releases: http://ellison.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/transcript-of-rep-ellison-floor-speech-in-opposition-to-omnibus-bill
Data license: MIT · Data source: dwillis/congress-press
This data as json
| url | title | date | year | month | party | chamber | state | member_name | bioguide_id | domain | scraper | source | date_source | text | has_text | collected_at | updated_at |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| http://ellison.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/transcript-of-rep-ellison-floor-speech-in-opposition-to-omnibus-bill | Transcript of Rep. Ellison Floor Speech in Opposition to Omnibus Bill | 2015-12-18 | 2015 | 2015-12 | Democrat | House | MN | Keith Ellison | E000288 | ellison.house.gov | legacy | Let me thank the Gentlelady. I just want to say, you've done an awesome job holding down the Progressive Caucus special order hour. It's been to the benefit of everyone who listens. So, Bonnie Watson Coleman, thank you very much. Mr. speaker, it's important for all of us involved in this debate and for every American to understand a concept known as Starve the Beast. It's a conservative concept and what it really means, and I would like everybody just to be clear, what it means is that the conservative wing in our country wants to shrink the size of government where a big multinational oil company will never have to worry about an E.P.A. regulator because the government will have so little money, they won't have an E.P.A. regulator. The Starve the Beast concept means that a big bank won't ever have to worry about a bank regulator saying, hey, Mr. banker, you cannot do that with the American people's money, you have to be fair, you have to be proper and right with the people's money, because we'll shrink the government to be so small and so weak that there won't ever be that regulator who will say to the big banks, you cannot do that. Starve the Beast means that the largest private sector elements in our country can escape the accountability that the government provides through the people who inspect the water, the people who inspect the meat, the people who inspect the air quality. And when the public interest runs afoul of private gain, the private gain will prevail because the public won't have the wherewithal and resources to say, no, or you have to readjust this, or you have to operate at a higher standard of quality or anything like that. How do you get this Starve the Beast strategy in play? One thing you do is you have unpaid-for tax cuts and you get these tax cuts in place, they're all good you say, isn't this great, don't you want to stop paying taxes? Who likes paying taxes? Nobody. So people say, ok, good, we're going to get out of having to pay taxes, how nice. Then you don't pay for them. But then what happens to the budget? You've got a big hole in the budget because the revenue you were counting on is not there. Now, then, you use the public relations to say that raising taxes is just the worst thing anyone could ever do at any time in their life. They say this three letter word of tax, it's really a four letter word, I'll let your imagination go from there. Then, because they have been raising -- they made raising revenue utterly radioactive, all we can do is cut. So, what do we do? We cut education funding. We cut meals on wheels. We cut national institute of health. We cut, we cut, we cut. All this stuff that ordinary citizens rely on, until we get to the next round of tax cuts. By the way, when it comes to tax cuts and conservatives, if the economy is doing really well they need a tax cut. If it's doing really bad, of course the solution to that is what? And if we're just doing average, a tax cut. well, why not have a tax cut. almost always unpaid for. If you look at it over time, there's this pattern of irresponsible tax cuts, deficits, cuts to fix it, more tax cuts, deficits, more cuts to fix, never do we raise the revenue we need in order to meet the needs of our society. Who gets hurt? Not the country club set. People who need their government to function on their behalf. People who drink water every day. People who need some inspection of it. People who eat -- like to breathe clean air. People who might want to eat some meat that's been inspected. People who might be suffering from a serious disease like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, who might need the national institute of health to put forth a grant which will help. And so what does that all have to do with this discussion? Today, we just passed a bill that gave $600 billion worth of unpaid for tax cuts and made them permanent. We created a structural deficit even worse. Now, are they going to -- now they're going to give it back a little bit, a little bit. We give away $600 billion. They give us $30 billion. Voila, we're supposed to be happy about that. Here's a concept also known as Stockholm syndrome. They cut -- your captor holds you in control and you -- and then they, after they've held you a little while they give you a few little chips. Then they make you think when they give you even a little drop of water, that they're so benevolent. I will never forget that we never should have had sequester in the first place. We never should have had sequester. We had a hostage-taking situation here where republicans were literally threatening to default and renege on the full faith and credit of the United States by not -- by busting the debt ceiling. If we did not give them back all kinds of cuts and concessions, they would bust the debt ceiling. So then we entered into this