Skip to main content

Rep. Chip Roy On December 2019 Spending Bills

December 17, 2019

Rep. Chip Roy released the following statement Tuesday afternoon regarding his votes on H.R. 1158 – Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020: Defense; Commerce, Justice, Science; Financial Services; and Homeland Security and H.R. 1865 – Further Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2020: Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education; Agriculture; Energy and Water; Interior; Legislative Branch; Military Construction and Veterans Affairs; State and Foreign Operations; and Transportation and Housing:

Today, I voted against the two spending bills brought before the House of Representatives.

What you heard from many of my colleagues today is "what these bills provide" for the American people. Let me be clear: these bills do not provide anything. The American People provide. They work hard to produce for themselves and their families. The federal government borrows.

This bill borrows, and it borrows at a time when we can't afford to borrow another penny. Our nation is $23 trillion in debt, now racking up more than $100 million of debt per hour.

Just as they've done time and again this year, my Democratic colleagues released the text of these bills less than 24-hours before my colleagues and I were forced to vote on them. Thousands of pages for members and staff to read through with less than 24-hours. Think about that. There is no way on earth anyone could know everything in these bills. But that is how Democrat and Republican leadership like it.

These bills are troubling for several reasons. I'll name a few:

- Authorizes DHS to nearly double the available H-2B visas for the remainder of FY 2020

- Includes a 7-year reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank

- Increases the tobacco age to 21 - which is a violation of liberty and a play to Big Tobacco (not to mention the plays to insurance companies)

- Provides barely a fraction of the necessary border security funding -- $1.375 billion for "fence and wall construction" while the White House requested $8.6 billion

It is unfortunate that many of my Republican colleagues, who spent years campaigning on repealing Obamacare and "fiscal restraint," voted in favor of these bills which prop up Obamacare and spend money we don't have.

My Democratic colleagues don't care about leveraging the financial futures of your children and grandchildren, so long as they get their pet projects and radical agendas funded. They've never met a spending bill they didn't love.

While there are a plethora of reasons I could not support this bill, like the fact we are funding overseas engagements in Afghanistan (after the recent Washington Post stories about how our leaders had no clear mission) with no debate on the matter whatsoever, I'm pleased that the administration's conscious protections are codified, as well as other pro-Life initiatives.

I also support the affirmative steps these legislative vehicles take to implement the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which I voted in support of last week. Among many things, including funding for a pay raise for our military, standing-up the Space Force, and continuing to provide missile defense and other lethal security cooperation and aid to our greatest ally in the Middle East, Israel.

My hope is that President Trump follows through on his promise from March 2018 and vetoes the spending bills.

"But I say to Congress: I will never sign another bill like this again. I'm not going to do it again. Nobody read it. It's only hours old. Some people don't even know what is in — $1.3 trillion — it's the second largest ever," President Trump, March 2018