Jeff Merkley

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Would the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. MERKLEY. I yield to my colleague from Rhode Island.

Mr. MERKLEY. Well, I must say, my impression is--and I hope the Senator will correct me if I am wrong--that the Republicans are embarrassed by the fact that they are proposing a bill that creates over $3 trillion in debt in 10 years and over $30 trillion over 30 years and that the vast bulk of it goes to billionaires. And so they want to say: We are so embarrassed because we mentioned fiscal responsibility when we were running for office. We were going to get the budget under control. And they are doing the opposite, and they are embarrassed that they are doing these cuts in programs to fund tax breaks for billionaires, cutting regular healthcare--16 million people losing healthcare--for tax breaks for billionaires that, as the Senator pointed out, go on and on and on and are actually permanent.

Mr. MERKLEY. So I find two things very interesting. They are saying, if something was in the law that they passed in 2017 and it expires, they are pretending it doesn't expire and that, therefore, extending it doesn't cost anything. But in their own bill, when they say a provision expires, they are saying: No, it really does die, and, therefore, we are saving money in the years after. How are those two things possibly consistent?

Mr. MERKLEY. I find it very interesting that the Senator pointed out that these tax provisions for the middle class--that no tax on tips is phased out and no tax on overtime is phased out. And what the Senator is saying, I believe, is that when they put into this bill that a tax break is ending, they are saying that it doesn't cost any more in the following years.

Mr. MERKLEY. You mentioned the use of section 312, which gives some flexibility to resolve, as you put it, minor issues on a bipartisan basis to correct an issue, a technical issue. In those cases you mentioned, were those on a reconciliation bill?

Mr. MERKLEY. Would the Senator from Maryland yield for a question?

Mr. MERKLEY. Well, I thank the Senator from Maryland for also pointing out that President Trump--he did--when he was campaigning, say he was fighting for ordinary families. But at his inauguration, who did he have standing behind him? Not champions for healthcare or champions for housing, and certainly not champions for nutrition or education, but, in fact, a series of five or six billionaires. And now you are telling me that, in this bill--and I want to make sure the American people understand this--the provisions that were sweeteners to say we were helping working people are being phased out, but they are keeping all the tax breaks for billionaires.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I want to share a couple comments with my colleagues, my Republican colleagues, because I have made these remarks on the floor. Generally, the floor is empty, but you are here now. In 1974, 100 Senators agreed on reconciliation as a fast track, filibuster-free, but only for one purpose: reducing the deficit. It had three pillars: first, reduce the deficit over a 10-year period; second, reduce the deficit in each and every year after that 10-year period in each title of the bill; and, third, use honest numbers. In 1996, the Republican team was in the majority and decided on a nuclear option to allow that reconciliation process to be used to increase deficits in the 10-year window. That was unfortunate because it destroyed the agreement all 100 Senators had agreed to in 1974. But now, today, if we proceed with this current policy baseline, there are two other pillars that you are destroying of the architecture to create fiscal discipline. The second pillar was no deficits after the 10-year period. That has been destroyed. The third was to use honest numbers from the Congressional Budget Office on a current law basis comparing each provision in the bill as compared to the provision not being in the bill. So here we are, taking a step that is as significant as it was in 1996. All three pillars will be brought down not by Democrats but by Republicans. It is not necessary to do this to get what you want within the 10-year period. Why tear down these additional two pillars of honesty about the numbers--of no more smoke and mirrors--and creating deficits after the 10-year period? It is extremely unfortunate if you press forward with that vision in this bill.

Mr. MERKLEY. I yield to Senator Murray.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, joining me on the floor are experts in the budget process, who are former chairs and ranking members: Senator Murray, who was the Senate Budget chair from 2013 through 2015; Senator Whitehouse, who was the Senate Budget chair from 2023 through 2025; and Senator Van Hollen, who was the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee from 2011 through 2017. We are here to address a fundamental violation of the law--of section 313--the Senate rules for reconciliation. To try to summarize this in the simplest words possible, 100 Senators voted to have a special fast-track, filibuster-free pathway solely for reducing the debt. The first principle was that no deficits could be created in a 10-year period. Our Republican colleagues blew that up in 1996 when they wanted to do a tax bill that would create massive deficits. Then a second pillar was no deficits in any title of the bill in any year after the first 10 years. This bill, right now, if this passes, blows that up. The third was to use honest numbers, Congressional Budget Office numbers. I have a letter here from the Congressional Budget Office, and they say that the estimate is relative to the CBO's January 2025 baseline. The CBO is required to construct its baseline under the assumption specified in the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act and the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. In response to your questions about the cost of title VII, the question was, Would title VII increase the deficit by more than the $1.5 trillion over the 2025 through 2034 period? The answer is, yes, the CBO estimates that its enacting would increase the deficit by nearly $3.5 trillion over the 2025-2034 period--$3.5 trillion. We then asked, Would it increase deficits in the years beyond 2034, beyond the 10-year window? The answer was yes. But if you were to ask my Republican friends, they would say: No, no, no. We are inventing a new theory, and that is that anything that the 2017 tax giveaway to the billionaires put into law that expired after 10 years, we are just going to assume it would have continued, and, therefore, our continuing it doesn't cost anything. That is a pretty crazy notion that if they didn't put it into the bill, the law says it ends, but they say: No, no. It would have continued anyway through some magical way; so, therefore, a tax break for the really wealthy costs nothing. This is exactly--exactly--the type of lying to ourselves, smoke and mirrors that 100 Senators agreed to end back in 1974; and that piece of it has continued in place for 51 years until this moment, in this Senate, by this Republican majority, who says we are going to start lying to ourselves and lying to the American people about what this bill costs. Well, we are not going to lie. We are going to tell you the truth. This bill costs well over $3 trillion over 10 years and some $30 trillion-plus on top of existing deficits and debt because of the provisions that are in this particular bill. Our current national debt that has been run up since the Declaration of Independence is around $36.5 trillion. This bill basically matches that in creating that much additional debt over the next 30 years. This is a huge assault on the programs that we have sustained as a nation for the people of America and for people struggling to get on their feet. So we want affordable housing programs. We want to have fair and quality healthcare. We want to have an education system that gives every child an opportunity to thrive. We want to create a robust economy through investments so there are good jobs, because no government program is better than a good job. All of those are imperiled by this bill because the Republican leadership is lying to the American people and lying to themselves. So we are here to tell the truth. First of all, we are going to turn to Senator Murray who, as I mentioned, was the Senate Budget chair from 2013 to 2015.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. MERKLEY. I really appreciate that point from my colleague from Washington State because, in this bill, it creates so much necessitated borrowing that CBO estimates that that borrowing will cause interest rates to go up. And when interest rates go up for the Treasury, it goes up on your car loan, on your adjustable rate, the mortgage on your house, and just in general. These are costs that are borne by ordinary families. And I find it very interesting because the Republicans were demanding what they called the dynamic score, saying: Well, won't these cuts produce such a great economy that it will kind of lift all boats and produce more revenue and maybe the deficit won't be as bad. Here is what the Congressional Budget Office found. Again, that is the nonpartisan honest broker. They found that because of the interest rates rising as a result of this massive sea of red ink that necessitates massive borrowing that, in fact, those rising interest rates will hurt the economy. So there is no dynamic score that produces: Oh, well, it isn't so bad after all. No, it is the opposite, and, in fact, that dynamic argument has always been wrong. And we are looking at the folks who lectured my colleague from Rhode Island. I sat through many of those lectures as well. And I, in my head, went: Wait a minute. Aren't these the folks who did the massive ocean of red ink in the 2001 Bush tax bill? Aren't these the same folks who produced a massive ocean of ink in another tax bill, 2 years later? Aren't these the same ones that, in 2017, did a massive ocean of red ink? And now they are doing it again? How could they possibly be putting themselves forward as deficit hawks or debt hawks, not to mention that they cheered on two adventures that were a huge tragedy for the United States of America--trying to occupy Afghanistan and going to war in Iraq--which together added $8 trillion to our debt? And if you take a look at this chart, every time there is a Republican administration, the last deficit while they are in office compared to their first deficit goes up. For Clinton, it went down. That is fiscal responsibility. For George W. Bush, first term, it went up. For Obama, it went down. In other words, the Democratic Presidents, time after time after time--Clinton, Obama, Biden--they reduced the deficits while they were in office, and the Republican Presidents, while they were in office, every single time, increased the deficits. So none of us want to hear any more talk about fiscal responsibility from across the aisle. Do you want to be fiscally responsible? Vote no on this bill. This bill takes and fires 16 million people off of healthcare to finance those tax breaks for billionaires. This bill says 4 million children will go hungry to finance tax breaks for billionaires. This bill is ``families lose and billionaires win,'' and the debt goes up, endangering our ability to do basic programs for the entire next generation. It is wrong on every count. And I think, collectively, we urge our colleagues to honor the argument they have made over time that, in fact, they were concerned about the deficit and they were concerned about American families, because if you are concerned about the deficit and debt, if you are concerned about families, you must vote no on this bill.

Mr. MERKLEY. No, they were not. In fact, that power has never been used on a reconciliation bill because the following section, 313, gives very specific instructions. It says each provision must be costed out for its impact on both outlays, the spending side, or revenue, should it be a revenue measure. If you are saying ``Well, how do I do that?'' you say ``Well, if we pass this provision, what will it cost as compared to not passing this provision, not having it in the bill?'' That is a comparison to current law. This ability of the Budget chair--and actually the law says the Budget Committee--to correct technical issues or narrow issues on a bipartisan basis basically solves snarly little budgeting questions, like on the dairy program that you mentioned. It was never used on reconciliation, ever; never used on a broad basis, ever; never used to create a lie about what a bill costs in this fashion. Now, we are turning to the Senator from Maryland, who was ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee for 6 years, so he brings a lot of experience and knowledge about the budget process. Senator Van Hollen.

Mr. MERKLEY. When the House bill was first laid before the Senate, was the operative baseline under which it would be considered the current law baseline under section 257 of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985?

