Scalise: Six Months After Becoming Law, Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is Helping Rebuild the Middle Class

WASHINGTON, D.C.—At today’s House Leadership stakeout, Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) highlighted the many ways the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is working to benefit all Americans, not only by giving 90 percent of Americans a tax cut, but by increasing opportunity and access to the American Dream. Whip Scalise also stressed the work Congress continues to do to combat the opioid crisis, pass the Farm Bill, and find a path forward on immigration that fits the key pillars laid out by President Trump.

Click here or on the image above to watch his remarks.

On combating the opioid crisis:

“We started where we left off last week, and that is addressing this opioid crisis that’s plaguing our nation.

“There are a number of bills that we’re going to be packaging together this week that confront this problem in many different ways. It allows the federal government to be more effective and efficient at addressing this crisis, as well as helping local communities where this problem really has hit every single part of our nation.”

On the six month anniversary of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act becoming law:

“Then we move on to looking at this great success we’ve had, the great work that Chairman Brady and his committee did at putting together a Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that is working for this American economy.

“Rebuilding the middle class, that’s something President Trump set out to do from the very beginning. He said not only do we want to cut taxes to make our country competitive again, which we had lost our competitive edge as Americans, but he also wanted to make sure that people that wanted to get a chance to have the American Dream, to be able to get real opportunity, would be able to succeed as well. And all of that is working even better than expected and I do agree that more is going to come from this.

“And the good news is, as we just saw two weeks ago, today there are more companies looking for workers—more job openings than there are people looking for jobs. That’s a real important sign, but it also shows us why it’s important that we get this farm bill passed this week.”

On passing the Farm Bill: 

“Not only does the farm bill have real important continuation of laws for our nation’s farmers, so that we can continue to be the leading breadbasket for the world, but it also has reforms to our welfare system that say if somebody is looking for a job, they ought to be helped, and we can provide great career opportunities and great job training for them.

“But if there’s a job opening right now and somebody’s able to work, they shouldn’t be able to sit on a broken welfare system. It’s time for them to be a part of this growing economy and get back in the workforce.

“So these work requirements that we have in the farm bill are equally important to getting this economy growing as the important farm policy.”

On finding a path forward on immigration policy:

“And then I want to thank President Trump for coming to our conference last night and being very clear, number one, that he wants to fix our broken immigration system. I don’t think anybody’s surprised about that; it was a pillar of his campaign. He said he wanted to build the wall, and the reasons he wanted to build the wall is so that we could get back to rule of law and securing our border like every other country does.

“Look, we’re a nation that embraces immigrants. We let in over a million people a year legally today; by far the most generous nation on immigration policy in the world. But there are broken parts of our immigration laws.

“And so we worked to put together a bill. Initially there was the Goodlatte-McCaul bill, and the votes weren’t there to pass that bill. Really good policy in that bill, but our objective is not just to have good policy in a bill, it’s to pass a bill and ultimately to get a bill on President Trump’s desk that he will sign.

“And so we went back to work, working with some of the same people as well as other members of our conference that have differing views on immigration. And we worked closely with President Trump to develop a new border security bill. Chairman Goodlatte and Chairman McCaul are the leads on this as well, and it has some of those components.

“Frankly, if you look at the triggers to make sure that the wall is built, there’s even more strong components in this second bill that ensure that the wall will be built.

“While then you take existing visas, this visa lottery system that everybody that looks at it agrees is bad legal policy, to date, under current law, 55,000 people a year come in to our country where their names are literally plucked out of a hat. Let’s move that to a merit-based system.

“And it allows us to solve the DACA problem without adding one new visa. Not one additional person will come into our country legally. We still let in a million people, but we move away from this random system to a merit-based system by reforming parts of our broken immigration law.”

“And then on this final point, and I think as the country has seen, as it’s been highlighted in the last week, the problem that we have with current law relating to separation of children and their parents. This goes back to a 2008 law that Congress passed, plus court decisions like the Flores decision on top of it, that forced this policy. This is law and we want to change the law; we don’t think it’s good law. In fact, President Trump agrees with us and he has called on Congress to work to fix this law.

“By the way, before this crisis was highlighted in the media, we had already started to fix it and it was in our original draft of this bill. This bill not only addresses our immigration system, but it ensures that we reunite families so parents and kids come back together.”