[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 100 (Wednesday, June 9, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4007-S4012]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Biden Administration
Ms. ERNST. Madam President, you might have missed it, but without
much fanfare, the White House quietly released the President's budget
on the Friday before a holiday weekend. Maybe we weren't supposed to
notice the plan at all, but the contents make it impossible to ignore.
President Biden is proposing higher taxes on working Americans and
cuts to our national defense to pay for a massive expansion of the
Federal Government, an enactment of the radical progressive demands,
like parts of the Green New Deal.
What can't be paid for is simply put on the Nation's ``credit card,''
adding trillions of dollars of red ink. President Biden's budget can be
summed up like this: higher taxes, higher spending, and higher debt.
And don't take my word for it. The New York Times wrote that Biden's
$6 trillion budget would ``push federal spending to its highest
sustained levels since World War II.''
Under the Biden budget, by 2028, Washington will collect more tax
revenue as a portion of our economy than at nearly any point over the
last 100 years. This tax-collecting scheme even includes a retroactive
tax increase. That is right, folks, you may owe higher taxes on past
earnings.
Plus, the President would allow the tax cuts for lower income and
middle-class Americans to expire in 2025, and the result will be higher
taxes for most Americans. Higher tax bills will add additional burdens
to Iowa families and small businesses already struggling with the
rising prices and inflation being caused by Bidenomics.
So what do you get in exchange for all of these new taxes? For the
first time in nearly half a century, taxpayers would be forced to pay
for abortions. The Biden budget contains $600 million for electric
vehicles. That is a lot of money to subsidize a product
[[Page S4008]]
very few Americans, other than upper income individuals on the coasts,
seem interested in purchasing.
President Biden would also spend your taxes to double the size of the
IRS over the next decade, adding almost 87,000 new employees at a cost
of nearly $80 billion. You heard it right, folks--87,000 new IRS
agents.
But while the Biden budget promises a bureaucratic buildup at the
IRS, his proposal is far less generous to our Armed Forces. The Air
Force would suffer a substantial cut in its number of aircraft. The
small number of new ships added to the Navy will not keep pace with the
growth of Communist China's shipbuilding. This is especially concerning
since the CCP now boasts the world's largest Navy and is attempting to
expand its naval presence in the Atlantic. You heard that right--not
the Pacific but into the Atlantic.
The Army budget would be slashed by more than $3 billion. The
resulting troop reductions would leave us with the same sized Army we
had on 9/11. While essentially freezing defense spending overall, $617
million of the military's budget would be diverted to fighting climate
change.
Folks, who does the President think he will be able to call on should
we need to fight off foreign threats--his new Army of IRS agents?
We face new threats around the globe, and lowering our defenses, as
President Biden is proposing, will only embolden our adversaries.
Americans may fear an IRS audit, but Red China won't.
When America last spent as much as President Biden is proposing, we
built, essentially from scratch, the world's greatest military force.
And all Americans were called on to play their part in the most noble
of causes.
The entire free world will forever owe a debt of gratitude to the
``greatest generation.'' There is no denying that the sacrifices made
by these Americans and the resources committed to their mission forever
altered human history for the better. The same cannot be said about
what is now being proposed, which leaves America weaker in the world,
and the debt will be paid by future generations.
The Biden budget is a bust for taxpayers and a boon for DC
bureaucrats and tax collectors
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, as my colleague from Iowa just said,
something mysterious happened just before the holiday weekend when the
budget was released. So just before Memorial Day, the administration
released its long-awaited fiscal year 2022 budget proposal.
Having reviewed the proposal, it is obvious why they chose this
timing to do it--because they hoped most Americans would be too
distracted by their backyard barbecues and tributes to fallen heroes to
even notice how outlandish this budget proposal is. Thank God,
Presidents only propose, Congress disposes because we have the power of
the purse.