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about debt and the challenge that confronts us. Over the last few decades, we have seen a lot of sources of red ink. Among them are the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq. We saw the first Bush tax bill in 2001, massive red ink; 2003, massive red ink; Trump's tax bill in 2017, an ocean of red ink. I don't think anyone here would argue that these decisions didn't result in significant deficits and significant additions to the debt. Yet there is so much conversation here about fiscal responsibility and let's get this under control. Yet we see time and time again this body vote, under Republican leadership, for another ocean of red ink, another massive deficit, adding to an already bloated debt that so profoundly compromises the ability of our Nation to address issues in the next generation. We are borrowing from the next generation, making it less likely that we can effectively provide the programs, the foundation of healthcare and housing and education and the investment in R&D that produces good- paying jobs for the next generation to thrive. That is wrong. It is wrong to proceed to borrow and compromise the next generation in order to give tax breaks to billionaires. Wow. You know, there are purposes for when we do need to borrow: when we are facing a recession and when we are facing a war. But we haven't been in a recession. We haven't been at war; although, we clearly had an attack on Iran. Maybe we are at war now, maybe not. We will see if the cease-fire holds. But we are not in a position yet where we should be proceeding to say this current year we should be creating even more deficits. But the bill before us doesn't create this massive new additional ocean of red ink for the purpose of addressing a war nor to address a recession but, instead, for the lofty purpose of enriching the richest Americans. I must say that driving 16 million people off of healthcare to give tax breaks to megamillionaires and billionaires may make the megamillionaires and billionaires who are serving in this Chamber quite happy, but it doesn't make America better. I must say that leaving 4 million children hungry has a devastating impact on their ability to study and learn and thrive in their lives to come. And to do it for tax breaks for billionaires may make my colleagues who are really rich really happy, but it is really wrong. In addition, my colleagues just aren't creating a sea of debt; they are also cutting down the bipartisan structure designed for Congress to exercise discipline over deficits and debt. That architecture was crafted in 1974, the Budget and Impoundment Control Act, normally referred to as the Budget Act, the 1974 Act. It came about because two things were going on: One is that President Nixon had impounded funds, and the Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that. That is unconstitutional. You can't steal the power of the purse. In the Constitution, that power of the purse is given to Congress. Senators were very concerned about the deficits that were existing in 1971, and 1972, and 1973. They averaged $20 billion a year. They totaled $60 billion. I can tell you that now when our deficit is running at something closer to $2 trillion a year, $20 billion doesn't sound like much of a cause for alarm. But that is how determined 100 Senators were to get control over our budgeting process. All hundred voted for this structure, the Budget Control Act. It had two basic features. It had a regular budgeting process, and then, for legislation that reduced the deficit, it had a special, fast- track, filibuster-free lane called reconciliation. But you could only use it for reducing the deficit. That special, fast-track, filibuster-free lane really meant a lot here in the Senate because we are the ones who have the 60-vote requirement. The House doesn't have a requirement for 60 votes, for three-fifths of the body on anything. So it was really all about here, about the Senate's sense that we should only drop to 60 votes for bills that reduced the deficit. Embedded in this were three fundamental provisions, three pillars of the architecture of getting control of deficits and debt. The first was that in the first 10 years that are presented in a reconciliation bill, the sum of the 10 years has to produce deficit reduction. That was pillar No. 1. The second pillar was that in every single year that follows the first 10, it has to produce deficit reduction. It has to save money. And the third was honest numbers. We are going to use honest numbers. We are going to create this organization, the Congressional Budget Office, and we are going to utilize it to cost out programs, do the modeling, be nonpartisan. Then we are going to utilize this other organization that already existed, the Joint Committee on Taxation, to have their staff produce honest, nonpartisan numbers for the cost of revenue provisions. The section of the law that controls this special reconciliation process says each provision, whether for a spending program or for revenue, has to be costed out in order to be able to hold ourselves accountable. If the provision is written down and it changes the law, how much will that cost? If the provision is not in the law, not in the proposed law, then, obviously, that is different than if the provision is in the law. New law versus existing law, that is what section 313 says is going to be costed out to see if we are meeting the goals laid out in the budget resolution. That is the discipline. Those were the three things: No deficits created in the first 10 years; second, no deficits created in any year following the first 10 years; and, third, honest numbers about what each provision costs. Those are the three things. Well, that was in 1974. You can picture Robert Byrd, who was a passionate defender of the 60-vote requirement, but he voted for this special, fast-track, filibuster-free lane for that one purpose: reducing deficits. That was 1974. Well, 22 years later, along comes a moment when you have a Republican Senate and a Republican House. And the Republicans said: Do you know what, we like this idea of a line-item veto, so they passed it. Fine. But the Supreme Court said that is unconstitutional because the Constitution says the power of the purse lies with Congress, not with the President--something that our current Office of Management and Budget and our Director of Management and Budget doesn't like and is contesting and told me he wants the Supreme Court to overrule what it ruled back then. The second idea was to do a balanced budget amendment. But the Republican chair of Appropriations stood up and said: Do you know what, sometimes you need to spend more because of conflict; sometimes you need to spend more because of recession. And so, no, we shouldn't have a formalistic formula. And he refused to vote for it, and the proposal failed one vote short of the 67 it needed. OK. But then the Republican majority said: But you know, we have got this other idea. We have got all these really rich and powerful corporations and individuals, and we want to give them a massive, beautiful tax cut and make them even more richer and powerful. They will love us, and they will keep us in power. What a win-win, to give away the Treasury to the richest people in this country. But they had a problem. There was no filibuster-free, fast-track lane that allowed creating a deficit. So what did they do? They fired the Parliamentarian. That is what they did. They brought in a new Parliamentarian, a Parliamentarian who had actually been on the parliamentary team back in 1974, a Parliamentarian who had then left that Parliamentarian team and gone to work for the majority leader and then came back off the majority leader's staff to rule and say: That deal that was crafted with all 100 Senators, we are going to break that deal. We are going to do a nuclear option. We are going to blow it up. We are going to say that this fast track can be used to create deficits in the first 10 years. So there went pillar 1. Pillar 2 has survived until now, until this moment: No deficits after the first 10 years. Pillar 3--use honest numbers--has survived until now: Use the CBO numbers, use the comparison of a provision as described in section 313 and honestly relay what it costs for a program or for a revenue provision. And I say ``until now'' because my colleague, whom I love to work with on a number of things, has an idea. And he said: There is a provision not in the section of the law that exists for reconciliation but in the section of the law as it deals with just the regular budget process that was created in 1974 that gives the budget chair some flexibility to solve technical problems, and I think I can use that to simply decree a new baseline so that things that actually cost a ton of money, we can tell the American people and ourselves they don't cost money. Well, let's see. Here are some examples: the business passthrough. The Joint Committee on Taxation, passthrough for LLCs, says this revision in the law will cost $736 billion. My good friend across the aisle says: I want to use a magic baseline to show things cost less. He says: We will use a technique here, some magic math, and tell the people that it only costs $6 billion, even though the Joint Committee on Taxation tells us it costs $736 billion, and reduce it to less than 1 percent of the true cost. Let's take another example. There is a provision that extends the estate and gift tax exemptions. The honest broker, the Joint Committee on Taxation, says putting that provision in the bill will cost, as in increasing deficits and increasing the debt, $212 billion. But my colleague across the aisle says: I want to tell people it doesn't really cost that--it only costs $10 billion--by using my baseline as opposed to the honest baseline that we have used ever since 1974 passed, when 100 Senators said: Let's stop using smoke and mirrors and let's use honest numbers. Or how about the exemptions being expanded for the alternative minimum tax? The cost of that, from the Joint Committee on Taxation: $1.37 trillion. That is with a ``t,'' trillion--$1.37 trillion. My good colleague across the aisle says: Using my magic math and my special baseline, that won't increase the deficit; it will actually reduce the deficit by $6 billion. Are you kidding me? We are going to destroy the principle, for 51 years, that we will use honest numbers with ourselves and honest numbers with the American people; and in the process, we are tearing down that second pillar that reconciliation will never be used to extend deficits past the reconciliation window of 10 years--because, you see, that has never been allowed by either party, never done. In fact, the ruling in 1996, the one that tore down that it can only be used for deficits in the first 10 years, that ruling was explicit in reaffirming the second pillar of no deficits after 10 years. So we have the plain language of the law. We have 51 years of precedent. We have the ruling from 1996. But my colleague says: I want to use magic math to pretend this bill doesn't cost what it costs. Well, let's take a closer look at the provision that my colleague, the chair of the Budget Committee, is using. It is called section 312. Let's see how it has been used. Let's see if it has ever been used on reconciliation. Let's see if it has ever been used completely on the breadth of an entire reconciliation bill. Let's start by asking the question: Has it ever been used in a partisan way? Well, in 2017, Crime Victims Fund--no, no--a bipartisan decision. In 2023 and 2025, Power Marketing Administration: bipartisan. They were solving a technical issue, both parties working on it together. Preventing double counting of a dairy program: bipartisan. Adjustments to Fiscal Responsibility Act: bipartisan. It has become traditional to say this power in section 312 rests with the chair of the Budget Committee, but that is not true. The law says it rests with the Budget Committee. The reason we think of it as resting with the chairman is because it has always been done in a bipartisan way, with the Democrats and Republicans together saying: We are solving a problem. The second question: Has it ever been used on the breadth of a reconciliation bill or only upon a narrow provision? Well, it turns out, in every single case--the Crime Victims Fund, the Power Marketing, the dairy program, the Fiscal Responsibility Act--always a narrow provision. But not now. How else can we take a look at this? How about if we look at whether it was resolving a technical ambiguity. Yep. Every single time, resolving a technical problem, in bipartisan fashion, narrow provision. And most importantly, has this provision of 312, which is not in the section that controls reconciliation, ever been used in reconciliation? Nope. Not in 2017, not in 2023 through 2025, not on the dairy program, not on the Fiscal Responsibility Act--not ever. Never used in reconciliation. So, colleagues, two big issues are here. Are you really going to invoke, for a bill that causes over $3 trillion in debt over 10 years compared to current law--are you really going to invoke, for a reconciliation bill that, for the first time, continues that ``Red Sea'' in years 11 through 30--11 years, 30 years out, extending beyond the 10-year window, in direct violation of the ruling of the Parliamentarian in 1996, in direct violation of a section of 313 that says that only--you cannot run deficits after that? You know, those 30-year estimates, over $30 trillion of additional debt from this bill. Now, our current debt is pretty high: $37 trillion. This adds another $30 trillion-plus. And the Congressional Budget Office costed out what happens if the interest rates are 1 percent higher than they put in the model--1 percent higher. And of course, it is easy to imagine that we could be off by 1 percent. So 1 percent higher, and the cost isn't $30 trillion; it is closer to $60 trillion--1 percent higher--of additional debt over 30 years. They said it would add another $24 trillion on top of the over $32 trillion to begin with. Are you really going to vote for a bill that uses dishonest numbers? So here is one reason to vote against this bill: It is a massive debt creator, primarily to give tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. Here is the second reason: It tears down programs in