During a House Republican Leadership press briefing on Tuesday, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) spoke about the House Republican budget bill.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you, Whip. This is a really important week, not just in the House, but for the ability for Congress to join with President Trump and deliver on that agenda that we all ran on.
00:12We all know what President Trump said at his rallies, talking about getting America back on track, securing the border, locking in tax rates, no tax on tips, producing more energy in America, getting rules and regulations under control.
00:26All of those things are in this one big, beautiful bill that we have been focused on for more than a year in the House.
00:34But President Trump's not the only one that ran on all of those objectives.
00:38We did, too. House Republicans ran on those same things.
00:43We need to follow through now and get the job done.
00:47And nobody said it would be easy.
00:50It wasn't easy to get the budget passed a few weeks ago.
00:53Some, in fact, not necessarily saying anybody in this room, but some said the bill might not pass.
01:00And yet we passed the bill without a vote to spare because we know our margins are narrow.
01:06But our commitment is firm on getting this done because, as the Whip said, failure is not an option.
01:14And so today is no different where we are than where we were the same week that we passed the budget over a month ago.
01:22There are members that have questions.
01:24That's not a surprise.
01:26On any big bill we've dealt with, going back to 2017, when we did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, there were members who had questions.
01:33And our job is to continue answering those questions while moving the ball forward.
01:38But it's critical that we advance this agenda, that we don't delay, because passing the budget doesn't end the process.
01:46It starts the reconciliation process.
01:50We can't even begin reconciliation until the budget's done.
01:53And if some people think we can just wait for the Senate to catch up to the House, we could talk all day about the fact that they're not against what we're trying to do.
02:03They just haven't gotten to that point.
02:05The months of meetings and negotiations that we've had in the House, the back and forth with CBO that we have done, which, by the way, has yielded some really big improvements in the CBO scoring.
02:18Some of it is just coming in from the initial scoring from the CBO because we disagreed with their numbers, but we didn't just yell and scream.
02:27We went back to them, and we're now getting CBO to give us better numbers on the savings that we'll achieve from things like work requirements and some of the other reforms that we all agree upon.
02:38But we cannot delay, the country can't afford for us to delay a month or longer to wait on the Senate getting where we are.
02:49We've got to continue to move forward, and the bill that we have before us allows us to do that.
02:55It allows us to achieve all the savings that we laid out in the House bill.
03:00It allows us to achieve all the border security we laid out.
03:03It allows us to achieve all the things we want to do to stabilize the tax code.
03:07But think about this, you know, because people are watching the markets, and that's understandable.
03:13There is trillions of dollars on the sidelines, and I've heard this from so many people in different industries all across the country,
03:21trillions of dollars that are not looking at tariffs, that are looking to see what Congress does on the tax code.
03:27And they're not going to make those investments until they see a stabilized tax code that doesn't expire at the end of this year,
03:34but in fact gets renewed for 10 years, ideally permanently, to lock in tax rates so you don't have a massive tax hike on the country.
03:43And we need to remove that uncertainty.
03:46The President can't do that.
03:48Congress needs to do that, House and Senate combined.
03:51So the President is all in.
03:52You saw his true social post yesterday.
03:55We're all in as well.
03:56And, yes, members will continue to raise questions.
03:59We're going to continue working through that process.
04:01But we can't stop the advancement of our agenda.
04:05Democrats don't want this economy to turn around, but we do.
04:08We ran on it.
04:09We're committed to it.
04:10And our leader in that effort is our Speaker, Mike Johnson.
04:15Rarely do I get to raise the podium level.