I have bad news for my Democratic colleagues about the release of
this; that the American public won't have the wool pulled over their
eyes as easily as this administration thinks so by putting this out
late Friday before the holiday weekend. Americans will see this budget
for what it is, a very unserious political document containing a
laundry list of liberal wish list policies unmoored from economic or
fiscal reality. It would be funny if not for the very serious issues we
currently face in our country, and this budget makes them worse.
In response to the pandemic, Congress understandably took bold
actions to help individuals keep the roof over their head and to help
small businesses keep their lights on. As a result, our national debt
exploded because of the pandemic. It now exceeds the entire output of
our economy, and this budget is going to make that situation even
worse.
As we enter the postpandemic world, we need to address the very real
issues about rising debt and deficits posing for our country over the
long term. Otherwise, to quote the nonpartisan Congressional Budget
Office, ``a growing debt burden could increase the risk of a fiscal
crisis and higher inflation as well as undermine confidence in the U.S.
dollar.''
The President's budget completely ignores potential fiscal and
economic challenges that we all know are on the horizon. Taking the
concept of ``never letting a crisis go to waste'' to a whole new level,
the Biden budget would put our country in a permanent crisis mode in
terms of spending and debt levels.
In 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, the government
spending peaked at 24.4 percent of GDP. Now, spending proposed under
President Biden's budget would average even higher at 24.5 percent over
the next decade. So what we had peaked in the 2009 year of the
financial crisis is going to be just common for the whole next decade,
and that is bad.
Moreover, the President's budget would set a new record for the debt
as a share of the economy. According to the President's own rosy
assumptions, debt as a percentage of GDP would reach 112 percent next
year, shattering the World War II record of 106 percent of GDP. And by
2031, debt as a share of our economy would hit 117 percent of GDP. So
how extraordinary a step this budget takes. At a time when inflation
has been rearing its head, proposing sustained spending and debt at
these levels is playing with fire, like pouring gasoline on a fire.
Even long-term Democrat economists and Obama administration alums,
Larry Summer and Jason Furman, have begun to sound the inflation alarm.
The President would be well-advised to start taking notice when leading
economists like these two point to the dangers of inflation.
As problematic as the spending side of the budget is--and so far that
is the only part I have covered--we now go to the tax side, and the tax
side is equally dangerous. The President proposes enacting the largest
tax increase in history.
Incredibly, even with the $3.6 trillion in new taxes he proposes, his
budget still doesn't come close to putting our national debt on a
sustainable path given the new spending. This shows his tax cuts aren't
about fiscal responsibility. Instead, they are about punishing success
and redistributing wealth.
Ultimately, this will prove disastrous for the economy and, of
course, it is going to affect all Americans. Job-killing tax hikes will
slow economic growth. These tax hikes will reduce business investment,
and these tax hikes will result in lower wages and fewer jobs over the
long run. As a result, then, the middle class is likely to suffer the
most.
Higher taxes, excessive spending, and escalating debt are not a
recipe for our economy to ``Build Back Better,'' those famous words of
this President's economic program--``Build Back Better.'' Instead, they
are just a recipe for government to ``Build Bureaucracy Better'' and at
the expense of hard-working Americans.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio
Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I am here to join my colleague from
Iowa who just spoke and others to talk about the President's budget.
The budget is comprised of a couple of things. One is what the
spending is going to be for the country. The spending, which is
unbelievably high and at unprecedented levels of spending at a time of
unprecedented deficits and a long-term debt that is at the highest
level ever, is concerning.
The second is that the budget is about revenue. So on the spending
side, we all expected it to be a very high number--over $6 trillion in
new spending--but on the tax side, we also have huge new tax increases.
The Senator from Iowa just said it is the largest tax increase in the
history of the country. He is the former chairman of the tax-writing
committee, chairman of the Budget Committee here, and he has been
through a lot of tax increases over the years. This is the largest one
in the history of the country. It is coming at a time when you don't
want to raise taxes because we are coming out of this pandemic, trying
to get the economy back on track.