healthcare and nutrition that are key to the success of our children and families who are in the 20 percent less affluent in America. Here is a third reason: It creates debt far into the future, beyond the 10-year window, that will compromise the ability of us to address the challenges of America for decades and decades to come. It is really an attack on the next generation. Here is a fourth reason: It tears down the framework of accountability, the last two standing pillars, crafted by 100 Senators all voting yes in 1974. I encourage my colleagues, as they get together in their caucuses on the blue side of the aisle or the red side of the aisle, to say: Let's hold on. This is wrong. This is not what the President campaigned on. He campaigned on being a champion for families--not for billionaires, to screw over families, to make the rich richer. Wow. Just that extension of the alternative minimum tax is going to cost $1,368,932,000,000. Wow. In other words, almost $1.4 trillion. What ordinary family uses an exemption under the alternative minimum tax? It is the megawealthy. They listed it under chapter 1, which they titled ``Tax Relief for Middle Class Families.'' Find me a middle-class family in which this alternative tax exemption applies. So we are just days away from voting on this. We are going through the Byrd bath, in which different policies are examined and, if they are primarily a policy, they are not allowed in here. That was part of the rules that were crafted long ago for the special fast-track reconciliation. Then we have 20 hours of debate, and then we have amendments. We are very close to the point of making this tragic mistake. And I know that many of my new colleagues who were just recently sworn in, in January, have been folks who said we need fiscal discipline. You can't campaign on fiscal discipline and tell your constituents you are going to uphold that after you take office and then come here and not only vote for this massive debt but tear down, at the same time, the last two pillars of the architecture for controlling deficits this year and into the future. That doesn't square, so don't do it. I will close by saying this is not the first time we have been down this road. And there are a few myths that people tell themselves to justify this: We will only do this once. In 2001, it was once. In 2003, it was twice; 2017 was the third time. We are doing the same damn thing again: mortgaging our future and helping increase wealth inequality in this country by doing all these special provisions for really rich people. We have done it now--this is the fourth time. Don't pretend you are fooled, like you didn't get it, because we have been down this road before. It is the wrong road. ``Families lose, billionaires win'' is the wrong mission for America. It is the wrong mission for the U.S. Senate. The right mission is ``Families thrive, and billionaires pay their fair share.'' I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. I appreciate the comments of my colleague from California and particularly appreciate that my colleague from Virginia Senator Kaine has proposed this War Powers Resolution, a resolution that reaffirms a basic principle: The decisions of war and peace belong under our Constitution to Congress, not to the President. But on June 21, President Trump ordered strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities. There was no congressional authorization. There was no debate in this Chamber. There was no vote in this Chamber. The President made a unilateral decision that risked bringing the United States into another extended war in the Middle East. That is not how our Founders designed our Nation through the architecture of the Constitution. In fact, each Member here swore an oath to uphold that Constitution that places the responsibility for declaring war upon this body, not upon the individual who sits in the Oval Office. To be sure, the President, as Commander in Chief, has the responsibility to protect the Nation from an imminent threat. But in this case, there was not an imminent threat. First, according to our own intelligence, Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon. Second, even though Iran possessed a significant amount of 60- percent-enriched uranium--more than the 3 percent to 5 percent that is utilized for civilian energy--it was still not enriched to the level to build a bomb. It would have had to be enriched to 90 percent. It would have had to be converted to metallic form. It would have had to be arranged with an extensive system of explosives that compress it in order to start a chain reaction. That is a very difficult engineering feat. Third, prior to the U.S. strikes, Israel's Foreign Minister said Israel's attacks had already set back Iran's nuclear weapon program for at least 2 to 3 years. So let's be clear, the threat was not imminent. It was not a situation where there was no time for the President to observe the Constitution, to honor the Constitution, to seek an authorization for the use of military force from the Congress of the United States. The administration, instead, acted precipitously, putting American lives at risk, including the over 40,000 U.S. troops in the region, as well as diplomats and American civilians stationed or visiting the Middle East. Wars are easy to start, but they are often hard to end, and the consequences can be enormous. Look, for example, at the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq: more than 7,000 deaths of American men and women serving in uniform, more than 50,000 serious injuries--often life-altering injuries--to America's sons and daughters serving in uniform, more than $8 trillion of American treasure spent. That is why the Founders said the consequences of conflict, of entering into war, are so significant they must never be entrusted to a single person, not even the person who sits in the Oval Office. That is why they wrote the Constitution, placing the responsibility for that here where it can be wrestled with; where it can be debated; where different perspectives can be brought to bear; where experts can be interviewed; and all can be taken into account in making such an important decision for our Nation. From where we are right now, two things need to happen: First, Congress needs to reassert its constitutional authority over matters of war and peace; second, we need to double down on diplomacy to secure a lasting peace. And a lasting peace includes at least three elements: Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon; second, Iran stops funding militias across the region; and, third, Iran's economy is freed up to prosper. Those are the three elements that need to be addressed. Let me begin, first, by addressing in some greater detail Congress's need to reassert its constitutional authority. On ``Meet the Press'' on Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham said: You can't have 535 Commanders in Chief. He is exactly right. And that is why the Founders designed the Constitution with a separation of powers. Congress has the responsibility to decide if we go to war, and then the President commands our military to go to war. Article I gives Congress the power to declare a war and article II gives the President the power to be the Commander in Chief to execute the war. Senator Kaine's War Powers Resolution says hostilities in Iran must be explicitly authorized by Congress, but that does not, in any way, prevent the United States from defending itself from an imminent attack should that need arise. This is a privileged resolution, meaning that we will have the opportunity to wrestle with it. And we will be voting on whether to do so later today. This resolution is urgently needed. We are already in the throes of a slide into an authoritarian state. Our President has been ignoring the Constitution or violating the Constitution by violating the rule of law that applies to the executive branch; by ignoring or suppressing or circumventing due process, the very issue that protects all of us from an overbearing Executive. In fact, it is the defender of our freedom; third, stiff-arming the courts; and, fourth, seizing Congress's power of the purse. And then just this week, it was reported that Trump will limit intelligence sharing with Congress, another brazen attempt to centralize powers in the executive in a strongman Presidency. With this resolution, Senator Kaine's resolution, Congress can reassert its constitutional authority as a coequal branch of government. It can stop this President from seizing even more dangerously unaccountable power. In addition to Congress taking this action, there is an urgent need for diplomacy in order to secure a lasting peace in the Middle East. That lasting peace includes the three elements that I mentioned: that Iran does not have the path to developing a nuclear weapon; that it stops funding militias across the region; and that Iran's economy is freed up to prosper. They can reenter international commerce. It is already clear that diplomacy is not just essential but that it is effective. In 2015, the United States helped negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the Iran nuclear deal, which blocked all paths for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. It blocked the plutonium path; it blocked the uranium path; it blocked the covert path. That deal was so important for global security that it involved the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France, all working together to create that framework in partnership with Iran. And Iran accepted massive inspections and oversight from the International Atomic Energy Agency to make sure that you not only had an act of trust, but lots of acts of verification. The deal worked. Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. Instead, they dismantled their plutonium- based Arak heavy water reactor. They agreed not to enrich uranium beyond 6.7 percent, and they didn't do so. They shipped all of their more highly enriched uranium out of the country--some 25,000 pounds--to be stored abroad. But 3 years later, President Trump tore up that agreement. He did so over the objections of his own national security officials; over the objection of his Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis; over the objection of his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; over the objection of his National Security Advisor General McMaster; and over the objection of his Chief of Staff General John Kelly. Had President Trump, in his first administration, not torn up that agreement, we would be celebrating Iran's tenth anniversary under the nuclear deal with no path to a nuclear weapon. By ripping up the Iran nuclear deal, Trump opened the pathway for Iran to enrich beyond 3.67 percent, leading to the concerns that prompted Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities and that led Prime Minister Netanyahu to ask President Trump to use our planes and our abilities to bomb Isfahan, Natanz, and Fordo. To create an enduring agreement now that stops Iran from having a path to a nuclear weapon, restrictions like those that were in the Iran nuclear deal back in 2015 have to be recreated. And, in fact, we learned over the last few days how diplomats from President Trump's team have been working on this, were in conversation with Iran before Israel's attack to create such an arrangement. In fact, they continued those conversations even as bombs were dropping. We have to succeed to put in place a permanent, detailed, enforceable plan for peace which Iran agrees to, that stops funding for militias outside Iran and blocks all those paths to a nuclear weapon. Colleagues, we wouldn't be here today discussing this if President Trump hadn't torn up the first agreement that was working against the advice of his entire foreign affairs and security staff. That is what happens when you scoff at diplomacy--diplomacy that works, agreements that worked--and unleash events in the world that lead to circumstances that realized themselves this year in 2025. The decision to strike Iran without authorization from Congress was wrong because there wasn't the imminent threat and, thus, there was time to go through the process of seeking authorization for the use of military force necessitated by our Constitution. Wars are easy to start, but they are hard to end, and that is why the Founders wanted us to debate them before the American people. We must reassert Congress's congressional authority. We must double down on diplomacy to secure long-term peace. We cannot allow our servicemembers in uniform to be sent to war if we are not even willing to debate and vote on that war. I urge my colleagues to support this resolution.