How to Drain Washington’s Spending Swamp

March 23, 2018

This Wednesday, House leadership released a 2,232 page bill omnibus spending bill that will keep the federal government open through October.

This bill was negotiated completely behind closed doors by just four people: House Speaker Paul Ryan, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

These four people wrote a 2,232 page bill which spends $1.3 trillion without any meaningful input from the rest of the members of Congress. Virtually no debate and absolutely no substantive amendments were allowed. It was presented to the rest of us in Congress on a take it or leave it basis.

This is just part of the reason I voted no.

For those of you who are concerned about government spending: this bill increases spending by over $250 billion from what we agreed to spend in 2011 and it sets us on a path for a trillion dollar deficit either this fiscal year or the next.

And it is chock full of special interest giveaways that could not have passed in the light of day.

It includes the CLOUD Act, which allows foreign governments to demand your data from United States companies. This bill never received a hearing or a mark up in committee but some lobbyist was able to convince our Senate and House leaders to slip it into this bill.

The bill also limits how many agents our immigration enforcement agencies can hire to enforce our immigration laws and forbids any spending on a new border wall.

As bad as this bill is, unfortunately it is just business as usual here in Washington.

This is the sixth-last minute spending bill Congress will have passed over the last six months.

That means there have been six times over the past six months that Congressional leadership has chosen to fund our $4 trillion by last-minute, take-it-or-leave-it spending bills. No debate or amendments allowed.

This is no way to run a government. We need to do better.

We need to go back to voting on smaller individual appropriations bills.

Let’s vote on a spending bill that funds just the Department of Defense. Let’s spend the time to have a debate and allow for amendments.

Let’s do the same for the Department of Homeland Security. And then for the Veterans Administration. And then for Transportation. And Interior. And on and on.

Yes, this process would force my colleagues and I in the Senate to work harder. Instead of working just four days a week like we do now, we might have to work five or maybe six days a week.

And yes, the Democrats will try and filibuster. But let’s make them filibuster!!! Let’s make them come to the floor and defend their votes not to allow a debate on how to fund our military.

We never even tried that! Not once! We did hold one vote on a defense spending bill. And yes the Democrats did vote to block that debate. But instead of staying on that bill and forcing them to explain why they were voting not to fund our troops we just moved on to other business.

We didn’t even try to fight.

We need to do better. We have to do better.

Our House and Senate Appropriations Committee should immediately begin work on the fiscal year 2019 spending bills. When the House has passed their first appropriations bill, the Senate should bring their corresponding bill to the floor. Let’s force the Democrats to actually filibuster next year’s spending bills. Let’s force them to stay on the floor for hours, for days, even for weeks if necessary.

It will be tiring. It will be painful. But eventually they will cave. And if we don’t take this difficult path, we will be right back in this same position this October.

Let’s not fail the American people again.

Don’t Bailout Obamacare

March 16, 2018

The Republican Congress that was elected to repeal Obamacare is now considering bailing it. It shouldn’t.

Last week, America’s Health Insurance Plan (AHIP), the lobbying arm of the health insurance industry, sent a letter to Republican leadership demanding billions of dollars in new subsidies for Obamacare insurance policies. The letter did not mention that health insurance companies are already enjoying record high profits without additional taxpayer subsidies.

Unfortunately, Congressional leadership appears committed to giving the insurance companies what they want. The omnibus spending bill set to be released Monday will likely contain a provision that would send Obamacare insurers $10 billion in “reinsurance” payments a year for three years: 2019, 2020, and 2021.

Instead of repealing the Obamacare regulations that have caused premiums to more than double since 2013, Republicans are set to buy off insurance companies to hide the true cost of rising premiums.

While advocates for these insurance subsidies argue these payments will reduce premiums, it’s essential to understand that they do not reduce premiums in real terms. There’s no real decrease in costs. They hide part of the premium by shifting it to taxpayers. That’s a bailout.

And don’t think for a second that this would be a onetime $30-billion-dollar price tag. Why would a future Congress allow a $10-billion-a-year bailout to end in a cliff in 2022? Insurers’ lobbyists will be back in 2022 leveraging their control over premiums for the spigot to continue. What Congressional leadership would be agreeing to by including reinsurance bailout funds in this omnibus is a $10-billion-a-year corporate bailout in perpetuity.

