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unidentified
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The House is in recess, but will return later to debate legislation that would repeal Biden administration regulations, including a role expediting bank merger reviews and another seeking to overturn a role limiting toxic air pollutants from industrial facilities. | |
| Live coverage of the House continues here on C-SPAN when members return later today. | ||
| Live to Capitol Hill now, where House Republican leaders are speaking to reporters after their meeting with President Trump on the tax and spending bill that they hope to pass by the end of this week. | ||
| We join this news conference live in progress. | ||
| In fact, nearly 1,000 organizations, nearly 1,000 organizations have already expressed support for the policies within the bill. | ||
| The Job Creators Network described our reconciliation bill as, quote, exactly what the country needs to jumpstart the economy and guarantee the safety and prosperity of Americans for decades to come, end quote. | ||
| The National Association of Manufacturers said of this landmark legislation, quote, we need certainty now, and this is the moment to deliver one big, beautiful bill that lets us compete and win, end quote. | ||
| Their warning could not be more true. | ||
| The time to get this done is now. | ||
| Not only does this legislation make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent and implement no tax on tips and overtime pay, it also unleashes American energy, cuts waste, fraud, and abuse, and allows President Trump to continue his successful deportation and border security operations. | ||
| And that's only naming a handful of things this bill accomplishes. | ||
| Our reconciliation bill delivers on President Trump's America First agenda, and it does so while saving the American people over $1.6 trillion. | ||
| The one big, beautiful bill is truly a once-in-a-generation chance to get America back on track. | ||
| House Republicans must seize this opportunity and quickly, as my good friend Jason Smith just said, failure is not an option. | ||
| With that, I turn it over to our leader, Steve Scales. | ||
| Thank you, Whip. | ||
| Well, this morning, President Trump had a strong and clear message to a packed House Republican conference. | ||
| And that is after months of long, intense discussions over really important differences and issues. | ||
| This one big, beautiful bill has come through the committee process, and it's time to end the negotiations, unify behind this bill, and get it passed on to the Senate. | ||
| And what President Trump really talked about was the things that we all talked about during the campaign, how important it was to prevent a tax increase on working-class families. | ||
| Low- and middle-income families would see a large, painful tax increase if this bill were not to happen. | ||
| And look, we all know every Democrat's going to vote no. | ||
| They've bragged about it. | ||
| They are fighting tooth and nail to stop us from preventing a tax increase. | ||
| Democrats also made it clear they want open borders, and they sure don't want the provisions of this bill, as Chairman Green and Chairman Jordan talked about, that will give our Border Patrol agents the tools they've been asking for for years to finally have the technology to be able to compete with the drug cartels and have better tools than the cartels of Mexico have to secure our border, | ||
| to complete construction of the wall, to deport criminals who came to America to harm our citizens. | ||
| And President Trump is finally following through, following through on that promise to secure our border, but he needs more tools to do it. | ||
| Something we also ran on was producing more energy in America. | ||
| And this bill reverses the Biden-era policies that shut off American energy, making our country more dependent on hostile nations, giving Putin billions of dollars a month more to fund his war in Ukraine by shutting American energy off. | ||
| This bill opens it back up again. | ||
| It generates more money. | ||
| It generates opportunity for families. | ||
| It generates higher wages for hardworking taxpayers. | ||
| It will generate real economic growth to lower inflation, to lower costs at the grocery store, to lower interest rates, all the things that 77 million voters gave us a mandate to go deliver on. | ||
| I know we've got a few final issues to resolve, but as President Trump said today, it's time to stop the talking, and we need action. | ||
| We need to deliver for those families who have been waiting way too long for the results that are in this One Big Beautiful bill. | ||
| A lot of great policies to deliver for those families is just waiting. | ||
| We're going to deliver this week. | ||
| We're going to bring the bill. | ||
| Failure absolutely is not an option. | ||
| We've got to get this done. | ||
| The man leading that charge here in the House, who President Trump had some great words about, is our Speaker, Mike Johnson. | ||
| Thank you, Leader. | ||
| Thanks to all these great leaders standing behind me. | ||
| I tell you what, we're in a very good mood this morning. | ||
| We had an epic time on the Hill. | ||
| I don't think there's ever been a time when I've been more proud to be a Republican, to be an American. | ||
