Opposing Speaker Pelosi's Liberal Wish List

I wanted to write to you and share my thoughts on some of the recent legislation pushed by House Democrats.

Last week, I opposed H.R. 1319, the hyper-partisan $1,900,000,000,000 ($1.9 trillion) spending wish list proposed by President Joe Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The legislation was not a stimulus plan, and it was not "COVID-19 relief." This legislation was not a targeted and temporary approach to help get individuals back to work, children back in classrooms, and crush the COVID-19 virus. Speaker Pelosi and congressional Democrats chose to push aside their Republican colleagues, despite both parties working together previously to pass five pieces of legislation to help our nation address and recover from this pandemic.

This is perhaps most evident in the bill's most expensive provisions, which have absolutely nothing to do with combatting COVID-19. The disastrous 1.4 million job-killing minimum wage hike, an $86 billion bailout of private pensions, and over $100 million in special pork transportation programs in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's home city of San Francisco are but a few examples of mandates and policies that have nothing whatsoever to do with ending the pandemic and restoring our way of life. Of the $1.9 trillion that the bill spends, less than 9 percent of the spending actually goes to defeat the virus by supporting public health priorities like vaccine distribution. Even worse, this legislation will increase our deficit so much, it will trigger automatic cuts of $17.2 billion in Medicare meant to support Pennsylvania's seniors over the next decade.

This legislation sends money to places that it does not need to go. Ways and Means Committee Republicans released an analysis that nearly one-third of the $150 billion Coronavirus Relief Fund previously provided to state and local governments remains unspent. And yet, congressional Democrats want to send an additional $350 billion to states, some of which are running enormous budget surpluses. Nearly $1 trillion in funds from previous COVID relief legislation still remains unspent.

This bill also sends stimulus checks to individuals who never experienced job loss or financial impact during the pandemic. Separately, Ways and Means Committee Democrats blocked my amendment to incentivize the hiring of long-term unemployed individuals. At the same time, this underlying legislation may pay individuals more to be unemployed than they would earn while working.

This legislation also does not act with urgency. Take for example, the $130 billion in funding for our schools, only $6 billion would be spent this year. The other $124 billion will be spent over the next seven years. Getting children safely back in school needs to happen now, not seven years from now.

Congress could do much better than this bloated, greedy, and hyper-partisan $1.9 trillion spending wish list. Both parties could have come together to create a better bill, including many of the commonsense and good-faith proposals Republicans have offered throughout the committees' process.

Many House Republicans, myself included, worked with House Democrats to advance previous COVID-19 legislation. House Republicans have shown time and time again that we will work with our colleagues across the aisle, but today's purely partisan legislation tells us that Democrats will not reciprocate and work with House Republicans. The American people deserve better.

This week in Washington, House Democrats plowed ahead again with two highly partisan bills and continued to shut out House Republican's common-sense amendments. Last week Speaker Pelosi continued her power play of progressiveness by passing a $1.9 trillion package filled with the left's agenda. This week she further attempted to solidify Democrats' control by drastically increasing the control Washington will have over the states' elections, making the House vote in the dead of the night for the second week in a row, while most Americans were sleeping. This is wrong and no way to move our nation forward.

For an update on what happened in Washington this week, watch my week in review video.