On top of being bad policy, these reinsurance payments will fund abortion unless the Hyde amendment—a pro-life protection preventing taxpayer funding of abortion coverage—is specifically applied. Pro-life groups were clear in 2017 that unless the Hyde amendment is included, any member voting for the reinsurance payments would “not only be voting to sustain what many have called the largest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade, but would also be voting to directly appropriate taxpayer dollars for insurance that includes abortion.” Thus far, none of the bailout proposals have included the Hyde amendment.

Congressional leadership needs to listen to the voters that sent them to Washington to end Obamacare. In a recent poll, 61 percent of Americans opposed Congress paying health insurance companies to temporarily lower premiums.

What Americans need is real relief from the Obamacar regulations that are already raising the cost of health care. We need to allow the states to run their own health insurance markets again. Bailing out Obamacare’s fundamental failures only puts the real goal further out of reach.

Reclaiming Congress’s War Power

March 9, 2018

For over a thousand years, Sunni and Shia Muslims have been fighting and killing each other around the world. And since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, much of that fighting has occurred as part of an ongoing proxy war between Iranian-backed Shia forces and Saudi Arabian-backed Sunni forces.

On March 26, 2015, this centuries-long conflict continued when Saudi Arabia’s military killed 17 people in an attack on Shia Houthi forces that were in control of the Sana'a International Airport in Yemen. The Iranian-backed Houthis had driven Saudi-backed President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the country. Saudi Arabia was intent on putting him back in power.

Ideally, this would be of little concern to the United States. But President Obama had just given Iran $1.7 billion as part of his nuclear deal with the theocratic regime—money that Iran immediately began to spend on proxy wars throughout the Middle East.

Obama did not want to alienate our traditional Saudi allies in the region, so without any congressional debate he began supporting the Saudi war in Yemen by providing aerial refueling to Saudi jets and intelligence for targeting. Houthi forces responded by firing missiles at a U.S. Navy destroyer. U.S. forces responded by destroying three radar sites with cruise missiles.

Since the Saudi war in Yemen began, more than 10,000 civilians have died and another 40,000 have been wounded. Fifteen million people can’t access clean water and 17 million people—about 60 percent of the country’s population—are at risk of starvation.

Congress has voted to send more than $768 million in humanitarian aid to Yemen, but it never voted on the military force that created the humanitarian crisis in the first place.

One can debate the wisdom of United States involvement in Yemen. What is beyond debate is that our current support for the Saudi war in Yemen is unconstitutional. Congress should have a debate and a vote on the matter.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution clearly states that, “Congress shall have power to … declare war.” No such declaration was ever made, or even proposed, for the war in Yemen.

And while Article II of the Constitution identifies the president as commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, it is generally understood that this only gives the president power to order military operations in emergency situations. The three-year-old civil war in Yemen, which poses little to no danger to the United States, does not qualify as an emergency situation.

That is why I joined Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) last week to introduce a joint resolution pursuant to the War Powers Act of 1973 that would force the president to remove United States forces from the conflict.

Our resolution will become ripe next week, giving us the power to file a discharge motion and force a full vote on the matter in the Senate.

Opponents of this resolution assure us that our military campaign in Yemen is worth it. If that is so, surely they can defend it before the public and muster the votes necessary to provide the administration with an authorization for use of military force.

President Trump won the election last year after promising to reevaluate our nation’s foreign policy priorities. If we continue to insert ourselves into conflicts with no direct impact on U.S. national security, we divert resources—assets, time, and most importantly, lives—that could be better spent elsewhere.

This resolution opens up the door for President Trump to do that reevaluation now, hand-in-hand with Congress.

The Perpetual Amnesty Act of 2018

February 16, 2018

Yesterday, eight Republican senators joined with 46 Democrats to vote for a bill that would have established a de facto rolling amnesty for unlimited numbers of illegal immigrants.

The final vote total fell six short of the 60 needed to end debate, with three Democrats crossing the aisle to vote with Republicans because they opposed the bill’s increased spending. If amnesty supporters can convince those three Democrats that $25 billion in higher spending is no big deal, then they will be just three votes away from moving their bill through the Senate.

And in reality, Democrats may need only two more votes to reach 60 because Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is slated to return to the Senate later this year. Finally, there are three other Republicans who voted against yesterday’s amnesty plan but voted for the Gang of 8 amnesty plan in 2013. Democrats would need to flip only two of the three senators to reach 60.