| We're on the verge of making history here, and everybody feels it. | ||
| In that room today with President Trump, it was filled with standing ovations and high energy and high excitement because everybody senses what's happening here. | ||
| It was a great esprit de corps, and we're blessed to serve under and with a president who understands the necessity of these relationships and is willing to roll his sleeves up and come stand in the trenches to be a part of this excitement of what's happening. | ||
| From the outset of the budget reconciliation process, we have sought to enact President Trump's full agenda, not just parts of it. | ||
| And that's why we call it the One Big Beautiful Bill, because really everything is sandwiched into this. | ||
| The American people were sick of wasteful spending and high inflation and open borders and weakness on the world stage. | ||
| And you know what we're working towards right now? | ||
| The opposite of all those things. | ||
| President Trump has used his executive authority in historic ways to stop much of the bleeding. | ||
| But Congress has a role and a responsibility to step in at this stage to stitch up and mend those wounds for good. | ||
| And that's what this legislation is about. | ||
| We cannot leave the American people waiting or wanting. | ||
| The One Big Beautiful bill enshrines into law and funds President Trump's promises. | ||
| There's a lot of them because we had to make them because after the last four years, everything was an absolute disaster. | ||
| So he's promised to cut wasteful spending and save taxpayers money. | ||
| Check. | ||
| That's what we're doing. | ||
| Make permanent historic tax cuts and prevent the largest tax hike in U.S. history. | ||
| Check. | ||
| That's what we're doing. | ||
| Invest in our national defense and homeland security in a fiscally responsible manner. | ||
| That too. | ||
| Reestablish American energy dominance and basically restore common sense to the government. | ||
| That's what the American people elected him to do. | ||
| This bill does all that and so much more. | ||
| And as a reminder, we're right on schedule. | ||
| Our House budget resolution gave instructions to 11 separate committees in the House to write their portions of the budget reconciliation bill, and they did it right on target. | ||
| Every instructed committee exceeded those targets, in fact, that they were given through our resolution. | ||
| That means the committees that were told to spend have spent less. | ||
| And the committees that were told to save actually found more savings than they were targeting. | ||
| And the bill delivered more than $1.5 trillion in savings mandated by the budget resolution. | ||
| That is historic. | ||
| There's never been anything like it before. | ||
| And we're proud to deliver it. | ||
| This is a whole of Congress response to a whole of government problem. | ||
| And the results of all this work for over a year has now come to fruition. | ||
| Every House Republican has engaged in the process. | ||
| The White House has been involved, as you saw most recently within the last hour. | ||
| The Senate has been involved. | ||
| Constituent groups from around the country made their voices heard. | ||
| And that's why, as the whip said, nearly 1,000 organizations have issued enthusiastic public endorsements about this legislation. | ||
| I don't think there's ever been anything like that. | ||
| No legislation has ever garnered that much support. | ||
| It's really something that we never promised it would be easy. | ||
| We never thought this was going to be an effortless process because when you're doing this much in a bill this large and complicated and comprehensive, there's a lot of opinions in the room. | ||
| We respect that in the Republican Party. | ||
| We're people of deep principle and settled philosophy, and you're going to get differences of opinion when you work through these things. | ||
| That's part of it. | ||
| We welcome it. | ||
| Nothing in Congress is ever easy, especially when you have small margins. | ||
| But we are going to land this plane and deliver this. | ||
| And we're proud of what we've accomplished together. | ||
| Every member of the conference can be proud of this legislation in the end. | ||
| It's truly a nation-shaping piece of legislation. | ||
| You heard some of the highlights here. | ||
| Let me just give you a couple of things that haven't been mentioned yet or can't be mentioned enough. | ||
| Some of the big conservative wins in the bill that are common sense wins from the American people. | ||
| Putting Americans first. | ||
| I love what Chairman Jordan said. | ||
| This is really simple. | ||
| We're delivering. | ||
| We're doing what we said we were going to do. | ||
| When you talk about putting Americans first, we're making the largest investment in border security in over a generation, providing nearly $150 billion to secure our border and deport illegal aliens. | ||
| We are cracking down on illegal aliens receiving Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, and tax benefits that are intended for the citizens of this country. | ||
| We're shifting the cost of adjudication in the immigration system from the American taxpayer to the aliens themselves. | ||
| And we're imposing a fee on remittance payments to foreign countries by illegal aliens. | ||