One reason that we were in good shape before COVID-19 is because we
actually put in place some tax reforms and some tax cuts that really
worked. Let's be very specific about that. In the months just before
COVID-19 hit, we had an economy that was hitting on all cylinders in
every respect.
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In February of that year--so February before the COVID-19 crisis
hit--we had the 19th straight month of wage growth of over 3 percent.
That was great news in my home State of Ohio, I will tell you, because
we had years of flat-rate growth, even declining growth, when you take
into account the effects of inflation. So we had really nice wage
growth.
And guess who was made the beneficiary of that wage growth. It was
lower and middle-income workers, which is also something you would all
think people would hope for in this Chamber. That was partly because
the tax cuts the government put in place in 2018 from the 2017
Republican bill provided tax relief to middle-class families, doubled
the standard deduction, doubled the child tax credit, lowered the tax
rates, and put more money into people's pockets. And the 2017 reforms
also spurred needed investment in our communities, growing economic
opportunities, particularly in low-income neighborhoods.
And the reforms on the corporate side--on the international side and
on the corporate side--generally meant that more companies were
investing in America, creating more jobs and investments here rather
than overseas.
At the time, the Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of the
lower corporate rate, as an example, and said that 70 percent of that
benefit was going to go to workers in terms of their wages and
salaries. That is exactly what we saw. So, again, there were 19
straight months of wage growth of over 3 percent in February before
COVID hit.
By the way, also in that time period--the year before COVID hit--we
had the lowest poverty rate in the history of the country. Let me
repeat that because I think it would be a surprise for a lot of people
to hear this who are so critical of the tax reforms in 2017 on the
other side of the aisle, saying this is not going to help ordinary
people. Of course, it did.
We talked about the wage growth, but also the lowest poverty rate in
the history of our country. We also saw a 50-year low in unemployment.
We saw record low unemployment among certain groups of Americans,
including Hispanics, Blacks, and Asian Americans.
We also saw a situation where there were a lot of jobs being created
that were higher wage jobs because wages were going up, and we had the
kind of opportunity economy that everybody in this Chamber should hope
for.
What is this budget saying? This is the budget, again, that President
Biden has just put out. He has said: Let's get rid of all that tax
reform and those tax cuts. Virtually, every one of the 2017 tax cuts
expires under his budget or is ended now before it would normally
expire. Let me repeat that: The budget that they put out wants to
increase taxes, and that includes taxes on everybody, including the
middle class. In only a few months in office, the Biden Administration
is committed to spending about $6 trillion.
Again, just put this in context. That is bigger than the annual
budget of the United States. When you add up all the plans the
President has put out there, it is $6 trillion in new spending. One of
the problems with that has been that it has primed the pump. In other
words, it put so much stimulus into the economy that it has created
inflation. That was something that was warned by Republicans, including
me and others, but also Democrats, like Larry Summers, who is a
Democrat, an economist, and former Secretary of the Treasury.
Unfortunately, it looks like that prediction was correct because
inflation is up. If you ask folks back home about it, they will say:
Yeah, I went to the gas pump, and it was $3.50 a gallon
That is what I heard last weekend. That is what I experienced myself.
Also, it is the price of food.
Certainly, it is the price of materials. If you are trying to build
something today and you want to buy some plywood, good luck. The costs
have skyrocketed.
This inflation is real and it is happening, and people are feeling
it. In a way, that is a hidden tax, isn't it? If everything costs more,
it is sort of a regressive tax that is built into the system. That is
what is happening when we have inflation. We are also seeing pressure
on interest rates, of course, which is going to make it harder on
people to buy a home, buy a car, to be able to get by.
This $6 trillion has made a difference in the sense of sending a
message out from the Democrats that we would like to spend much more,
but they already did spend quite a bit that has primed the pump--$1.4
trillion in a COVID package, as an example.