That is why it is so important for conservatives to educate themselves and others about what was in yesterday’s amnesty bill—a bill that was posted just a day before the vote.

Proponents of the so-called “Immigration Security and Opportunity Act” claim their bill offered “a permanent solution to those who came to our country as children through no fault of their own.” In a perverse way, they are kind of right.

When President Obama first announced DACA on June 15, 2012, only illegal immigrants who had entered the country before June 15, 2007 qualified for protection. We were told this would be a one-time amnesty—future amnesties would not be needed because people were no longer entering the United States illegally.

But just two years later, President Obama moved that June 15, 2007 date back three years, to June 15, 2010. Despite his previous claims that our borders were secure and no new amnesties would be needed, suddenly he discovered an additional three years-worth of illegal immigrants in need of protection.

The bill rejected yesterday changed the cut-off date yet again, to June 15, 2012—a full five years after President Obama’s original June 15, 2007 cut-off date for DACA eligibility! What exactly will stop amnesty advocates from coming back five years from now to demand amnesty for illegal immigrants who entered the country after June 15, 2017?

Absolutely nothing. Because amnesty begets more amnesty.

The bill’s proponents claim their legislation prohibits parents who brought their children into the United States illegally from receiving citizenship themselves. But this provision contains a loophole so big it would be completely ineffective in practice. The legislation bars only those parents who “knowingly” helped their children enter the U.S. illegally. The burden for proving the parent “knowingly” aided illegal entry would fall on the U.S. government, so unless the parent admitted to the illegal act, the provision would not stop anyone from gaining citizenship. Additionally, the wording of the provision would protect parents who brought their children to the country on a valid visa but then kept them here illegally once the visa expired.

The bill also would direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to prioritize the removal of illegal immigrants who enter the United States after June 30, 2018. Although this provision is very likely unenforceable as a matter of law, it would have encouraged additional illegal immigration over the next six months.

The “Immigration Security and Opportunity Act” would pave the way for future five-year amnesties. If it passes, people around the world will know that if they come illegally to the United States and manage to avoid deportation, eventually amnesty advocates will clamor for their protection. All future Congresses would need to do was change one date in federal law, and a new class of illegal immigrants would become citizens.

A Betrayal of Limited-Government Conservatism

February 9, 2018

Last night, Congress passed a continuing resolution (CR) that will keep the federal government funded through March 23. This is the fifth Continuing Resolution of the fiscal year—a sixth may be needed before March 23, since both parties have agreed to begin debate on an immigration bill next week.

But as bad as the decision to continue funding the government through un-amended short-term auto-pilot bills is, the two-year budget cap deal that passed along with the CR is even worse.

With the CR, Congress agreed to fund specific government programs at specific levels only through March 23.The larger budget deal set overallspending levels for two years. The breakdown of spending on specific programs after March 23 will be decided in future funding decisions.

But no matter how Congress divvies up the budget in the months ahead, last night’s budget deal guaranteed that the end result will blow the top off the nation’s already rising debt.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the spending increases in last night’s budget deal will drive next year’s budget deficit to almost $1.2 trillion, a level not seen since the beginning of President Obama’s failed stimulus program.

This is a complete betrayal of everything limited-government conservatives fought for during Obama’s presidency.

It also is a betrayal of the limited-government vision the Trump administration outlined in its FY 2018 budget. That document called for a $1.4 trillion reduction in discretionary spending over the next ten years. By contrast, this bill sets up a path to dramatically increase discretionary spending.

But that’s not all. The bill also threw in more than $17 billion in tax loopholes to special interests, including tax rebates for rum producers in Puerto Rico, accelerated depreciation for racehorse investors, special expensing provisions for Hollywood producers, and tax subsidies for electric vehicles.

It even suspended the federal government’s $20.5 trillion debt limit through March 1, 2019. Suspending the debt limit functionally raises the borrowing authority of the federal government by over one trillion dollars—and it does so without any effort to reduce or reform federal spending.

If you hoped that this budget deal would create the possibility for welfare orspending reform, I have bad news for you. By setting spending levels for the next two years, the deal has made passage of a budget resolution this year extremely unlikely. Without a budget resolution, there can be no reconciliation process. And without a reconciliation process, any serious effort to reform welfare or spending is dead.