| Second category: providing historic tax relief. | ||
| We're going to eliminate taxes on tips and overtime and provide tax relief for seniors on Social Security. | ||
| We're going to eliminate taxes on auto loan interest if that car is made in the U.S. Lowering the cost of borrowing from America's farmers and providing tax relief for job creators. | ||
| Another category: bringing back common sense. | ||
| I mean, that's the continuing theme here that we all talk about. | ||
| We're repealing and rolling back over $500 billion in funding for the radical Green New Deal policies from Biden's so-called Inflation Reduction Act. | ||
| We call it the Inflation Act. | ||
| We're ending Biden's war on American energy. | ||
| We're banning Medicaid dollars from going to transgender surgeries for minors. | ||
| We're canceling Biden's student loan repayment program. | ||
| We're increasing university endowment tax for these big woke institutions. | ||
| We're revoking tax-agem status for nonprofits that materially support terrorism. | ||
| We're doubling the jail time for leaks of confidential taxpayer information. | ||
| We're eliminating big businesses' ability to engage in woke PR campaigns to facilitate refundability for green energy projects. | ||
| We're incentivizing the federal workforce to be at-will employees, and we're repealing Biden's disastrous EV mandate. | ||
| The stakes couldn't be any higher. | ||
| We could go on and on. | ||
| It's over a thousand pages. | ||
| I could list all the wins, but we only have so much time. | ||
| Despite the overwhelming popularity of so many of these provisions in this bill, the guys on the other side of the Congressional Democrats have refused to engage with us in this process at all. | ||
| They're not going to vote for anything that I just listed for you. | ||
| And make no mistake about it. | ||
| This week they're going to vote for. | ||
| They're going to vote for the largest increase in taxes in American history. | ||
| They're going to vote against border security, against American energy dominance, and against broadly popular policies such as work requirements to shore up Medicaid. | ||
| President Trump's one big beautiful bill is going to require one big beautiful vote. | ||
| And this is our shot. | ||
| Best chance. | ||
| This is our best chance that we'll ever have in our lifetimes, in any of us, in any of our lifetimes, to deliver on the mandate handed down by so many Americans. | ||
| 77 million Americans voted for President Trump, more than that. | ||
| And in fact, it's exactly what Republicans were sent to Washington to accomplish, as Chairman Jordan said. | ||
| By passing this legislation, wages will increase as much as $11,600. | ||
| Take-home pay for the typical American family with two kids will increase by $13,300 a year. | ||
| As many as 4.2 million full-time equivalent jobs will be created because of this legislation. | ||
| But if we fail, here's the alternative. | ||
| Here's what the Democrats are going to vote for. | ||
| Every American citizen seeing a 22% tax hike. | ||
| 26 million businesses would see a tax increase of 43 percent. | ||
| We'd lose nearly 6 million jobs in the economy and about a trillion dollars in GDP by some estimates. | ||
| The Border Patrol and ICE would lack the resources to detain and deport criminal illegal aliens, and 1.4 million illegals would continue to receive taxpayer funding of health care. | ||
| Look, we could go on and on this morning about finishing the border wall and accomplishing all these things that we've talked about. | ||
| But we're just going to end it here and tell you that failure is simply not an option. | ||
| We have to get this done. | ||
| I told President Trump on the campaign trail that I believed he could be the most consequential president of the modern era and arguably maybe one of the most in all of U.S. history, maybe top two or three. | ||
| I think this is the way we deliver that. | ||
| And by extension, that means that this Congress can be one of the most consequential in history. | ||
| We do not take that lightly. | ||
| And despite the challenges and the nonstop media criticism and the historically small House majority, we are right on track to deliver. | ||
| And that's what you'll see this House do this week. | ||
| Now, we're not going to take a lot of questions this morning because we've already done a ton of media with you in the halls. | ||
| The President gave you a lot, we gave you a lot. | ||
| What we're leaving to do right now is gather up the small subgroups in the House Republican Conference and tie up the remaining loose ends. | ||
| I'm very confident that we'll be able to do that. | ||
| There's a great esprit de corps in the room this morning because everybody knows what's at stake. | ||
| All the things we've talked about here this morning, we are going to get this done. | ||
| So this is a rare thing. | ||
| I'm going to say hold the questions and let me go get back to work so we can finish this thing up. | ||
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unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Thanks for being here this morning. | ||
| Thanks for taking this question. | ||
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unidentified
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I can take your questions. |