By the way, that $6 trillion, when you add it up, is about six times
more than the government spent in response to the Great Depression.
That is adjusted for inflation. I am talking about inflation-adjusted
terms. It is about six times more than the government spent in the
1930s in the Great Depression.
It is a very radical budget, really, both on the spending side and on
the tax side. The philosophy of more and more spending at a time of
record debt and record deficits isn't going to help our economy
recover. I think it is simply going to drive inflation, as we talked
about, put pressure on interest rates, keep people out of jobs, and put
more financial pressure on everyday Americans.
Instead, what we ought to do is help people get back to work. COVID-
19, thank God, is finally passing. In my own State of Ohio, we are
finally opening up again because our COVID-19 rates are so low. The
vaccines are working. I encourage people who haven't been vaccinated to
step forward and do it because it helps you and your family and also
our communities to be able to recover more quickly--get people back to
work and back to school, get our children back to school and get back
to our churches and our synagogues, and get back to our normal life. It
is starting to happen, and it is exciting.
One of the problems is, again, higher inflation, higher interest
rates, and also that there just aren't adequate workers out there, in
part, because the government is paying more and more for unemployment
insurance--$300 in Federal supplement on top of the normal unemployment
in the States. There are still 25 States that have that, and this means
that people often are making more on unemployment than they would be
making at work. On average, about 42 percent of people, with the
additional $300, are making more on unemployment than they were at
work. That creates a little disincentive.
There are other disincentives, too, out there to go back to work. As
a result, there are 9.3 million jobs open in America. That is the
latest figure from the Department of Labor based on the April numbers.
We don't have the May numbers yet, but 9.3 million is a record number
of job openings in America. We never had this many jobs open.
This is a problem because if you don't get people back to work and
filling these jobs, some of these companies are going to downsize. Some
will leave our shores for elsewhere, where they can find workers.
Others, frankly, are automating. You could argue that may be a more
efficient, economic decision, but I don't like to see that. I don't
like to see that. I think the technology and the automation, where
appropriate, are great, but I want to see people get jobs where they
get the dignity and self-respect that comes from working, and they get
the opportunity to have a fulfilling life with work.
So 9.3 million jobs are open. Let's fill those jobs. Let's not do
this incredibly high spending level talked about in this budget. Let's
not raise these taxes at a time when we are finally seeing economies
start to rebound after COVID-19. Let's get back on track. We had a
great economy--an opportunity economy--before COVID-19. That is what we
want to return to.
I yield back.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.
Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, I come here, probably more than any other
Senator, on this topic of budgets, and it ought to be called the ``lack
of budgets.''
Thank goodness that, currently, we have the blueprint out there in
black and white for what we intend to do--for what the President
intends to do, and he is going to try to sell it to the American
public.
We have been on this pathway for decades. During the Reagan years, we
talked about enlivening the economy, bringing taxes down, letting
people keep more of their own resources. That worked. I think that
still makes sense.
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It works in most States. It was driving the economy with that dynamic
pre-COVID.
But what we did lose along the way is that--regardless of our
revenues, which stubbornly average 17 to 18 percent of our GPD--when
you raise rates, people don't produce as much. There is not as much
income to tax. When you lower them, you get more revenue to tax, and
you actually are gaining more revenue for the government, to boot. So
we were there pre-COVID. We only need to look to see what was working
just 1\1/2\ or 2 years ago. It was the best the economy was doing.
It was raising wages. We always should be interested in doing that
but not through government--through the productive private economy. It
was raising it in places that we had never been able to do it before.
So rather than throw that blueprint out the door and go with something
like this that has never worked in the past, whenever you get
government becoming that large a part of your economy--and it used to
be 20 percent. Even though we were only taking in 17 to 18 percent,
regardless of the tax rates in our own government revenue, we got used
to running deficits. That is what happened decades ago, and we have all
gotten used to it. If you want to see a budget that takes the theory
that it doesn't make any difference how much more you spend than you
take in, this is it. If you like it, it is the best budget we have ever
done.