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I have come tonight to the floor to talk about fiscal responsibility and how important it is that we preserve or, at least, advance a structure in which we engage with integrity in budgeting, so we don't run up massive debts that affect the opportunities for the generation to come. One of the things I have been very aware of during the 17 years I have been here is that I hear a lot of conversation from my colleagues across the aisle about fiscal responsibility. But let's be clear, the majority of the debt run up over the last 20 years has come from the Republican side of the aisle. It has been the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. Those alone account for $8 trillion. And if we turn the clock back just a little bit more, we had the 2001 Bush tax cuts, the 2003 Bush tax cuts, the 2017 Trump tax cut--each of them producing an ocean of red ink by cutting taxes for the richest Americans. Is that any way to run a country? Cutting programs for families to fund tax breaks for mega millionaires and billionaires? Well, apparently. And in the process, massive, massive debt. Now, my Republican colleagues have engaged repeatedly in this myth-- this myth that somehow the tax breaks for billionaires will result in so much increase in revenue because the economy will hum along. Every single time, it is a lie. It is a deception. It never happens. Instead, revenue plummets, and we indebt our country far into the future. Let's look at another version of the world. Every time there is a Republican administration, if you look at the first year compared to the last year, deficits go up. Every time there is a Democratic administration, first year to the last year, deficits go down. Here we are at another moment where we are about to make a decision related to another Republican bill that will create another red sea of debt--some $3-plus trillion over 10 years, some $30-plus trillion of debt compared to current law over 30 years. Now, the very fact that I am mentioning 30 years points out something new and different being put forward by my Republican colleagues; that is, that under reconciliation, you have only been allowed under the rules, in law, under section 313 of the Budget Act, to incur deficits in the first 10 years but not after the first 10 years. So there was no need for a 30-year estimate because that simply was not allowed. As long as we are looking at what has been allowed under the law and how things have changed, let's look at the structure of what happened to the fairly magnificent 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act. And why do I say magnificent? Because all 100 Senators--everyone on the blue side of the aisle, everyone on the right side of the aisle--said ``We have to get the deficits under control''--1974. Well, what had the deficits been in the 3 years before? In 1971, 1972, 1973, they averaged $20 billion--$20 billion. Now our deficits are about $2 trillion a year. But back then, there was seriousness about getting the budget under control. So this Budget Control Act had some interesting features. First, it had a process for regular budgeting, and then it had a separate, very special track called reconciliation, and reconciliation was designed only for reducing deficits. That is why all 100 Senators voted to create a filibuster-free fast track only to reduce deficits. Picture Robert Byrd of West Virginia, one of the fiercest defenders of the filibuster, but even he voted for this special, filibuster-free path only for reducing deficits--1974. That act also produced the Congressional Budget Office because another piece of the vision was, let's have honesty in numbers. You know, every time we would come to a budget, one team or the other, whoever was in charge, kind of uses some smoke and mirrors to pretend the impact on the budget is more favorable than it really is. So we needed an organization that is impartial, nonpartisan, that will do the modeling and give us the best information for us to be able to understand the consequences of the provisions in law we are proposing. Well, that was 1974 that all of that was done. For the 22 years that followed, that filibuster-free fast track, that special reconciliation fast track, was only used for deficit reduction because that is what it was created for. But in 1996, my Republican colleagues had the majority in the House and the majority in the Senate, and they undertook some, well, bold, new initiatives. One of those was to do a line-item veto for the President. Guess what? The Supreme Court struck that down because the Constitution says it is the responsibility of Congress, not the President of the United States of America, to lay out the decisions about how much is going to be spent on what programs. The Executive executes the law, but we here write the law. The Supreme Court said: No, no, no. You can't do that. If you want to cut a program, you can't ask the President to do that; you have to do it yourself. Then there was a second initiative. That second initiative was called the balanced budget amendment, and the idea was that we would put a new clause in the Constitution that essentially forced us to do much like a State government does--you have to balance the budget. Well, there were those on the Appropriations and Revenue Committee that said: I don't know that that is the right idea because in a time of crisis, you need to be able to spend more for national security or in a time of recession or depression, you might need to spend more to stimulate the economy. Well, that amendment needed a two-thirds vote, 67 votes here in the Senate. It got 66. So it did not pass the Senate of the United States of America. So the Republicans at the time--Robert Dole was the majority leader-- said: Well, do you know what we want to do? We want to do a massive tax bill with lots of provisions that cut taxes for the richest Americans. Then they said: But, you know, the problem is that we will need 60 votes to move that bill off the floor, and the Democrats are not going to agree to a plan that gives away the Treasury to the richest Americans. So they concocted a plan. They replaced the Parliamentarian. They replaced the Parliamentarian in order to get a ruling that said the filibuster-free track voted by 100 Senators only for deficit reduction could be used to increase deficits for tax reductions. Wow. My Republican colleagues who were preaching fiscal responsibility destroyed this powerful mechanism that all hundred Senators had agreed to to invoke fiscal responsibility and reduce deficits. But out of that carnage of 1996--that nuclear option, if you will-- came two surviving pieces, and one of those surviving pieces was that any year after the first 10 years in any title, you had to have deficit reductions or deficit neutrality. So whereas the deficit could be increased in the first 10 years, it couldn't be increased in any title in any year following that. So you couldn't even say: Well, a surplus in 2011 adjusts for--or the 11th year adjusts for a deficit in the 12th year. No. Every single year, every single title, deficit-neutral. The other thing that survived was keeping honest numbers--honest numbers--that we were going to do what section 313 of the law says. Section 313 says that each provision has to be evaluated in terms of its outlays--that is the spending impact--or the revenue impact. So here is a clause in the proposed law. If we follow that clause, if we enact that law, how will it affect spending and how will it affect revenue? Well, each and every clause has to be costed out in that fashion--a combination of work by the Joint Committee on Taxation on the revenue side and the Congressional Budget Office on the program side. Every clause. If the clause in the law, the provision in the law, passes, how will it affect things? If it is not in the law, what happens? What is the difference between that? What is the difference between this new proposal and existing law? OK. Well, now my Republican colleagues--the party that blew up the deficit-reducing pathway all 100 Senators agreed to for the first 10 years--want to blow up the remaining two pillars. Now they want to be able to produce deficits after the first 10 years. That is why CBO is doing a 30-year estimate of the debt created by their bill. No longer is it just a 10-year framework, that 10-year framework that their bill is going to produce some $3-plus trillion of debt compared to current law, but they have to do a 30-year estimate. Their bill is going to produce over $30 trillion in debt compared to current law because they are destroying that second pillar--no deficits after 10 years. The third pillar was to use honesty in numbers, but folks on the other side of the aisle said: We are embarrassed by this massive, debt- creating monster, but we want to pass it because it gives tax breaks to the richest Americans, and that is what we are all about. We are going to cut healthcare for 16 million Americans to give tax breaks to the richest Americans. We are going to leave 4 million children hungry to give tax breaks to the richest Americans. But that is a little embarrassing that we are also going to run up a massive debt of the United States of America to give tax breaks to the richest Americans. Do you know what? That not only harms citizens today--I mean, citizens across this country, when they hear about this bill, they go: That is just wrong. It is absolutely wrong to destroy healthcare or housing or education in order to line the nest of the already best off Americans. It is just wrong. What happened to government by and for the people? Why is the Republican Party pursuing government by and for the powerful, the richest? That is where this nickname comes from for this bill, the ``Big Beautiful Betrayal.'' Why is it a betrayal? Because President Trump campaigned on helping families, but the moment he was sworn into office, who was standing behind him? Was it champions for the people? Champions on healthcare? No. Champions on affordable housing? No. Champions on food programs or nutrition? No. Who was standing behind him? Billionaires. Billionaires were standing behind President Trump. So it is the ``Big Beautiful Betrayal'' because he campaigned on helping families, but the bill he is championing instead hurts families and helps billionaires. Now, how is it that a law that has been in place for now 51 years can be corrupted--corrupted--to allow deficits beyond year 10? How is it that a law that has been in place for 51 years can be corrupted to stop using the honest numbers that come, evaluating the costs or the revenue impact of each and every provision? How is that possible? Well, I will tell you how that is possible, and that is, the chair of the Budget Committee said: Hey, there is this provision--it wasn't designed for reconciliation. It was designed to help resolve technical anomalies in regular bills--not for reconciliation, for regular bills. But it gave the Budget Committee the ability to provide some flexibility about evaluating and solving technical anomalies. So the chair of the Budget Committee has proposed taking that provision that is there in a section of the bill for regular budgeting, that gives some flexibility to the Budget Committee to resolve anomalies, and transporting it over into this other special, filibuster-free pathway designed to decrease deficits to create a phony baseline. So instead of taking a provision in the proposed law and saying ``Well, this provision is here; how much cost would it add?'' instead you say ``Well, let's take this provision and pretend that if it wasn't here, there would be some other provision, maybe an extension of something that is actually expiring.'' So we will create these phony numbers to try to pretend this doesn't create the debt it creates. Here we are, section 312, the chair's authority on regular budgeting being transported into reconciliation. Stay with me here. This has never been used in this fashion because the entire law, as written, the instructions for reconciliation say you have to cost out each provision. If the clause is in the proposal, what would it cost compared to the clause not being in the proposal? Here we are back in regular budgeting, this power that is in section 312 for the chair--that actually says the Budget Committee, not the chair--to resolve an anomaly. Has it ever before been used in a partisan fashion? No. Here are the times it has been used. Never before has it been a partisan thing. It has been Democrats and Republicans together saying we have a knotty little technical problem, for example, like a program that has a new name. Is that costed as a new program? But it is actually an existing program. It has a new name. How do we resolve that? It is that type of little technical difficulty that was always worked out--used in a bipartisan fashion. Again, that power was assigned to the committee, not to the chair. How else does 312 differ in the past from the present? Well, it has never been used on a broad bill. It has been used to resolve individual, small, narrow issues, things like the Crime Victims Fund, things like the Power Marketing Administrations, things like double counting of a dairy program--little narrow provisions, not on a systematic billwide basis, not at all. No, never done. Again, only done in a bipartisan fashion on very narrow provisions. How else does it differ? Well, it has always been used to resolve this technical ambiguity challenge, some little anomaly that occurs in a bipartisan fashion on a narrow bill. But here, it is being used systemically across an entire bill to create a fake baseline to pretend that those provisions that cost money don't actually cost money because instead of comparing that provision to the provision not being in the law, we will compare it to pretending the provision would have been in the law even if we didn't put it into the law. That is as phony as it could possibly get. It destroys integrity completely. Has it ever been used in a reconciliation bill? No, because there are special instructions for the reconciliation bill. They are laid out in sections 310 and 313. In 312, for regular budgeting, power is to the Budget Committee--not the chair but to the committee--to resolve ambiguities. Finally, let's just look at the type of money that was associated with these narrow programs. Crime Victims Fund, $73 million. Sounds like a lot. The largest provision it has ever been used for is adjustments in the Fiscal Responsibility Act--again, on a bipartisan basis, on a contained program--$2.8 billion. What are we talking about now? We are talking about trying to hide $37 trillion in debt, new debt. Wow. To every colleague on either side of the aisle who has back home said we need to get our deficit under control, this is not the bill for you. This bill creates over $3 trillion in debt compared to current law over just a 10-year period. Our debt is already over 100 percent of our GPD. I talked to a number of colleagues, and they said: Well, we have to hold it to 100 percent of our GPD. We are already, like, 120 percent, meaning the debt is in the high thirties--about $36.5 trillion--and our gross domestic product, our entire economy, everything it creates in a single year, is about $28 trillion. So the debt is now much larger than everything our economy produces in a single year. That is the danger zone, folks, because you start to enter a debt vortex. And the debt vortex means the debt has gotten so high that the interest rates are starting to eat up the budget. So to fund our military security and our basic healthcare, housing, and education programs, well, we have to borrow more money. That is what this bill does. It borrows, borrows, borrows as far as the eye can see. Again, colleagues on both sides of the aisle--my Democratic colleagues, my Republican colleagues--if you have ever said a word about fiscal responsibility, do not accept this corruption of allowing a provision to be used to create a fake baseline. We solved that together--100 Senators. We solved it 51 years ago by creating the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, to give us honest, nonpartisan estimates. Don't create phony baselines. In the future, which other party will it be? Maybe it will be this side of the aisle that wants to use a phony baseline. We agreed together not to do this. This was not just a handshake. This was a vote. This is the law. Do not corrupt it and work with us for a different vision, not a vision of families lose because that is what happens in this bill--16 million people losing healthcare, 4 million children go hungry to fund tax breaks and giveaways for the richest Americans. That is not a vision. Join us and rewrite this bill. Let's reduce the deficit it creates. Let's reduce the total debt it creates. And, certainly, let's not create provisions that allow there to be deficits beyond the 10-year window. Let's keep the honesty of using nonpartisan numbers, not phony baselines. Let's create the integrity of sticking with the no deficits after 10 years. Let's do that with the vision of families thriving and billionaires paying their fair share.