House Speaker Nancy Pelsoi hailed President Joe Biden’s roughly $2 trillion economic agenda as “historic, transformative and larger than anything we have done before,” as the chamber was poised to pass the legislation Friday morning.
The House reconvened for the vote Friday after Republican leader Kevin McCarthy delayed action with a more than eight-hour floor speech that lasted into the early morning.
McCarthy used his privilege as minority leader to camp out on the House floor just after 8:30 p.m. Thursday in a speech criticizing the tax and spending bill in particular—and Democrats in general—that stretched until just past 5 a.m.
Flanked by his GOP allies and heckled by Democrats, the California Republican called the bill the “single most reckless and irresponsible spending bill in our nation’s history.”
Key House Democrat Floats 2-Track Path To Speed Debt-Limit Work
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021. The House Budget chair this week said that he urged Speaker Pelosi and other party leaders to act quickly to raise the federal debt ceiling after the Treasury said a default is possible after Dec. 15.
Pelosi began her remarks with a dig at McCarthy, saying that “as a courtesy to my colleagues I will be brief.”
Debate in the House opened Thursday as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its estimate that Biden’s signature economic package doesn’t contain enough tax increases to pay for itself.
The determination countered the Biden administration’s analysis, but moderate Democrats who had been holding out to see the CBO score said they were ready to back the bill, clearing the path to passage.
“While I continue to have reservations about the overall size of the legislation—and concerns about certain policy provisions that are extraneous or unwise—I believe there are too many badly-needed investments in this bill not to advance it in the legislative process,” Florida Representative Stephanie Murphy, one of the moderate holdouts, said in a statement.
The CBO found that the House legislation contains $1.636 trillion of spending, while raising $1.269 trillion in revenue over 10 years. That would add $367 billion to U.S. budget deficits over the decade.
The Biden administration and Democratic leaders have long been prepared for the CBO to find a deficit increase. The White House produced its own rival score for the bill showing a $112.5 billion deficit decrease, when its estimate of revenue gains from stricter tax enforcement is included.
A key reason the CBO finds the bill does not pay for itself involves estimates of how much increased tax collection can result from expanding the Internal Revenue Service’s budget. While the White House has projected that increasing the number of enforcement agents at the Internal Revenue Service would yield $400 billion in higher revenue, the CBO does not agree.