Again, we shouldn't be calling it a budget because budgets mean that
you live within your means from year to year like all other entities
do. State governments do it and some that don't generally have issues
in their own States' economies, but we cannot take all of these
resources from the private sector, run them through government with the
inefficiency that goes along with that, and expect to have a good
outcome.
Senator Grassley was here earlier and Senator Portman. They gave you
a bunch of statistics. I am going to describe how this shipwreck ends
up on the shore over time. It is just a question of how much we buy
into this as the way we need to run our government, which has not
worked over the last two decades--from the Gulf wars and from all of
the stuff that we have tried to do through government for which we used
to at least have pay-fors.
The biggest drivers of our current deficits nobody wants to talk
about. They are Medicare and Social Security. We knew decades ago that
the Social Security trust fund was going to go bust and that it is
going to happen here in a little over a decade. Will we do anything to
try to change it? That takes political will. I have been here a little
under 2\1/2\ years and have not found a lot of that.
The bigger driver of our structural deficits would be a broken
healthcare system. I, more than any other Senator, have talked about
that--not solving it through more government but reforming healthcare
to make it become a true industry that believes in transparency,
competition, and getting the healthcare consumer involved. We can fix
that part of it, but we can't get any interest even in my own party for
much of that because we defend a broken healthcare industry. We don't
ask it to be transparent, competitive, and engage the consumer like
most other industries do and do well and that provide a good service to
the American consumer.
So government will end up doing what it always does. It is so easy to
borrow from others and to spend the money. You are going to have a
sugar high. You are going to feel good, but there is going to be
indigestion down the road. The way it is going to end up is we are
going to have calamities within our credit markets, and we are going to
have people no longer willing to lend us money.
We have now taken these trillion-dollar deficits, which are going to
be closer to $1.5 trillion, and this new budget--again, I hate even
calling it a budget--is going to add to that, not lessen it. When you
talk about raising revenues, there is even anxiety on the other side of
the aisle because raising taxes never goes well. It is generally tough
to get everybody to agree on it, and that means our deficits are going
to be even larger.
Is it going to take our completely depleting the Social Security
trust fund that we have been paying into since the thirties, and is it
going to take depleting the Medicare trust fund, which now happens in
5\1/2\ years, and is the American public going to allow us here to keep
spending more money than we take in year after year and end up where
the Chinese won't lend us any money down the road? Others won't as well
because our interest is going to be about as much as we pay for
defense, and then you are going to have a calamity.
You can blame it on everyone here who thinks this feels good now.
When you want to feel good in the future, you make hard decisions in
the present. Any well-run organization or any well-run State or local
government makes those tough decisions in the short run so they don't
have to solve things through a calamity in the long run.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming
Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, I come to the floor to talk about our
economy and link that to the budget that the President has introduced
for our Nation going forward.
On Friday, the Department of Labor published its monthly jobs report.
Just like the April jobs report, the May report is a cause for concern.
There really wasn't any cause for celebration. Yet President Biden did
exactly the same thing that he did in the previous month after that
disappointing jobs report--he declared victory. He gave a speech in
Delaware, and he called it ``historic progress.'' Even the President of
the United States is stretching the language of our Nation right here.
Let's look at the facts.
What is Joe Biden calling ``historic progress''?
Over the last 2 months, about 850,000 fewer people were hired than
the economists had predicted. In the month of May alone, 160,000 people
left the labor force. The percentage of Americans in the labor force
actually went down. Another month, another weak jobs report. It is
disappointing but not surprising. We know why it has slowed down.
President Biden and the Democrats have committed to paying millions of
people more to stay home from work than to go to work. If you pay
people more to not work than to work, that is what you are going to
get. That is what they are being encouraged to do. In fact, I would say
that these people are not being lazy; they are being logical with the
incentives that the Democrats have put in front of them, which is money
in their pockets to stay home from work.