It is unclear what the Senate will do legislatively between now and the November elections. What should be clear to limited-government conservatives is that they have been completely abandoned by the Republican Congress.

The State of Our Union is Strong

February 2, 2018

This Tuesday President Trump delivered the first State of the Union of the 45th presidency of the United States and he was privileged to accurately report that the state of our union is strong.

The United States economy grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in 2017, and growth exceeded 2016 levels in every quarter. Unemployment fell from 4.7 percent in January 2017 to 4.1 percent this month. And wages grew 2.9 percent in 2017, a level not seen since 2009.

Not only are more Americans working for higher wages, but starting next month millions of Americans will also start benefiting from the tax cut Congress passed and President Trump signed this past December.

According to the centrist Brookings Institute, the bill will reduce taxes for all income groups by an average of $1,600 in 2018, and according to The New York Times tax calculator, the typical Utah family with three kids making the state median income of $66,000 will see an average $1,680 tax cut.

American families would not have been able to save this much money in taxes without the hard work of Sens. Dean Heller (R-NV), Tim Scott (R-SC), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and First Daughter Ivanka Trump, who all worked tirelessly to increase the Child Tax Credit from $1000 to $2000 and make $1400 of that amount refundable.

The Senate has also been working diligently to fill the many vacancies open throughout the federal court system. The biggest, of course, being Justice Neil Gorsuch who was confirmed to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on April 10, 2017. I had the good fortune of appearing before then-Judge Gorsuch when he was on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals and can honestly report that he is one of the best judges in the country. He came to oral argument prepared with probing and fair questions that helped everyone better understand the issues before the court. The nation is lucky to have him on the highest court.

In addition to Gorsuch, the Senate confirmed 18 other federal judges, the most ever in the first year of a presidency. By the end of 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee also approved another 25 judicial nominations that are now awaiting final Senate confirmation, and another 25 judicial nominations are currently waiting for Judiciary Committee approval. With the help of the Senate, President Trump is on track to fill a record number of judicial appointments, thus reshaping the federal judiciary for a generation.

Our nation’s rural communities also received some much needed help in 2017 as President Trump rolled back multiple restrictive regulations pushed on them by wealthy urban environmental special interests. Burdensome methane restrictions and reporting requirements were either stalled or rolled back entirely. Restrictive new planning requirements for public land use were undone as were burdensome new truck efficiency standards.

For Utahns, however, no decision was bigger than President Trump’s December order to shrink the Bears Ears National Monument from President Obama’s oppressive 1.35 million acres to a much more sensible 200,000 acres. The rural communities around Bears Ears that rely on grazing and other uses of public lands were able to breathe a huge sigh of relief knowing that, at least for the next four years, the federal government would not be invading their lands and upending their way of life.

There still is much for Congress and the White House to do over the next three years, but 2017 was a very solid start.

The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act

January 26, 2018

At twenty weeks past conception a baby can sleep and wake in the womb. She can suck her thumb, make faces, and see light filtering in through the womb.

And by 20 weeks, if not before, science suggests that baby can also feel pain.

Only seven countries in the entire world allow elective abortions at this late stage. And the United States is one of them.

Each year in this country, more than ten thousand abortions occur after the twenty-week mark.

We can stop this and we must.

That is why this coming Monday’s vote on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act is so important.

The abortion lobby is attacking this bill by denying there is any evidence that unborn babies can feel pain at twenty weeks.

That’s what the abortion lobby says. But what does the science say?

According to a 2006 study from the International Association for the Study of Pain, “The available scientific evidence makes it possible, even probable, that fetal pain perception occurs well before late gestation.”

The study goes on to say that pain perception develops in the “second trimester,” “well before the third trimester.”

A 2012 study by the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists concludes, “the basis for pain perception appear[s] at about 20 to 22 weeks from conception.”

And another 2012 study that was published in the journal Fetal Diagnosis and Therapy found that “. . . from the second trimester onwards, the fetus reacts to painful stimuli . . . [T]hese painful interventions may cause long-term effects.”

The authors of this study recommend that unborn children be given painkillers during “potentially painful procedures” such as surgeries—or, I would add, such as abortions.

There are many more studies like these but the consensus is clear: The science at a minimum suggests that unborn children can feel pain at 20 weeks . . . Can feel the abortionists’ knife and suction tube as it rips them apart in the womb.

That possibility alone should have us rushing to ban abortion at 20 weeks.

