Contact:
Alexah Rogge
202-225-6611
alexah.rogge@mail.house.gov
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Congressman Fulcher released the following statement regarding the vote on H.R. 6800 scheduled for tomorrow in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Tomorrow, the House is voting on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 1,800+ page ‘HEROES’ Act that we received two days ago, despite calls from both democrats and republicans to delay this vote. Aside from the lack of time to review the bill, I have three significant concerns with this legislation.
First, the ‘HEROES’ Act is reported to cost $3 trillion. To put this in perspective, the price tag of this bill is nearly double that of the recently passed CARES Act, which was the most expensive piece of legislation ever enacted. Keep in mind, WITHOUT passage of Pelosi’s new bill, CBO has already projected this fiscal year’s federal budget deficit to be $3.7 trillion and our debt-to-GDP ratio to be as high as it was during WWII, with federal debt held by the public reaching 101% of GDP.
Second, this bill contains many items that are unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic or are progressive policy wishes, rather than solely emergency provisions to support Americans through this period. The list is long, but here are a few examples:
- Expansion of the Individual Economic Impact Payments and Medicaid coverage to illegal immigrants;
- $50 million in EPA funding for ‘environmental justice grants;’
- $20 million in funding for National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities;
- A bailout for labor union pensions, which I voted against in the Education and Labor Committee and on the House floor.
Last but certainly not least, this bill has permanent and massive implications to the election process in our country. The ‘HEROES’ Act would infringe upon the states’ Constitutional rights to determine the “time, place, and manner of holding elections” by federalizing the elections process. States would no longer have the option to require voter ID and national vote by mail would be enacted.
For these reasons, and the echo of similar concerns from my constituents in Idaho’s First District, I plan to vote NO on this legislation. While this bill may still pass through the democrat-controlled House, it is very clear that this one-sided, extreme bill will never pass through the Senate or be signed by the President in order to become law. Despite this, we cannot ignore the extremely costly and unconstitutional parameters that this proposal is setting for negotiations on future rounds of stimulus funding.”
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