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, over the decades, there is a lot of conversation here in the Senate about deficits and debt. And every now and then, there is a significant bipartisan effort to take on that challenge in a responsible way. But the biggest historic bipartisan effort occurred in 1974, just over a half century ago. And in that effort, Democrats and Republicans together said: Let's start using honest numbers when we are engaged in spending and revenue raising so we will quit having smoke and mirrors, quit pretending things are not what they are, quit selling--if you will--lipstick on a pig. Well, that effort created the Congressional Budget Office to get nonpartisan estimates. That effort created a strategy of saying we will have a regular budgeting process; and for reducing the deficits, we will have a special process called reconciliation only for reducing the deficit. And that special process had three very significant components. One was reconciliation would not be used to create any deficits in the budget window that is in the 10-year window. The second is that it would not create any deficits in any single title in any single year any year after the first 10 years. And the third was that they would use--all of us would use--the nonpartisan numbers delivered to us on revenue through the Joint Committee on Taxation and on programs through the Congressional Budget Office. What an idea: We are going to be honest with ourselves, and we are going to be honest with the American people about what our decisions cost. But along the way, my Republican colleagues preached fiscal responsibility, but became the masters--the Kings--of fiscal irresponsibility. Let's look at the ways that they ran up deficit and debt here in the United States of America. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: $8 trillion--not to mention the incredible loss of lives: some 7,000 servicemembers, more than 50,000 servicemembers with serious injuries. And continuing on their deficit- and debt-creating rampage, there was the Bush tax cuts in 2001, and the second Bush tax cuts of 2003, and the Trump tax cuts of 2017, all creating an ocean of red ink compromising the opportunity for us to do right by American families in healthcare, housing, education, great investments in technology and job creation, because there is no government program that is better than a good-paying job. All of it compromised from the Republicans' ocean of red ink. But just making program decisions that created red ink wasn't enough for my colleagues across the aisle. No. They decided to tear down the 1974 structure for fiscal responsibility. In 1996, they proceeded to say: You know what, we want to do a tax bill that will vastly lower taxes on the richest Americans, and we know it will create a mountain of deficit and debt. Democrats aren't going to vote for that, they said--and they were right. They said: Let's get a ruling. Let's get a ruling that allows us to do deficit creation with reconciliation, even though all 100 Senators voted for reconciliation as a special filibuster-free pathway only for deficit reduction. It was really a dark moment for the Senate. The majority brought in a new Parliamentarian to get a ruling that reversed what everyone had understood in the 1974 law. And then they proceeded to use it three times already in 2001, 2003, 2017. And now they are doing it a fourth time--more red ink. That amount is about $3.4 trillion. And over 30 years, the debt they are creating as compared to current law is over $30 trillion of additional debt--$30 trillion. So, please, don't come to this floor--I say to my colleagues across the aisle--and preach fiscal responsibility. If you can't walk the walk, don't talk the talk. There is one way to be fiscally responsible, and that is not to vote for a bill that creates $3.4 trillion in debt over 10 years and more than $30 trillion in debt over the next 30 years. That is the way you have fiscal responsibility. You do it with action, because actions speak louder than words. It is part of what makes Americans so cynical to hear speeches about fiscal responsibility and then see the actions are the exact opposite. But there is a sense of embarrassment among many of my colleagues across the aisle because they have given speeches back home about fiscal responsibility. So they don't like the idea of voting for a bill that creates $3.4 trillion in debt over 10 years as compared to current law or more than $30 trillion in debt over 30 years as compared to current law. So they said: Let's create a magic math baseline that pretends these provisions don't create debt. That is just a horrific strategy--to lie to ourselves, to lie to the American people about what this bill costs. This little myth being hoisted on this Chamber and the American people, they put a fancy name on it. They called it current policy baseline. So let's revisit what has happened to the 1974 law. It said: No deficit creation in a 10-year period, and Republicans tore that down in 1996 and used it now three times, and now today a fourth time this week to create an ocean of red ink. Second of all, that 1974 agreement was that there be no deficit created in any title in any year after that 10-year window. This reconciliation bill is tearing that down right now, the second main pillar being devastated because they are making the tax cuts permanent and then creating a phony baseline to say it doesn't really create additional deficits far into the future. But everybody in America knows it does. Everybody in America knows that they are creating a phony baseline, doing exactly what was done before 1974, taking us to the same place where we are deceiving ourselves or attempting to or deceiving the American people. Third of all is that they are tearing down the integrity of using honest numbers. So they tore down the 10-year agreement--no deficits in the first 10 years. Now they are tearing down the second pillar--no deficits in any title in any year after the first 10 years. Now they are also tearing down the third pillar--be honest about the numbers. Now, this strategy--my colleagues across the aisle will say: Well, there is this provision in the budgeting law called section 312, and it gives the Budget Committee the power to resolve technical difficulties when we come to costing out programs. But what I am conveying to you right now is that this is not in the section of the law that deals with reconciliation. Section 310 deals with reconciliation, section 313 deals with reconciliation, but section 312--no. So here is what we have. This provision the Republicans are saying they want to use to give the Budget chairman the power to create an artificial baseline to pretend this bill doesn't cost and to be able to extend debts far into the future or deficits far into the future, creating more debt--it has never been used in a partisan manner before. Here are the times it has been used in all these different ways: Crime Victims Fund, Power Marketing Administrations, preventing double counting of a dairy program, adjustments to the Fiscal Responsibility Act--every single time a technical difficulty worked out in a bipartisan fashion. But I can assure you, there is nothing bipartisan now about trying to use this in reconciliation. This provision from 312--has it ever been used in this broad fashion, even on a regular budget bill in a broad fashion? No. It has been used on very narrow issues time after time in a bipartisan fashion. But that is being violated here. Has it been used not to resolve an ambiguity but to hide trillions of dollars of costs? No. It has always been used in that bipartisan, on a narrow issue, to resolve an ambiguity in costing out a program--until now. To my core point, this power doesn't exist in the section of the budget bill that addresses reconciliation. Again, there is a regular budget process, and there is a reconciliation process. So it has never been used in reconciliation. The last point I will make on this is that because it has been narrow, because it has been resolving technical ambiguities, it has also addressed much more modest amounts of numbers--normally in the millions; one time, $2.8 billion. But now it is being used to hide the $37 trillion score of this bill over 30 years. What a difference in every possible way. So I say to my colleagues, don't tear down honesty and integrity in accounting for provisions. You know, section 313--if you go through it, it has different clauses. It says: Establish the impact on outlays or revenue for each provision. Now, what that means is you take that provision that is in the bill and you say: If it is in the bill, what is the impact on program costs and revenue? But if it is not in the bill, what is the impact, and how does that compare? That is what costing out each provision means. It is inherently a comparison to existing law. Now, there are some inherent inconsistencies that accentuate the point I am making. If one uses this magic math to say that you are going to assume that every tax provision that was in 2017 would have been automatically extended, so it costs nothing, then you would have to also assume that every tax provision that is ended in this reconciliation bill after a couple years would also continue forever. But that is not the way the Republicans ask that it be costed out. So they are having it both ways. An existing provision that they want to extend, they say: Well, it would have been extended anyway, so it costs nothing. A provision that they are ending, they are saying: Reduce the cost of this bill because we are ending the provision, and we are assuming no one would ever dare to extend it. That is just totally inconsistent, and it explains clearly that this is a gimmick. Gimmick. Capital G-I-M-M-I-C-K-- gimmick. A gimmick. Smoke and mirrors to deceive ourselves and the American people. Or let's take this: In that same reconciliation bill, there is a provision to lift the debt limit by some $5 trillion. The Senate Republicans increased it from the House, which wanted to increase it by $4 trillion, and they are saying that this is enough to cover the next 2 years because we are going to increase the debt so much, we need to have a $5 trillion cover. Well, if their story about the baseline, meaning that we are telling the people that this bill doesn't cost any more or costs very little compared to the Congressional Budget Office score of $3.4 trillion-- they wouldn't need to increase the debt ceiling on top of what the House has already increased it. So let's come back to the core here. A hundred Senators came together and created a responsible framework to bring control over deficits. No deficits in a 10-year period under reconciliation--Republicans broke it. No deficits in a single title in a single year after 10 years-- Republicans are breaking it with this bill. Using honest numbers-- Republicans are breaking it in this bill. Let's not break it. Let's say no. Every single colleague who has talked about fiscal responsibility, walk the walk. Tell your leadership we are not going to have this situation where we are voting for a bill that creates deficits decades into the future. The only reason that score isn't higher than $37 trillion of additional debt over current law is because CBO cut off the accounting after three decades. So, colleagues, we are going to be voting on this bill probably Friday night. Maybe it is going to be 3 a.m. Saturday morning. Maybe it is going to be later on Saturday. But this bill doesn't deserve to go out of the Senate. This bill absolutely shatters the remaining provisions for fiscal accountability in terms of the structure that was worked out in 1974, and it creates massive debt over a 10-year period as compared to current law. Here is the rub: It creates this debt primarily to give tax breaks to the richest Americans. It cuts healthcare for 16 million Americans to give tax breaks to the richest Americans. It leaves 4 million children hungry to give tax breaks to the richest Americans. It runs up $3.4 trillion in debt over 10 years to give tax breaks to the richest Americans. This is, families lose, billionaires win. That is a terrible strategy for America, so simply say no. Oh, I know how much the tribal bonds are within the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, but it is our responsibility here on the floor to listen to each other and to vote honestly about the impact of this bill. This impact--hurting families, helping billionaires--is simply the wrong direction for the United States of America. Let's vote it down and work together for a vision in which families thrive and billionaires--they pay their fair share. I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, when I was in grade school, my dad, the mechanic, would point to the schoolhouse doors and say: Son, if you go through those doors and you work hard, you can do almost anything because we are so fortunate to live here in the United States. He was a big fan of public schools giving an opportunity for every child to thrive. I took his advice to heart and went through those doors and studied hard and loved the vision of opportunity for every child in America. But the fact is that many careers require more than a K-through-12 education, and the cost of college has exploded. When I was graduating from high school, if you worked a summer job at minimum wage, which was about $3 an hour, you could save enough money, living at home, to pay your tuition at any of the public universities in the State of Oregon. Well, try paying your tuition today, a year of tuition, based on minimum wage working the summer. We are in a situation where college is so much more important now than it was decades ago to so many parts of our society, and yet it is so much more expensive. It is a huge barrier to opportunity for every child. My children are 29 and 27. Not so long ago, they were in grade school in my neighborhood--my blue-collar neighborhood--and people would say to me: Jeff, I am not sure I should encourage my son or my daughter to go to college because I am afraid they are going to end up with a mountain of debt, and that debt is going to be a millstone around their neck--instead of creating opportunity, obstructing opportunity. Indeed, we have seen the challenge in which, because of the cost of college, our sons and daughters are marrying later. Because of debt from college, our sons and daughters are finding it much more difficult to be able to buy a home, which has been the primary source of family wealth for middle-class Americans. So we should do something about this. But, unfortunately, my Republican colleagues want to make college more expensive. I wish you could come to my blue-collar community, get out of your gated communities where you live with people affluent enough to just pay their son's and daughter's education, and understand how expensive college is as a barrier to opportunity here in the United States of America. Specifically, they want to make it harder for children to afford college by eliminating income-driven repayment plans for borrowers. Income-driven repayment plans help folks responsibly pay off their student loans by basing a borrower's monthly payments on their income and their family size. It sounds like common sense to me. One of these income-driven repayment plans is the Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE plan, which more than 8 million Americans are enrolled in. But in the reconciliation bill--the proposed bill that we will be voting on later this week--it is slashed, and Senate HELP Committee Republicans are attempting to slash these loans in their portion of the reconciliation bill as well. As a result of these cuts, the Student Borrower Protection Center calculates that a typical borrower with a college degree will pay about $250 more per month. Now, if you are coming from affluence, maybe you are like: $250 a month. Oh, less than 10 bucks a day, not a problem. But you know it is a massive problem for children across America, for our young adults across America, for our families who are not among those millionaires and billionaires who so often inhabit this Senate Chamber. Why do Republicans want to get rid of programs that help individuals and working families, help lift them up and responsibly pay back what they owe and instead want working families to believe that perhaps college is not a possibility because of the mountain of debt it will create on their children? It is a ``families lose, billionaires win,'' this attack on affordable ways to pay for college. It is another example of the ``Big Beautiful Betrayal,'' the way this reconciliation bill puts families down and helps the rich get richer. Families lose, and billionaires win--that is not a good theme for America. It is not good policy. It is not even good politics. How about we work together on families thrive and billionaires pay their fair share? I have introduced the Savings Opportunity and Affordable Repayment Act, or the SOAR Act, with Senator Kaine, with Leader Schumer, and with Senator Sanders to codify and expand the SAVE plan and help borrowers in four important ways: First, it will allow more low-income borrowers to qualify for income- driven repayment plans, increasing the number of students who will be able to responsibly pay back their loans. Second, it protects borrowers from runaway interests. Third, it incentivizes former students to keep paying their loans rather than default by shortening the timeline for loan forgiveness from a maximum of 25 years to 15 years. CBO did a report on this back in 2020, and what they found is that those who participate in an income-driven repayment plan are half as likely to default as people who don't. So it becomes a win-win. More money gets paid back to the Treasury, not less. Finally, it will help many more borrowers by making them eligible for these programs by including Parent PLUS borrowers and borrowers with Federal family education loans. We know that the SAVE plan and other income-driven repayment plans work. They increase repayment rates; they reduce default rates; they lower costs for families; and they create a vision for our young folks that, yes, you can afford to go to college here in the United States of America; no, it won't create a mountain of debt that will be a millstone around your neck. Don't we want to send that message of opportunity to all of our young folks so they can aspire to their dreams, so they can reach their highest potential, so they can return their success by helping their entire community and our entire Nation thrive? Yes, of course, we do. So, colleagues on both sides of the aisle, let's join together in the vision of families thrive and billionaires pay their fair share, and let's do that by passing the SOAR Act. So, Mr. President, I propose that the Senate proceed to the consideration of the SOAR Act. And to give you the precise technical language for that, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be discharged from further consideration of S. 1220 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I enjoy working with my colleague from Louisiana, and he has made several points worth noting. He has noted that this strategy of enabling people to pay back their loan according to their income doesn't solve the large issue of why our colleges cost so much, and he has noted that it doesn't do anything about predatory college programs that charge a lot and deliver little. Now, I was here when Tom Harkin led the effort to shut down the for- profit programs that often weren't even accredited but were signing up veterans like crazy and ripping them off, leaving them with massive debt. And we couldn't get any help from across the aisle to take that on. So he is right; it won't solve everything. But the idea is that you pay according to your income, and as your income goes up, you pay back more. And the default rate is cut in half. So the Federal Government actually takes in more money than it would otherwise, and students believe that they do have an opportunity, despite the high cost of college--because that is just not going to be fixed overnight. You know, in Germany, tuition is zero. Germany has said every child should have the opportunity to thrive. But here in America, we make it so the rich have that opportunity, and ordinary families in my blue- collar community are going: We don't think our children can afford to go to college. That hurts all of us. It hurts every child whose dreams are crushed because of these high costs of college. I am happy to work with my colleague from Louisiana on ideas on how we lower the cost of college. But we have got a lot of folks going to college right now. Let's help these students know that they can go through those doors as a freshman and, if they thrive, they are going to pay back their loans fast and, if they don't thrive so much in a higher income job or it is a public service job, they will pay it back more slowly. But they will never have to default. I think it is a vision worth continuing to work on because our higher education system is not working as well as the systems in many other countries that are saying every child will have an opportunity. I believe--like my father did, like my mother did--in America as a land of opportunity for every child, not just the children of the rich.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I have come to the floor to talk about debt, and more precisely, how the Republican party has been driving massive increases in debt over the last couple decades, both in two ways. The first way is by particular legislative acts, primarily tax bills that have created enormous debt; and the second is by steadily eroding the framework for budgeting and controlling our difference between our revenues and our expenditures that was created in 1974. If we want to think about the big factors that have been driving up deficits and, therefore, debt, well, the big factors in recent history--war in Afghanistan, massive; war in Iraq, massive; the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003; the Trump tax cuts of 2017--these were huge factors in vastly reducing revenue, primarily by giving enormous giveaways to the very richest Americans. Well, that is not all the Republican party has been up to in terms of driving massive increases in deficit and debt. They have also been hard at work destroying the infrastructure that all hundred Senators agreed to back in 1974 to get a handle on debt. Now let's return to the deficits of 1971, 1972, 1973. Those deficits were, on average, $20 billion--$20 billion compared to $2 trillion now. And yet that $20 billion in deficit, average deficit, over those 3 years was enough to have the Members of the Senate and the Members of the House say: We have to get this under control. If we don't get this under control, we are going to undermine the ability of our work to provide a good foundation for families to thrive in the future through good, strong programs for housing and healthcare and education, good strong programs to create good-paying jobs, and good programs for the security of the United States of America. We are going to undermine all of that--the future for the next generation--if we run up these deficits. So they created that 1974 act. That 1974 act had a couple of different visions. One was a regular budgeting process. That regular budgeting process was laid out--this is the way that you can, at the front end of each fiscal year or preparing for each fiscal year, you can lay out a vision for how much you are going to spend and how much revenue you are going to create. Those expenditures will be laid out committee by committee, and then we will hold people to it, and we can basically do what a family does--have control over our income and our outgo, our revenue and our expenditures, and therefore control over deficits. That was the vision. That bill also created something completely separate from that, and that was called reconciliation. Reconciliation is a special fast-track, filibuster-free path--for one reason it was created; all 100 Senators agreed--to reduce the deficit. You can think of Robert Byrd, who was the fiercest defender of the filibuster--that is the 60 votes required to close debate. Yet even he said: Yes, I am fine setting aside that power that gives strength and leverage to the minority for the purpose of reducing the deficit--that one purpose. That was in 1974. Now let's fast-forward to 1996, 22 years later. You have a Republican House and a Republican Senate. It is the back end of the Gingrich revolution, the election that occurred in 1994 and the people serving from 1995 to 1997. There were several interesting things that happened in that year, in 1996. One was that Congress said: Let's give the President a line-item veto so that programs can be struck down by the President of the United States. The Supreme Court said: Not so fast. The Constitution is very clear. It gives the power of the purse to Congress, not to the President of the United States. If you want to give the power to decide what is spent to the President, well then you have to do a constitutional amendment. Well, that was the end of the line-item veto. Then the next thing that was turned to was, let's do a balanced budget amendment. Well, a balanced budget amendment requires two-thirds of each Chamber of those duly elected to say yes to the bill, and then it has to be sent out as a constitutional amendment to be confirmed by two-thirds of the States. That is a big undertaking. In the Senate, it was 1 vote short of having the 67 votes it needed to be passed. Well, that was a very frustrating situation to be in, one vote short. Then the leaders of the House and Senate--the Republican leaders of the House and Senate said: Well, you know, we have this other objective. We want to do a tax bill that will give vast sums of the U.S. Treasury to the very richest Americans, and we know Democrats won't stand for that, so we can't do it through regular order. Let's take that special reconciliation process created in 1974 only for deficit reduction and let's repurpose it to do deficit increases. But there is a problem there. The whole history was quite clear. You had 22 years of precedent to back up the playing language. So what has to be done? Well, the leader of the Senate, Robert Dole, brought in a new Parliamentarian, Robert Dove, who then created a ruling saying that despite the bill--what it says--and despite the 22 years of precedence, this fast-track can be used to do tax breaks and increase the deficit. Well, that was a core pillar of the 1974 bill--a fast track only for deficit reduction, a filibuster-free path only for deficit reduction. My Republican colleagues tore it down. They didn't use it immediately because President Clinton, a Democrat, was in the Oval Office. As it turned out, a deal was worked out on other issues, so they didn't do that tax bill until Bush came in 2001. Then they used that power created in 1996. The reason I am going through this is to convey that my colleagues who have talked about fiscal responsibility have been misleading America because while they talk about fiscal responsibility in practice, they have been running up massive deficits and debt for the people of this country--through the war in Afghanistan, through the war in Iraq, through the 2001 tax bill that Bush put forward, through his 2003 tax bill, through the Trump 2017 tax bill--and they have been destroying the discipline for the special reconciliation process that was designed only for deficit reduction. But that nuclear event of 1996 in which black became white and white became black, the total betrayal of