deal where we had some cuts in the beginning and then with they did is, they said, we're going to set up a special committee three republicans in the house, three republicans in the senate, three republicans in the -- three democrats in the house, three democrats in the senate. This committee was supposed to come up with some cuts, targeted cuts to reduce the deficit. Which they said then was the worst thing in the world to ever have a deficit. And then they got in that committee and instead of holding their pledge to protect and defend the United States, they upheld their pledge to not raise taxes to serve political figures in our landscape. The whole committee failed and this was contemplated that if this committee cannot come up with targeted cuts, then there will be across the board cuts on both sides, also known as sequester. You know what? That committee really never had a chance. I wish we would have known then that that committee was always a sucker deal. Because they were clicking -- clinking the champagne glasses when that committee failed. They knew it was going to be across the board cuts. They said, it's going to be domestic discretionary, which you liberals like, and there's going to be cuts to the military which U.S. conservatives like, which is a gross overgeneralization and not exactly accurate, but what we never accounted for is that in 2001, the U.S. military budget was already -- was about $290 billion. By the time we got to sequester, it was about $700 billion. They could stand some cuts but the programs that the average citizen needed that were going to be ravaged could not. So you know, no sooner than the Sequester went into effect, we had people say, we can't do these military cuts, can't happen, won't happen. They had their friends and advocates even though they've been getting fatfor years. What about meals on wheels and education funding and environmental protection? That was attacked. So what does that mean about today? What it means about today is this. We have seen more tax things given away, I definitely think some of the things made permanent today are good tax treatments -- treatments. I'm for research and development. I'm certainly for child credit and EITC. But they should be paid for because if they're not paid for they're going to come out of another part of the budget next year. Oh and by the way, how come tax doesn't have to be paid for but anything regular people need must be paid for. Why do we have to find offsets for unemployment insurance but not things big business needs? Utter hypocrisy. I want to tell you, for the folks listening, that there is a very important thing that speaker John Boehner said when the Republicans took over a few years ago. He -- they came up with this big, ugly budget, to cut things Americans rely on to prosper and grow and they said, we wouldn't pass their house file one system of Mr. Boehner, speaker Boehner said, if they won't take it one big loaf at a time, they'll take it one slice at a time. Boy if that promise is not being kept. We have to turn around and say no to this starve the beast philosophy. We have to turn it around and start meeting the needs of the American people. Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society. If you don't like taxes, move to so mall ark you won't have to pay any. Good luck. But in America, where we pay some taxes that pays for schools that pays for clean water, pays for highways, pays for police, pays for fire, we've got to stop and stand against this false claim that there is something wrong with taxation. Let me just wrap up on one point. The gentlelady, I know we have to move on, we have other great speakers I want to hear from myself, but I want to make one quick comment as I listen to my colleagues and prepare to take my seat and that is one of t things we'll be dealing with tomorrow. Now you know, we talk about this tax extender thing and the omnibus as if it's two different things. It's one big thing. That's truth. One of the elements of the omnibus tomorrow, which is pretty ugly, is lifting the oil export ban on crude oil. According to the energy information administration, lifting the ban will increase oil industry profits by more than $20 billion annually. The big companies that make all these extra profits, I think that they have their favorites in the House of Representatives and not too many of them sit over here. Probably a lot of them sit over there. I will also say that it will cut refinery jobs, it will make us more dependent upon foreign oil and it will increase more fossil fuel. This is absolutely the wrong thing, the only virtue of it is that a small, tiny, select number of people are going to get $20 billion, and I'm disgusted by it. By the oil industry's own expectations that this will lead to more than 7,600 wells being drilled each year, more fossil fuel the largest report from the Center for American Progress says it will result in an additional 500 metric tons of carbon pollution each year, egive lit to 108 million more passenger cars or 138 more coal-fired power plants. It will cost jobs in refineries, it will do real damage to Americans, but this is on the docket tomorrow. Are there good things on the docket tomorrow? Yes, there are. I'll leave it to other people to decide whether it's worth Toyota pass a monstrosity like this. So i will say, always know that sometimes when you're in the game, somebody else playing has an overall long-term strategy and if you're just playing minute to minute, you are going to be no match for them. ... | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |