Local House members walk party lines for vote
WASHINGTON — After an all-nighter in the U.S. House of Representatives during which Republican leadership railed against the massive Democratic supported Build Back Better spending bill—President Joe Biden’s signature social and climate framework — the Congressional delegation from Western Pennsylvania reconvened early Friday to deliver a vote along party lines.
Pennsylvania Democrats hailed successfully moving the bill through the House as a step toward “improv[ing] the lives of most Americans in a number of ways,” according to U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, DForest Hills.
“I was proud to vote for it today,” he said in a statement.
Among the measures included in the $1.85 trillion budget reconciliation bill, Mr. Doyle highlighted tax credits for parents, funding for early childhood education and measures to curb climate change.
“Among the most significant provisions in the bill, for example, the Build Back Better Act would help millions of Americans by lowering child care costs for most working families, establishing universal preK for 3- and 4-year-olds, extending the expanded Child Tax Credit for 40 million households — cutting child poverty in half,” Mr. Doyle said.
Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Mt. Lebanon, also voted in favor, citing his support of extending lower health insurance costs and giving Medicare the ability to negotiate prescription drug prices.
“Really what this bill does is lock in all the savings on the health care exchanges that we had under the [American] Rescue Plan,” Mr. Lamb told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by phone Friday. “In Pennsylvania, people are saving like 80 to 100 bucks a month, all the way to those who make $100,000 a year, so it really has brought in the middle class in a big way.”
Local House Republicans joined their peers in voting against the “taxand-spend monstrosity,” in the words of Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Centre, that will “supercharge the IRS,” according to the GOP conference of the House Ways and Means Committee, on which Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Butler, serves.
“From day one, Republicans were pushed away from the negotiating table. Democrats decided to go it alone and did not include our constituents’ voices into these talks,” Mr. Kelly said in a statement.
Representatives John Joyce, R-Blair County, and Guy Reschenthaler, RPeters, also opposed the budget package, calling it a “spending spree” and citing record inflation.
“House Democrats again ignored the realities facing Pennsylvania families by jamming through a socialist spending spree that does nothing to address the skyrocketing prices my constituents are facing at the grocery store and at the gas pump,” said Rep. Joyce in a statement.
The arguments were made against the bill repeatedly from House floor throughout the night as Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, of California, spoke for 8½ hours — wrapping up at 5:10 a.m. — making his case that a provision to hire tens of thousands of IRS agents is unfair to Americans. He highlighted the late Thursday Congressional Budget Office report that stated the bill would add $160 billion to the national deficit over the next decade.
However, just hours later, House Democrats were applauding from the floor for moving forward Mr.Biden’s framework that they say is fully paid for by “changing the tax code to make big corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share,”Mr. Doyle said.
Mr. Lamb said the CBO figures are “the subject of debate” over how much a bolstered IRS could recoup in unpaid taxes — one of the paths through which the Democrats projected revenue for the bill.
“We’re trying to give [the IRS] more resources to go out to catch the corporations and wealthy who don’t pay,” Mr. Lamb said.
However, even if the bill carries the price tag reported by the CBO, “$160 billion over an entire decade is a small and very affordable number in light of what you’re getting for it. You’re getting preschool, the best child anti-poverty measure in a generation, cheaper health care, cheaper drugs, a lot for what we’re doing here,” Mr. Lamb.
The bill now heads to the U.S. Senate.