those Senators who voted--100 of them--for a special filibuster-free process only for deficit reduction--the total betrayal of them. But two things survived. One was that there would be no ability to use reconciliation for deficit creation--increases outside of the 10-year window. The third was continuing to use honest numbers--the Joint Committee on Taxation for revenue and the Congressional Budget Office for expenditures. In fact, CBO was created by that 1974 bill so nonpartisan entities would give us honest numbers so we would quit lying to ourselves every time there was a bill about what it cost, quit lying to ourselves about what a tax provision change would mean. We would be honest with ourselves. You know, it is like a family doing their budget. If they say ``Well, we are only going to go out to dinner once a month to save money,'' but the reality is that they know they are going to go out to dinner 10 times a month, they are just deceiving themselves. They are putting something in their budget that isn't real. The idea was integrity--integrity with ourselves, integrity with the American people. But this brings us to this moment right now on the reconciliation bill because those two pillars of fiscal responsibility that survived the 1996 nuclear action by my Republican colleagues, the two pillars that survived--one, no increase in deficits after 10 years and, second, using honest numbers--those are under complete assault right now, and it is through something that is called by my Republican colleagues a current policy baseline. Let me explain what this means. Normally, you have a bill, and there is a provision in the bill, and that provision says ``Do this,'' and it goes to the Joint Committee on Taxation. They say: It is a revenue measure. Here is how much money that it will raise as compared to not having that provision in the bill. Not having that provision in the bill is current law. Putting the provision in the bill is the vision that is being costed out for honest decision making. So here is a provision. How much will it cost? Here is a change in a program. How much will that cost? That is the normal process. That is the normal process of integrity in any budgeting process. We are going to make a change in what we are doing. How much will it cost? But along comes the decision by my colleague--whom I work with so well on so many things, but on this, I profoundly disagree with him, the chair of the Budget Committee--and he says: Let's stop doing that process where there is a provision in the bill that changes the law and therefore we will estimate how much it costs. Instead, he says, we will simply pretend that a provision in the bill that ended a tax break and now the provision continues that tax break and therefore it costs money--we will pretend that, all along, we knew that it would go on forever, and therefore it costs nothing. Well, this is the type of smoke and mirrors that the entire 1974 act was designed to stop. Let's stop pretending. Let's stop trying to camouflage what things cost when we make decisions, when we pass laws here. Let's be honest with ourselves. Let's be honest with the American people. This strategy--how is this to be accomplished? Well, my colleague the chair of the Budget Committee looks to a provision--section 312--in the law. Let's talk about Section 312. Section 312 is a provision not in Section 313, which is for reconciliation. Section 312 is completely separate, and it has never been used in reconciliation. It was designed to resolve small technical changes. Let's look at the record of 312. Again, this provision says the chair--actually, it says the Budget Committee, not the chair--the Budget Committee has authority to resolve some technical problems that occur in the process of normal budget bills--not reconciliation; normal budget bills. Here are the times it has been used, this provision from 312. It has always been used in a bipartisan way, always with consultation, support from Democrats and Republicans, to resolve a technical issue. For the first time, my colleague the chair of the Budget Committee is saying: We will use it in a partisan fashion where there is no agreement worked out on how to solve a technical issue. We are going to do something that is pure partisan because we want to hide the cost of this reconciliation bill. A second point is that section 312 has never been used in a broad fashion. It has always been about a narrow provision--again, not in a reconciliation bill. It has been used routinely to enforce spending allocations by committee. It has been used for the Crime Victims Fund. It has been used for the Power Marketing Administration. It has been used to prevent double counting of a dairy program. It made some adjustments to the Fiscal Responsibility Act. It was always done in a bipartisan way on a very narrow issue. Then there is now, where it is no longer a narrow issue; it is about the entire cost of the bill. Section 312 has been used to resolve ambiguities--again, each and every time, resolve an ambiguity in a bipartisan way on a narrow issue--except now, it is not about resolving ambiguity; it is about lying to the American people about what the bill costs. Has it ever been used in reconciliation before? No, because it is not part of the two sections that control the reconciliation process--310 and 313. It is not part of that at all. It has never been used in reconciliation, not once, not ever, because it is not part of the law that guides reconciliation. Finally, I want to emphasize that because it has been about narrow issues, the amount of money involved has been related to those more narrow provisions. Yes, they sound large when they are in the millions--even once, on the adjustments to the Fiscal Responsibility Act, about $3 billion, $2.8 billion--but now we are talking not about a couple of billions, we are talking about more than $3 trillion. Wow, that is something. In every possible way, 312 power giving the Budget Committee the ability to resolve small technical issues outside of reconciliation doesn't fit with using it now to create a magical baseline to, well, obfuscate what things cost. Now, the cost of this bill, the provisions in this bill, as compared to not having the provisions in the bill, is a cost of about $3 trillion over 10 years. I think the most recent estimate is $32 trillionish--$37 trillion, and that is over 30 years. Here, we have the effort to tell the world that no, no, no, don't worry. It is only a couple hundred billion, the cost. I was struck this morning by the estimate that came from the Joint Committee on Taxation which laid out that the revenue portion debt of this bill will now reduce revenue over a 10-year period by over $4 trillion while my colleagues are telling the world: No. No. It will only reduce it by less than $1 trillion. Let's stop that type of destruction of the budgeting process. It is not just--not just--that we are lying to ourselves and to the American people about the cost of this bill, we are also destroying that boundary that survived in 1996, that said there will be no deficits in any single title, in any single year after the budget window. The budget window is a 10-year period. This morning, I read back through section 313. And right in section 313, it lays it out again: No deficit creation in any title, in any year after the budget window. So I am coming to the floor to say to my colleagues: Do not corrupt the very instruments we created in a bipartisan fashion to control the deficit. Do not use a fake baseline to lie to the American public about the cost of the provisions in this bill. Do not breach the boundary in which you are now going to create deficits beyond a 10-year period. The reason we had that estimate of $37 trillion over 30 years is because now the measures in the bill continue on that create deficits as far as the eye can see, and CBO said we could only estimate it out 30 years. So that is the number: roughly, $3 trillion over 10 years but $37 trillion over 30 years. CBO also told us, the Congressional Budget Office--that nonpartisan keeper of integrity in budget discussions--if our estimate of the interest rate is 1 percent off, it will cost about another $24 trillion on top of this. So what are we talking about then? We are talking about over $60 trillion over 30 years. How does that compare to what we have now? Well, we are actually in the midthirties right now in terms of our Federal debt. We are now over 100 percent of debt to GDP. I had thought, as I got into this discussion, that we were at the 100 percent mark and that our amount of national debt had reached the amount of our gross domestic product. But when I rechecked it, no, we are over it. We are beyond it. How are we going to be responsible architects of our national journey if we are going to keep pretending that things don't cost in the bills that we pass, if we don't use honest numbers, if we destroy the framework created in 1974 that said no deficits after 10 years? That is not the right course. We, the Democratic side of the aisle, will keep raising this issue because this bill should never go through this body on a false premise, on a fake cost estimate. Why is that so important in reconciliation? Because the budget resolution lays out how much revenue change can be tolerated and how much spending can be done by the various committees. So if you don't have honest numbers, you have a completely phony process. So let's come together and rebuild the bipartisan consensus that we are going to have a stronger framework, a stronger budgeting framework for the national enterprise. As we build up this massive additional part of debt through wars and through tax bills that deliver the national Treasury to the richest Americans, as we do that, we are undermining the future of our country. Please, to my Republican colleagues, do not come to this floor and talk about fiscal responsibility. If you can't walk the walk, don't talk the talk. It is that important. It is that important. I am going to conclude by noting that even without this breaching of the boundaries regarding deficits that run as far as I can see, even without the process of lying to ourselves about what this would cost, even without that, this is a terrible bill. This bill is families lose, and billionaires win, as simple as that: cutting nutrition programs, which means an estimated 4 million children will go hungry; tax breaks for the richest Americans, tax breaks for billionaires; and 16 million people losing healthcare. Why? To fund tax breaks for billionaires. That is just wrong. There is a better plan. It should be a bipartisan plan, where we seek to have families thrive and billionaires pay their fair share. That is a vision we should all be able to get behind. So let's take this terrible bill, this bill that creates a debt as far as the eye can see, this bill that creates an estimated $37 trillion in additional debt or even more than $60 trillion, if the interest rate predictions are off by 1 percent over 30 years--let's take this bill, and let's put a stake through its heart and start over and instead have that vision of a bill crafted along the lines of families thrive and billionaires pay their fair share.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to grant floor privileges to my interns on their shadow days as follows: Vincent Sheoships for June 24, 2025; and Emma Singleton for July 24, 2025.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, now, turning to an issue that has to be worked out in our U.S. Senate, is the challenge of having honest budget numbers for the conversation over the reconciliation bill. Back in 1974, the Senate and House were alarmed over the growing deficits. They were microscopic compared to the type of deficits we have today, but still people said: Let's not get on that path of expanding the national debt. Let's create a real budgeting process where we lay out a vision at the front end so that the bills that are passed by the committees--the revenue bills and the policy bills--fit into that budget framework so we will have control over the result, whether it is a surplus that we want or whether we want to spend more and run up some deficit because, perhaps, it is a year in which the economy is dipping, and we need to provide some stimulus. But the point was a front-end budgeting process into which we could put the effects of all of these different bills in the course of a year. So it was an act designed to bring planning for revenue and spending levels into a coherent framework by laying out a budget and holding committees accountable to that budget vision. In this Budget Act, Congress created two significant tools for very different and separate purposes. One of them is section 312 of the Budget Act. Section 312 says that the Committee on the Budget will establish estimates of ``the levels of new budget authority, outlays, direct spending, new entitlement authority, and revenues for a fiscal year.'' So there is the framework. And to clarify, for most of the work that is done, the committee depends on the Joint Committee on Taxation for revenue projections and depends on the Congressional Budget Office for the cost of programs. But this section in 312 has also been interpreted to give the chair of the Budget Committee the authority to resolve complex scoring questions that come up or technical ambiguities that come up on particular programs for particular revenue measures during normal legislating. I emphasize ``during normal legislating.'' It has nothing to do with reconciliation. Now, Congress created a second tool that was specifically about reconciliation. It is presented in the Budget Act and for a very special purpose. This section, reconciliation, was to be a filibuster- free pathway in the Senate for one reason and one reason alone: decreasing the deficit. And you can imagine: There is Robert Byrd, who is the champion of the filibuster, who wants everything to have to go through a supermajority vote. It was often used against civil rights bills but was often used in other ways as well. And he would not let go of that for any reason, except the special role of reducing the national deficit. A hundred Senators said yes to that vision--all the Democrats, all the Republicans. So we have in that act a section 313, affectionately known as the Byrd rule, that lays out some very specific details for how to handle