even the Washington Post--which is not really particularly friendly to those of us on the free market economic side--
has gotten so frustrated with Democrats getting behind microphones and lying. They are even now saying, the zombie claim that 2017 tax cuts gave 83 percent to the top 1 percent. Even the leftist newspapers are just bewildered with the left not telling the truth. I don't mind having policy arguments, but don't make crap up, over and over and over.
We see now even the left-wing media is having to correct the Democrats, saying, no, it turns out post tax reform that 2018 and 2019 were sort of miracle years; incredible wage growth, incredible productivity growth, savings growth, and particularly for the populations that we claim we care about.
Remember, they were the first 2 years in modern economic history where income inequality really shrank, and I thought that was the Holy Grail, that the wealthy got wealthier, but the poor got much less poor much faster, actually closing the income differential gaps and the wealth gaps. I always thought that that was the Holy Grail around here.
And when it happened--but it didn't happen with social engineering, it didn't happen with big spending programs that you get to basically extort votes with. It happened by opening up the economy and creating investment in productivity that made it so you could pay people more. It gets vilified with misinformation. It is just real hard to make honest government public policy when one side won't actually own a calculator.
So to beat this a little bit more, you take a look at what happened to, particularly, working, unmarried women. The wage growth was remarkable. Just remarkable. I think it was in 2019, we had African-
American females, I think, who were having like a 7-8 percent growth in wages in a single year in a time with almost no inflation. Some of these numbers were remarkable.
And if the goal here is to make the poor less poor, I actually believe those who were on the free market side have demonstrated there is a path where it works, and it is sustainable. And we are going to come back to that theme, because this year we will probably see income and equality shrink, but it is going to shrink in a way--because we have pumped so much cash out the door--it is not sustainable. As soon as that money goes away, we go back to the bad old days and the really crappy policies of the previous decade.
So let's actually walk through something that we started to touch on when we opened this up. The violence--and I am going to use the term, economic violence--that we are committing to the working poor in this country seems to get no press. I mean, if you read some of the really geeky economic journals, they are shaking their heads trying to get their heads around why the left is doing what they are doing.
But if I came to you tomorrow and said, tell me the number one policy sin that is going on right now that crushes the working poor. The classic definition of the working poor is they may not have finished high school. That is their labor is their value, it is what they sell.
It turns out, when you open up the borders--we have some amazingly detailed studies, and these are studies from years ago, back when Democrats actually believed in locking down the borders to protect working men and women. Remember these days, it was only like a decade and a half ago, where Republicans were accused of being owned by the Chamber of Commerce and wanting cheap labor, and Democrats were going to protect working men and women? Until all of a sudden it seems to reverse.
And I just desperately wish this place actually used basic economic theory to create policies instead of sort of having a meeting and saying, okay, this year you guys take that side, we will take this side. It is just absurd what is going on.
We have a number of studies that talk about when you flood the market with folks with similar skill sets. So you basically--if you are part of the working poor, what do you sell? You sell your labor. And this is the right board, sorry.
When you open up the border, we are actually looking at a reduction in wages by 6.2 percent. But why this is so harsh is some of the papers say it is going to last for a decade. What is going on at the U.S. border right now is, you are kicking the heads in of the working poor in this country for the next decade.
I know that doesn't fit the talking heads' language that you see on cable television or the rhetoric around here, but you can't sort of give speeches and say you care and then engage in policies that crush the value of their labor because you make them compete against potentially millions of those with similar skill sets.
And you start to take a look at what we did this last year, where there was peak unemployment for those skill sets. Now, if you happen to be a computer programmer this last crappy year, actually you did just fine. If you are someone who your skill set was you could work from home, you survived.
If you happened to be part of the population that you had not finished high school, you were in the 21-plus-percent unemployment area. It turns out the very populations that were most crushed by the pandemic are the very ones we are turning around and kicking their heads in again by opening up the border.
Is it compassionate? Is it truly loving?
When I hear speeches from my friends on the left saying, well, we are opening up the borders to be compassionate. How about the millions and millions and millions of our brothers and sisters here who may not have had the opportunities that those in this body have had? And we are going to make them compete with similar skill sets and millions of new arrivals.
And it turns out, if you actually look at the math, it is African Americans, particularly in urban areas, that you have just--that this body has just--by this President's policies, have crushed their future earning power, have made the value of their labor much less and it is not short term.
If you read the studies, we have a whole decade now of loss from where we were in 2018 and 2019, we have just wiped out that progress and the previous several years of progress. You would think this place would actually care about things like that.
