Joint Session of Congress
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, last night, the American people heard from President Biden in his first address to a joint session of Congress. The American people heard him speak about many of the same themes he touched on in his inauguration: unifying the country, healing the soul of our Nation, healing the divisions that divide us. It sounds great, but those who have paid attention to the President's actions know that his rhetoric and his actions don't line up.
The only legislative achievement so far for President Biden has been an eye-popping $1.9 trillion piece of spending that was branded as COVID-19 relief. It was so controversial that our Democratic colleagues didn't bother to use the standard legislative procedure. Instead, they used the budget reconciliation process so they could make it a law without a single Republican vote--hardly coming together and unifying the country.
As expected, President Biden had the audacity to brand this legislation as the reason why we have made such progress in fighting COVID-19. He touted the fact that America has provided more than 220 million COVID vaccinations during his first 100 days in office. But he didn't mention the fact that less than 1 percent of the funding in his signature legislation actually supported vaccinations--less than 1 percent. Less than 10 percent was directly related to COVID-19 at all.
If there were any doubts that this liberal spending binge was about to end, President Biden cleared that up last night too. He talked about his more than $2.6 trillion American Jobs Plan, which relies on a very generous interpretation of the word ``infrastructure,'' or should I say Orwellian. He discussed the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, which includes everything from universal preschool to free community college, to mandatory paid leave policies and tax provisions.
You know, you have to love politicians when they talk about giving away free stuff. The folks back home know better. Somebody has to pay for it. As my friend Senator Tim Scott said in the Republican response last night, these policies could put Washington even more in the middle of Americans' lives, from cradle to college.
These three proposals total more than $6 trillion--an amount so large, it is hard for any of us to wrap our head around it. That is on top of the money that was spent last year in a bipartisan effort to defeat COVID-19. The proposals equate to a spending rate of $60 billion a day during the President's first 100 days in office.
Six trillion dollars is one-quarter of our gross domestic product. If you convert our country's World War II spending into today's dollars, the three Biden spending proposals are even more expensive than what it cost us to arm and defeat Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.
But I want to be clear. These aren't wartime expenses. These aren't even necessary expenses, in many cases. These proposals have absolutely nothing to do with our current fight against COVID-19. Two hundred billion dollars to build or retrofit ``sustainable'' places to live; $225 billion for paid family leave; $178 billion on electric vehicle chargers--more socialism for rich people; $400 billion for home-based care. This money adds up pretty quickly.
I am not saying our country should cut off all of our spending altogether. There are necessary expenses and investments that need to be made. But this is not the time for a spending binge. We need to make smart financial decisions that will serve the next generation, not drive them further and further into debt.
The biggest question here, though, as with any type of government spending, is, How are you going to pay for it? For the Biden administration, the answer is simple: higher taxes. In fact, the President has proposed the largest tax hikes in more than half a century
Now, economics 101 would teach you that tax increases aren't a clear and easy way to boost revenue, especially when your economy is already on a fragile footing. President Obama observed as much when we were recovering from the great recession of 2008, that raising taxes during a recovery from a recession is a bad idea. Raising trillions of dollars in new taxes will not set us up for a strong recovery; it will simply throw even more wrenches into our sluggish economic engine.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the American economy was on a roll. The economy was booming. Unemployment was at a 50-year low. Companies were coming back on shore, moving their headquarters to the United States, in part because of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act set the stage for this recovery.
Instead of building upon what we did in 2017, the administration now wants to repeal those tax provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and double down on the old, tired talking points that America can simply tax and spend and regulate itself into prosperity.
Massive tax hikes are not the way to stabilize a shaky recovery, and I worry how much damage these increases will do if our Democratic colleagues insist on doing more partisan, party-line legislating.
The President did nothing to ease my concern about another looming problem, and that is the crisis on our border. For months, the President and members of his administration have denied what is a clear and growing crisis on the border. I hoped he might finally acknowledge the reality of the situation in his prime-time address and commit to working together with us to solve it, but no such luck. Instead, he talked about the need to provide a solution for DACA recipients and undertake broader immigration reform.
I want to be clear here. I agree that Congress should take action to give DACA recipients the legal certainty and stability they deserve. This is a priority for folks on both sides of the aisle, and I hope we will finally be able to get a bill on the President's desk to help these young people who have done nothing wrong. More broadly, there is no denying our immigration system is in need of reform. It is outdated and inefficient and simply doesn't meet the needs of our country today. But we are not ready for those types of conversations until we solve the immediate crisis at the border.
Last month alone, more than 172,000 migrants crossed our southern border, and 100,000 crossed in February. Nearly 19,000 of those individuals who came across last month were unaccompanied children.
We have seen migration in the past, surges, but never anything like this and never during a pandemic. There are serious risks to our law enforcement officials, our nongovernmental associations, and, of course, to the migrants themselves.
Something needs to be done now before the crisis grows even larger. If you are cooking dinner for your family and the food in the oven catches on fire, are you going to keep stirring the pot on the stove? Are you going to set the table or call your kids to come downstairs for dinner? No. You are going to put the fire out first. That is what we need to do now. Before we can even have those necessary conversations about immigration reform, we need to put the fire out and put it out now.
Once we have taken action on the border crisis, I hope we can have serious, bipartisan discussions about immigration reform and finally provide DACA recipients the certainty they deserve, but that can't happen until the crisis on the border is addressed.
Like I said, I am disappointed that the President didn't address this in his speech last evening. I was hoping he would be willing to work with a bipartisan group of Senators and Congressmen who are eager to take action.
Last week, Senator Sinema from Arizona and I introduced the Bipartisan Border Solutions Act, a straightforward and commonsense way to address this crisis. The bill already has the support of Members from both parties and in both Chambers, as well as a number of respected organizations. We would be glad to gain the support of the administration as well. But you can't solve a problem until you first acknowledge that you have a problem, and we have a problem with the crisis on the border.
This is not going to get any better. We know that much of this migration is seasonal, and so the high numbers--more than 300,000 that we have seen so far this year--are going to translate into even more numbers next month and next month and next. So the time to deal with this is now, but, like I said, until the administration acknowledges that there is a problem and that we need to work on it together, it is going to get nothing but worse.
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