that reconciliation process. So we have section 312, normal budgeting, for nonreconciliation bills, and we have section 313 with special rules for reconciliation bills. Now, why am I coming to the floor to make such a detailed examination of issues that we wouldn't normally, well, wrestle with in a public forum. Well, the answer is because there is a plan afoot to take this tool that was always used and framed for regular budgeting to give a bit of flexibility to the Budget Committee through the Budget chair to resolve complex technicalities or abnormalities--issues--on small issues in normal bills and apply it in a completely corrupted version to section 313, overruling the foundation for reconciliation. Two very different tools, two very different purposes, but taking one and applying it to the other destroys the integrity of the reconciliation process, and I am going to lay that out in some detail. Section 312 allows the Budget chair to be a referee, to find bipartisan common ground to solve those ambiguities in the budgets-- but, again, never used in reconciliation because it wasn't intended for that purpose. Now, if you are going to have a special process to reduce deficits, you have to agree to have honest numbers. So, therefore, the act created the Congressional Budget Office to give us those honest numbers on what programs cost. And then you have honest integrity with numbers on revenue coming from the Joint Committee on Taxation. So you have these two institutions and a commitment in section 313 to honest budgeting numbers. So we will quit fooling ourselves, and we will quit fooling the public because the goal was to reduce the deficit, and you can't reduce the deficit if you are lying about what new measures will cost, whether it be revenue measures or they be policy measures. So it would completely defeat the purpose of reconciliation to simply have the Budget chair, who could resolve a technical ambiguity in a normal bill, be able to say: Well, that is such a power, I am going to transport it from a normal budget bill over to reconciliation. Instead of using honest numbers from CBO and from the Joint Committee on Taxation, I am going to just create my own hall of mirrors, my own smoke, and my own baseline to pretend that things don't cost what they really cost. It is a complete obliteration of the responsibility for integrity in the reconciliation process, which, again, was designed only to decrease the deficit. Now, there has been a bit of a journey for the House and Senate since 1974, and that foundation that this reconciliation process would only be used to reduce the deficit got blown up in 1996. My colleagues across the aisle decided that, well, they wanted to pass a big tax bill, and they knew they couldn't do it through regular order. So they repurposed a process designed to reduce the deficit and said it could also be used for a tax bill that increases the deficit. Well, that was a painful blow to fiscal responsibility because each and every one of their tax bills has vastly increased the deficit. But they retained two other things: a second pillar, that said, after 10 years, every title has to either be deficit-neutral or reduce the deficit--so after a 10-year frame--and that they would continue to use honest numbers. OK. Well, so now we have another situation where we rely here on using reconciliation not for its original purpose, to decrease the deficit, but for a tax bill. But pillars 2 and 3 were still in place up until this moment: no deficits in any title after 10 years and using honest numbers. But the chair of the Budget Committee is saying: I don't want to keep pillar 2 and 3. I don't want to keep pillar 2 that says everything after 10 years has to be deficit-neutral or deficit reduction; and I don't want to use honest numbers because it lets the world see how expensive this bill is and kind of destroys our reputation for fiscal responsibility. So we want to create some magic math, some false baseline, to pretend that the bill does not have a lot of deficit. Well, this is a huge mistake, and I am just here to say: Let's not let this happen. Let's not destroy the second and third pillars. Let's not destroy the second pillar which says: no deficits after 10 years. Let's not destroy the third pillar which says: We use honest numbers from the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office. There are two reasons that my colleague who chairs the Budget Committee wants to take this provision from section 312 for normal budgeting that gives some flexibility to the Budget chair and bring it over and create this new fake baseline so this bill doesn't look like it will run up the debt that it obviously runs up. One is that he wants to make the tax cuts permanent, meaning deficits will be run far beyond the 10-year period. And, second, he wants the American people to believe that this is not going to create huge, massive, additional deficits and debt. Well, those are not good reasons. We should all work together to maintain the second and third pillars of no deficits after 10 years-- the third pillar that, in fact, we will use honest numbers and not lie to ourselves and not lie to the American people about the cost of a bill. He calls this new, fake baseline ``current policy baseline.'' And part of the little twist is to say: Hey, the law says that a tax provision ends, but we will pretend that it doesn't say that--the law doesn't say that--and it just continues on forever. And since we are now pretending that the law was written differently than it was really written, it is really not a new provision that costs anything. Because a lot of these new extensions or new tax provisions cost because they reduce the revenues, we will just pretend they don't. But you know it is that kind of pretending that got us into this trouble to begin with. That is what the 1974 bill was about. Let's quit lying to ourselves. Let's quit lying to the public. Let's quit pretending we are not creating deficits when we are. Let's have honest, honest budgeting. So the irony is that you can even see how this philosophy fails even within the Republican bill, because if this philosophy that every bill or measure that the law says ends actually continues, then there would be no reason to have in the bill what my Republican colleagues have put in the bill, which is that they end a bunch of tax provisions in the middle of the 10-year period so they can say the bill costs less. So the old laws that are going to expire, we pretend they continue. But the new laws that we are creating at this very moment, that end within the 10 years, we pretend they actually end. You can see how phony this situation is, and we need to do better. Now, let me just go through how modest the use of section 312, in general budgeting, was. The first is, it was always bipartisan. It was bipartisan in 2017. It was bipartisan in 2023 and 2024 and 2025. Each of these times, it was bipartisan. But this new proposal is to use it in this partisan fashion. It is a complete deviation from a Budget chair working out a gnarly problem in order to be able to figure out how we should really resolve how this individual policy should be evaluated, and, instead, turn it into an instrument in which you fake the numbers and do it in a partisan way. So that is not the only way that this would break protocol. The second is that each time it was used, it was used on a very narrow provision. It was routine--in 2017, on the Crime Victims Fund; on the Power Marketing Administrations; on the preventing of double counting of a dairy program; on adjustments to the Fiscal Responsibility Act. It was always on a very narrow provision, not creating a whole new baseline out of thin air in order to fake the numbers over deficits and debt. One example in this is 2017, when Republican Chair Mike Enzi directed CBO to use the original current law baseline for the Crime Victims Fund, rather than a new baseline with updated numbers, because, essentially, if you have a baseline at the start of the year and then, a few months pass, the numbers change slightly. And if you keep inventing or having to use a new baseline that is changing just, like, small amounts, it makes no sense because they aren't significant changes. So it was an issue to say: No. Let's go ahead and use the baseline from the start of the year rather than updating it every single time that every week goes by. So a narrow, very narrow, issue. And, as I noted before, it was to resolve an ambiguity. Each time it has been used, it has been to resolve an ambiguity. But, in this case, it is to create ambiguity; it is to create confusion; it is to create smoke and mirrors; it is to create a phony baseline to lie to ourselves and to the public about what this bill costs, and that is just wrong. Let me give you an example. In 2000, a deal had been struck on how to score activities of the Power Marketing Administrations, but over the years, the Congressional Budget Office had started scoring the program differently from the 2000 arrangement. In 2023 and 2024, Senate Budget Chair Sheldon Whitehouse and House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington invoked section 312 to have the CBO remember and observe the original 2000 agreement. It was the example of section 312 being used to resolve a technical ambiguity. Let's look at one other way that it has been used in the past. It was never used on reconciliation. It was not used on reconciliation in 2017. It was not used when they addressed the Power Marketing Administrations. That was not in reconciliation. Preventing the double counting of a dairy program is not in reconciliation. Adjusting the Fiscal Responsibility Act was not in reconciliation. This provision wasn't designed for reconciliation. Reconciliation has its own set of rules in section 313, and those rules say each provision--the word is ``provision''--in the proposed law is accounted for in terms of estimating accurately through these numbers from the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation what its real effect will be. So that is the story, and I will give you an example. In 2023, Senator Whitehouse and Representative Arrington again worked together to resolve an issue in the farm bill. The CBO was scoring the dairy program and reducing the costs of extending the program by $105 million over 10 years, but the CBO didn't include it in the new farm bill's baseline, meaning the Ag Committee has to pay for the program a second time out of the funding allocated to their committee. That didn't make any sense so they fixed it. That is an example--very narrow, bipartisan--and we are talking small numbers. Let's turn to those issues over small numbers. Well, they aren't so small when you think about this in terms of our normal trip to the grocery store--$73 million or less than $200 million. One case in the Fiscal Responsibility Act--again, in a bipartisan, specific provision-- is $2.8 billion. What is this bill about? What is this fake baseline being used to hide in this case? It is $37 trillion of additional debt. Again, this is absolutely a crime against fiscal responsibility. It is blowing up the last two pillars from the 1974 Act: no additional debt or deficit past 10 years of any title; the honest use of numbers from the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation. It is taking a provision to allow the taking on of small ambiguities to be wrestled with in a bipartisan fashion and resolved--taking that flexibility--and using it in the wholesale destruction of responsible budgeting. So let's not do this. Colleagues, the deficit now, annually, is sizable. It is about 6 percent of our gross domestic product. Remember the end of the Clinton administration? We were raising in revenue about 21 percent of GDP. We were spending about 21 percent. We were actually running a surplus. Now we are spending 6 percent more of GDP than we are bringing in as revenue. We are no longer bringing in 21 percent of GDP in revenue. We are bringing in 17 percent. We are no longer spending 21 percent. We are spending 23 percent. This bill, by the way, will crank up that gap between revenue and spending even more as time passes. It is a pathway to not only destroying the current programs that my colleague from Massachusetts was talking about--16 million people losing healthcare, 4 million children going hungry to give tax breaks to billionaires. It is not only a pathway to destroy current programs, but it runs up debt to destroy the ability to provide fundamental programs in housing and healthcare and education for the next generation, and that is wrong. That is why I say to you colleagues on both sides of the aisle: Let's be honest about the numbers. Let's not corrupt the process by bringing a measure that belongs in the regular budgeting world, not in the reconciliation world, in order to destroy reconciliation as a process that will not increase deficits after 10 years and will honestly convey the effect of each provision in the bill as to whether it raises revenue or spends money. Preserve honest budgeting. Let's do that. It will serve us well. It will serve the Nation well.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. I am going to talk about a different aspect of the reconciliation bill, but before I do so, my heart is with the people of Minnesota, who have lost Melissa and Mark Hortman. Melissa was speaker of the house. As a former speaker of the house in Oregon, I know the type of effort that goes into coordinating a legislative session and commitment to so many different policy issues, striving to build a better State, a better State of Minnesota. And Melissa and Mark are no longer with us because of an act of hate, an act of violence, something that so goes against the vision of free speech and free assembly in America, where we can come together and argue our points and disagree profoundly with each other, but out of that big stew of ideas comes policies that hopefully take us forward, not violence that takes us to the grave. So, again, my heart is with Melissa and Mark's family and the people of Minnesota. And I hope we can all work together to end the type of rhetoric, the type of framing that suggests that on the differences that we have, though large on policy, neither side is coming from an evil point of view. We bring differences that have to be worked out in legislatures like the U.S. Senate.