No. Because what is going to happen is the left's economic policies aren't, hey, we need revenues for this spending, and being extra creative with where those revenues come from.
Remember, I have come to this floor multiple times and said, if we need a trillion dollars for infrastructure, I can show you where you can cut a trillion dollars in spending, stop subsidizing the rich.
{time} 2100
Stop subsidizing the very top 1 percent. Stop subsidizing their flood insurance on their third home on the beach. Stop buying them subsidies for their Teslas, for their electric car, and for their solar panels.
If you take a look, Mr. Speaker, this is one of the great perversities we have here in policy, is the left wants to raise taxes on the rich and then on the other hand, hand it back to them in subsidies for other things they buy. I assume this is purely political.
This is, hey, I am giving you something, vote for me. Then you are able to tell your base, hey, look here, I went out and taxed the rich.
But from an economic standpoint, this is an absurd thing to do. This is economically distorting, and this is almost a type of political exploitation.
Why don't you just go straight, Mr. Speaker?
Don't do the economic extortions. Stop subsidizing, and stop sending the money out the door.
What is fascinating is I have done that speech now three times on the floor. I have sat down with a couple of my Ways and Means Democrat friends, walked them through the binder on all the things we do to subsidize the wealthy, and they just look at me, shrug, and say, Well, I don't know how we would sell that.
It is crazy. But it shows you, Mr. Speaker, the perversity of policy here.
So this becomes the policy being offered by the left: Let's raise corporate taxes.
Okay. Well, besides the international tax that we seem to be signing onto that is going to make the United States one of the most uncompetitive nations in the world, we are also about to do something where raising the corporate tax in the first 24 months we lose 1 million jobs.
So, Mr. Speaker, do you remember how we were talking about we need that robust economy and we need the robust labor market, but Democrats get their tax policies, just the corporate tax will unemploy in the first 24 months 1 million Americans.
So we start to take a look at--and this is a little complex to try to show on a board, we are going to have to spend more time on it to try to explain. But this is a whole bunch of the revenue side that the Democrats are proposing, and this is the spending.
The problem is much of the revenue here is a fraud. It is not real. So, Mr. Speaker, you start looking at the tax compliance. We can give you some proposals, and we have been trying for years, saying use data. You can cover much that of that tax gap by using data, not hiring 80,000--think of that, 80,000, that is twice as many as the entire Coast Guard--80,000 new unionized IRS employees to go out and chase people for the taxes when it turns out we have these supercomputers in your pocket, and there is data out there that would let you match instantly saying: Is this person telling us the truth?
It would be dramatically less intrusive, because for this to work, the Democrats actually have a proposal where you are going to turn every bank account into an IRS employee. Mr. Speaker, you do understand, if you look at the Democrats' revenue proposal, my transactions, my bank balances, my ins and outs, go to the IRS.
This march towards totalitarianism is on every one of these aspects. So it is not enough to just make up fake numbers of what the revenues are going to be. It is inherently intrusive, and it won't work. You will get lots of data, Mr. Speaker, that you can functionally use against the American people, but it is not the data that is actually going to get you the revenues, because for these who are really rich, tomorrow they will just move their money or their currency, they will do a crypto, they will do that type of token type of transaction, and it will be the rest of the American public that just gets crushed by this intrusion.
So let's actually sort of dig a little bit more into this so it is understood. Lots and lots of the experts out there, many are just the columnists. If you take a look, Mr. Speaker, some of them who are actually on the left are making it very clear that the Democrats' revenue proposals are a fraud. They are making things up.
These are just some snippets of many of the articles that are out there, and they are calling it bipartisan. But there was a promise.
Do you remember? The big promise from the President and Speaker Pelosi is: We are going to pay for these things.
No, they are not. Let me show you, Mr. Speaker, how devious this stuff is. So President Trump a couple years ago--and many of us weren't thrilled with the model--proposed a rebate back to the consumers.
So you buy a pharmaceutical, the purchasing managers in the background who buy it from the manufacturer and get it to your pharmacy get a rebate. They take that rebate and use part of it to buy down the price of the drug. Then it is sold at the retail counter, and you get a lower price.
President Trump's proposal was to take that and not buy down the price of the drug; therefore, it would actually raise the drug cost a little bit to Government, but the consumer would get that rebate at the retail counter. This is the simplest way to describe it. It is a little complex.
This is the way it works over here. The Democrats said: Oh, no. We hate this.
I have a whole list of quotes from Speaker Pelosi and the Biden team saying that this will never become policy and this will never become law.