A vote for that bill is a vote to protect some of the most vulnerable members of the human family.

Together, we can move our country’s laws away from North Korea and China, and towards our most fundamental belief: That all human beings are created equal and have an unalienable right to life.

Earmarks Are Not The Solution

January 19, 2018

Remember earmarks, those infamous, special-interest spending provisions party leaders used to sprinkle over legislation like sugar to get representatives and senators to hold their noses and vote yes on bills they would otherwise oppose?

You probably haven’t heard about earmarks lately, thank goodness. Republicans banned them when the Tea Party class came to Washington in 2010 opposed to the crony corruption. Who can forget pork-barrel embarrassments like the “Bridge to Nowhere,” the “Monuments to Me” projects that members got named after themselves, or the turtle tunnel in Florida (yes, it’s a tunnel for turtles)? Earmarks were everything Americans couldn’t stand about Washington – corrupt, wasteful, entitled, and out of touch.

But on Thursday, a House committee will hold a hearing to see about bringing them back. Earmarks were the original Swamp Thing, and just like in Hollywood, Washington is never above an ill-advised sequel to make a quick buck.

Earmark fans never left Washington, of course. They’ve just been laying low, waiting for memories of their waste and abuse to fade. And seven years on, they think they have found a nifty argument to carry pork-barrel spending back into polite company. That argument is the dysfunction in Congress over the last seven years. “See,” they say, “Congress can’t get anything done anymore. Earmarks may not be great, but they are the industrial lubricant of the sausage-making factory that is Congress, and bringing them back will get the machine working properly again.”

Like many terrible political arguments, it’s superficially appealing. Congress is indeed dysfunctional today. And earmarks probably would make it easier for party leaders to buy the votes they need to pass the bills they write. But the real problem here is this conceit that party leaders have a natural mandate to exclusively write legislation.

There was a time when one could reasonably argue that, between them, Republican and Democratic elites represented the public. But today, both parties are distrusted, both by their own members and the growing number of independents who refuse to associate with either party. And the institution where they supposedly do their representing, Congress, is utterly despised. That’s not because of a lack of earmarks. It’s because of a well-deserved lack of trust in our governing institutions, and the people who run them.

Earmarks can’t bring back that the trust Congress has squandered. Only transparency and accountability can do that.

The fight over earmarks is really a fight over two competing visions of how Congress should govern. The Washington establishment likes the current system where party leaders negotiate and write bills behind closed doors, often orchestrating a legislative cliff so that members are left with a binary choice between two terrible options. This system keeps the campaign and lobbying cash flowing through leadership offices and their alumni on K Street. The tough decisions are made in secret without any accountability. But no one likes the current arrangement of government-by-cliff. So, the swamp hopes, all that is needed is a little earmark lubricant to keep the game going.

But the fact is that this corrupt system excludes all but a handful of representatives and senators, and so effectively disenfranchises hundreds of millions of Americans. Bringing back earmarks will only make that situation worse.

The alternative system would be one of transparency, decentralization, and accountability. Representatives and senators would write legislation collaboratively, in the open, forging popular compromises and taking tough votes. Anytime someone says, “What we really need to do is get everyone in a room to hammer out the details,” remember, the Constitution provides for two such rooms: the House and Senate chambers. The reason Congress doesn’t work today is that both party establishments are afraid of the electoral consequences of the public actually seeing a free-wheeling debate they can’t control.

The path of transparency and accountability would require members to do the hard work of learning about issues and forming and defending coherent positions. It would be far easier to just let leadership do all the thinking for them and accept the occasional earmark they can tout to constituents back home.

But this superficially easy path is what has led us to the highly dysfunctional and divisive status quo. Earmarks would make life easier for politicians, but worse for the country. That Washington is even considering such a bargain explains why Congress is held in such disdain.

Eventually, Congress will reform itself, and so restore itself to its proper role in the federal government and in American life. Earmarks are just one more bad idea we need to discard before we finally face the truth and do our jobs.

Just say no to the return of Swamp Thing.

Editor’s Note: A version of this oped first appeared in The Washington Examiner.

The Truth About FISA Reauthorization

January 12, 2018

This Friday, the House of Representatives passed the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017, a bill that proponents claim adds key privacy protections to our nation’s foreign surveillance system.

Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

For example, proponents of the House bill claim that their legislation includes a new provision that requires the federal government to obtain a warrant before searching their spying database for domestic targets. And it is true; there is a new provision that requires a warrant to search the federal government’s dragnet databases under in certain circumstances.

But this new warrant “protection” also contains a huge loophole that any biased law enforcement officer could drive a hundred million dollar Special Counsel investigation through. Specifically, the warrant requirement only kicks in if the FBI is conducting a predicated criminal investigation.

The problem is that Intelligence Community investigations go through many stages, and a predicated criminal investigation is just the final stage. This means that during the first several stages of an investigation, government agents are free to use 702 collected data to spy on Americans without a warrant.

And once government agents have collected that information on domestic targets it is very easy for that information to end up on the front pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can preserve the federal government’s ability to monitor foreign communications and protect American citizens from terror attacks while still protecting American civil liberties.

The House bill should be amended to include a stronger warrant requirement. One that requires the government to obtain a warrant before it can access information on United States persons, no exceptions.

The House bill should also be amended to end “about” collection, which is the collection of communications that are not to or from a foreign target, but instead are communications that could merely contain a reference to an account of a foreign target.

For example, assume two Americans are emailing about current events and mention the name of a foreign target. Currently the federal government is forbidden from collecting this information, but under the House bill they would be allowed to do so. We must close this invasive spying loophole as well.

If the past year has taught us anything, it is that the federal government leaks like a sieve and any information that the government is allowed to collect has a good chance of appearing in the press as a political weapon.

The House FISA bill will only make this situation worse. Senate leadership must give senators the chance to improve this bill so American security and liberty can both be ensured.

A Tax Cut for Working Families

December 27, 2017

The tax cut bill just passed by Congress and signed into law by the president is not perfect. But I voted for it because it will help working families and small businesses, give almost all Americans an immediate pay raise, and create millions of new jobs.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. In fact, as citizens, you shouldn’t take any politician’s word for it. And happily, you won’t have to.

As in any political debate, there has been a lot of overheated speculation about this bill. Some Republicans who opposed my work with Sen. Marco Rubio to change the bill to provide more tax relief directly to working and middle class said that would destroy the bill and crush its chances to spur economic growth. The argument was silly.

But so are many of the criticisms of the bill coming from the left. Some Democrats say the bill will only cut taxes for businesses, not individuals. That’s false. The centrist Brookings Institute says the bill will reduce taxes for all income groups in 2018 by an average of $1,600.

Some congressional Democrats argued this tax rate reduction plan was the worst bill in American history, apparently forgetting about the Fugitive Slave Act, or the Alien and Sedition Acts. These criticisms are nuts.

In total, the bill is estimated to cut some federal taxes by a total of $6.5 trillion over the next ten years, and raise others by $4 trillion over the same period, coming out to a $1.5 trillion tax cut. I am not thrilled about the potential hit to the deficit. But I also believe we cannot tax our way to a balanced budget. The only way to close the deficit is with economic growth and spending discipline. With new jobs, higher wages, and more investment, the larger overall economic pie will give a bigger slice both to American workers and to their government.

Over the last two decades, the United States’ 35 percent corporate tax rate has cost us trillions of dollars in aggregate international investment. The new 20 percent rate in this bill will help bring more of the global economy to our shores, instead of having us send so much of ours overseas.

And of course the doubling of the standard deduction and child credit will deliver immediate, substantial tax relief to middle income families.

And the good news is, in a few weeks we will be able to ignore the political speculation and rhetoric and just see for ourselves.

Now that the bill is law, the IRS will begin to implement the new rules, and paycheck withholding guidelines will change. In another few pay periods, you either will or won’t see a raise in your take-home pay.

Over the course of the next year, two years, three years, we either will or won’t see more “Help Wanted” signs in business windows. We will or won’t see more listings on job-search websites. We will or won’t hear about this or that business expanding, opening a new branch or a new plant.

The new, $2,000 per-child tax credit – which Sen. Rubio and I successfully fought to make available to millions of additional working families – won’t make raising kids easy. But it will make things like diapers, braces, little league, or piano lessons more affordable again.

I voted for this tax bill because I believe it will deliver higher take-home pay, more relief for middle class families, and business tax reform to spur hiring, wage growth, and investment. Every Democrat in the House and Senate voted against the bill because they thought it would not do those things.

In a few weeks, we’ll start to see – in your paychecks, at your office, in your community – who was right.