Well, if it was never going to become law, how can the Democrats turn around and tell us that they are going to use the money from that program as one of their pay-fors?
It was like $180 billion. This is not law, and it is not policy. It was a proposal. But somehow if you look at the list of the pay-fors from the left, Mr. Speaker, they put $180 billion and say: Hey, we will just take this fake, magical money and use that to buy our friends.
Is this the new and improved way?
Mr. Speaker, you wonder why the American people when they start to understand the scam that are so many of these spending tax proposals why they are becoming so cynical.
I put up this board, because I want to call it the cliff that it is. Here is one of the other great scams that is in the Democrats spending proposals, how they get the scores to work.
Mr. Speaker, may I ask for my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Arizona has 29 minutes remaining.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I am sorry if I sound a little cranky, but I have had a lot of coffee. As you know, Mr. Speaker, at a certain point when you start to stack this stuff up it just breaks your heart, because we are better than the games we are playing right now. Please trust me, if Republicans were doing this, I would be, and I have been, when we have tried doing these sorts of things I have been every bit as aggressive.
So here is the scam so the public understands this: There are things like PAYGO where, hey, if a program goes more than 5 years, it has to be paid for.
So, Mr. Speaker, what if you create a multi-multi-multibillion dollar program, and then on the fifth year you just pretend it comes to an end?
Hey, we are just going to drop it. It doesn't really exist. Wink, wink, nod, nod.
We know a future Congress will have to extend it, because it have will have a constituency, but that way when it is scored, it scores within--and we don't have to pretend that we just created another program that has no funding and, therefore, continues to explode that debt.
This is actually what the Democrats are doing, and much of the spending is the creating games.
So earlier this year we created things like the childcare tax credit extension. Republicans really want to work on this, because particularly if we can target it to help the working poor there is a much more uncomfortable conversation, but we need to have it because, as you know, Mr. Speaker, the United States has a collapsing fertility rate. We actually now functionally don't have enough children to cover our debts. Oddly enough, that has a huge impact on future economic robustness.
How do we make it so you can afford to have a family?
So the left has actually created a thing here where it costs functionally $100 billion this year. In the proposal, it would cost
$1.3 trillion to do this the way the Democrats are spending money over the 10 years.
So how do they make that score work?
How do they not have to say: Well, just the childcare credit is $1.3 trillion of spending over 10 years. They just pretend it stops. They get a few years out, and then they just drop it.
You are really going to take the populace of the United States, start sending them a check every month, and then pretend it is going to stop?
That is the example. There are bunches of these examples. As a matter of fact, they did it with SCHIP years ago where on the sixth year the program was just supposed to disappear, and that is how they were so giddy they could get it to work with PAYGO.
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You wonder why the public realizes this place is almost operating like scam artists. If we allowed someone outside this building to do things like that, we would put them in jail.
Mr. Speaker, there are a couple of other things here. There are ways to find revenues to cover the infrastructure spending. I believe those of us on the more conservative side, we can show you places to cut spending and, therefore, not create the distortions.
You all saw the report, though I am sure my brothers and sisters on the left will avoid ever saying it out loud, that the actual capital gains tax hike on its own loses $33 billion in the 10 years, that it is not until you start to play games with something called bases.
Well, Mr. Speaker, have you ever thought about what a capital gains tax actually is? Okay. We are going to tax you for the gain you have in your value, the profit you made. What happens when the house you have, the piece of real estate, the other things you own--it is not appreciation. It is called inflation.
You do realize that is one of the great scams going on at this moment. As your house goes up in value, as other things go up in value, and we are going to get this much larger capital gains tax, then we are going to remove a bunch of what they call the bases. We are going to cap what you can subject to the lower tax rate.
You do realize that we are going to tax Americans on the higher price from inflation, not the actual purchasing power of it getting more valuable.
Let's do an example of your home. Now, you are a single person. You own a home, and it goes up by half a million dollars. You have just done incredibly well. That first $250,000 of gain--it is called once in a lifetime though you get to use it, I think, every 5 years--is exempt. But that other $250,000, you will have to pay capital gains tax on.
How much of that gain is appreciation? You bought a house in the right neighborhood. You exploded in value. But the next house you are going to buy, didn't it also go up similar in value, similar in cost? Was it inflation?
You will pay tax and now extraordinarily high tax rates, if the Democrats get their proposal, on that gain. It is a certain level of cruelty.
The last thing I want to touch on is, if our body here really wants to have an honest discussion about infrastructure and its true needs in our society--I have not seen the details of the so-called bipartisan agreement in the Senate, but the devil is always in the details.
I have a couple of examples here. If we are really going to do this, we need to sort of figure out if the Democrats really want infrastructure, particularly even green infrastructure. Do we really want it, or do we just want to put up a whole lot of cash that, ultimately, basically goes to environmental groups and that, ultimately, just goes to lawyers?
Let me give you an example. For us out in the Southwest, there is this area of New Mexico--I guess the way it is phrased is that they have this tremendous wind asset. It is one of the greatest wind production areas in all of North America.
Fifteen years ago, California said, hey, we really want some of that clean energy from that wind area in New Mexico. We will help invest in it. We will buy a forward on it. We will contract to buy this. We are at 15 years now, and the power line still isn't permitted because of all the environmental reviews, all the different jurisdictions.
If you are really trying to decarbonize the power grid, are the Democrats willing to stop funding the lawyers and the environmental groups that make their living off the litigation and NEPA study after NEPA study? Those are environmental studies.
We have a case here. It is referred to as SunZia power line. You can go online and look it up. It started in 2006, and some of the documents out there say they will finally get their permits in 2023 or 2025.
This isn't unique. There are lots of occasions like this where an area where you want to build wind, solar, even some geothermal, you can't get it permitted.
Don't you see the absurdity? We are going to put up all this money for infrastructure, particularly even from the Democrats, the green infrastructure, but we are not going to change the laws because the left is the beneficiaries of so much money from the environmental left and the trial lawyers and the lawyers that sue on this stuff.
We need to put a clock on this. Look, I know this hits a little close to home for some of our East Coast folks. But when it becomes an upheaval over doing ocean-based windmills off part of the East Coast here--and a lot of the very, very wealthy leftists are the very ones who cry and complain, saying you can't put this in part of our view, which really isn't part the view if you actually looked at the data.
We have to decide. Things like this Vineyard Wind project, which, I guess, is--actually, I am embarrassed to say that I have the map on my wall. I guess it is off the coast of Rhode Island. They have been fussing over that for a decade now.
Do the Democrats truly want this clean energy? For us in the desert Southwest, in the afternoons, because of our photovoltaic inventory, we produce too much power. We are now having to have really creative discussions of, in the afternoon, when power rates crash to almost nothing, should we convert it into hydrogen and make that storage?
You all saw the incredible article last week in The Wall Street Journal about the new iron to rust batteries. They are very, very heavy, so they don't work in vehicles but could be incredibly inexpensive, efficient storage. This is wonderful. But that is for those of us who live in the desert, where we have lots of sunshine and photovoltaic is pretty efficient.
But if you want to transmit that power someplace, are the Democrats going to step up and help someone like myself, who is just trying to do a piece of legislation that would put this permitting on a clock for it to get capital, for you to raise money, for investors to participate, for you to plan the power grid?
You can't have it where the power line for that wind farm you wanted takes 15 to 20 years to get the power.
I guess my little passion here is I am incredibly skeptical on the pay-fors. Even if it passes, unless we are willing to change the bureaucratic bottlenecks that have been created, you are not seeing much of this change in the power grid for a couple of decades.
Do we continue to tell the public the fantasy? Or do you step up and say: Hey, I am going to do the hard things. I am going to change these timelines. I am going to have to say no to some of my trial lawyer contributors. I am going to have to put this on a clock so everyone gets a chance to share their concerns for it to be properly environmentally reviewed.
It doesn't take 20 years to do a line siting. If the left is willing to do that, then they will get some credibility that they really are serious. If they are not willing to do that, then you understand much of the talk about the green revolution and the energy base is a fraud. It is theater. It is pandering because we will say: Hey, look at all this money, but you can't move the generation.
It is real, and we have example after example after example.
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate you tolerating a bit of my tirade tonight. As we often joke to whoever is in the chair, I used to get put in that chair when I made John Boehner mad, so I got to be in the chair a lot at night.
But the things I shared tonight, they don't need to necessarily be partisan. They are math. They are process. They are the bottlenecks that keep many of the things we actually can agree upon from happening.
But this place is so weaponized right now that if I say it is black, the other side has to say it is white. It has just become a dysfunctional body.
If our goal is to make the working poor less poor, if it is to make our society much more prosperous, if it is to provide optionality in our energy, we know it has to be done, but we have to be willing, not to necessarily engage in the theater side but maybe actually engage in the proof we have of what has worked and what hasn't.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 132
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