There are 9.3 million jobs that are unfilled right now in the United
States, a record high. As a result, small businesses--and I heard about
it this weekend in Wyoming--are struggling to find people to work
there. They are having a hard time finding people to take jobs. They
have signs up: ``Help Wanted.'' ``We Need You.'' ``Offering
Incentives.'' If people are getting paid more to not work than to work,
that is what they are going to do.
At the same time, prices continue to rise. That is what I heard about
as I was sitting, waiting to have my oil changed. It was a longer line
than usual in Casper, not because we didn't have good workers but
because we didn't have enough of them in a place that changed oil that
had two bays set up but was down to one. They have to do that several
days a week because they don't have the workforce. They can't find the
people to change the oil. So it was a good townhall meeting as we sat
around there, waiting for our oil to be changed, talking to people
about their concerns. That is what we heard about: trouble finding
workers, inflation.
Last week, the White House Press Secretary was asked about high gas
prices--and I had heard about that in Wyoming as we were sitting
around, waiting to get the oil changed: You know, it costs about $15 or
$20 more to fill a tank than it did a year ago. People not only pay
attention to how many dollars and cents it costs for a gallon of gas
but how much it costs to fill the tank and how much less they have to
spend for other things.
The White House Press Secretary said that gas prices aren't very high
if you account for inflation.
If you account for inflation? It is inflation. Gas prices are high
because it
[[Page S4011]]
is what happens when prices go up. That is inflation.
This should be a news flash for America. Inflation is the problem.
The White House Press Secretary didn't seem to see the connection. It
is caused by this administration. Gas prices have gone up about 70
cents a gallon in the last 4 months--since Joe Biden took the oath of
office. It is no surprise when the President, on the day he takes the
oath of office, paints a target on the back of American energy and
pulls the trigger, which makes us more dependent on foreign sources of
energy.
As the senior Senator from Alaska said in an Energy Committee
hearing, we are, at this time in the United States, using more energy
from Russia than we are from her home State of Alaska. That is a
comment on the policies of this administration.
Summer is almost here, and the pandemic is almost over. What is going
to happen with regard to the demand for gasoline? It is going to
continue to go up.
There is a moratorium on the exploration of oil and gas in the United
States, and we are making ourselves more dependent on foreign sources.
What is the President doing? Imposing more taxes on American energy.
Last week, he put more restrictions on the production of energy from
Alaska. Now what does he want to do? Well, we have seen it in the
Finance Committee right here. He wants to impose the increase of taxes
on oil and gas producers. That is going to hurt the people who work in
that industry, and it is going to make all of us pay more at the tank.
This is basic economics. If you restrict the production of American oil
and gas and if you raise the taxes on oil and gas, the prices people
have to pay at the pump--the prices they pay to fill up their
vehicles--are going to go up.
President Biden keeps declaring victory and keeps doubling down on
policies that are slowing down the economy. Two weeks ago, he
introduced his budget request for next year. To me, it is a blueprint
for bankruptcy. He is proposing $6 trillion in Federal spending for
next year. During the pandemic, the country hit about $4 trillion in
annual Federal spending for the first time ever. This was during a
national emergency, and we passed it in a bipartisan way with over 90
votes in the Senate. In five different coronavirus relief bills, we
were able to deal with what needed to be done for our Nation at the
time. The pandemic is behind us, and the President now wants to spend
$2 trillion more than that every year even after the pandemic is over.
This is only the beginning.
The Biden budget doesn't even include some of the most expensive
campaign promises he made when he was running for President. According
to one estimate, the Biden budget is missing about $1.5 trillion that
he had promised to spend. It is not even included in the budget. What
happens with all of this additional spending? Of course, it is going to
cause inflation because more money will be out there to chase the goods
and services that are available.
President Biden also wants to bring back the death tax. This would be
devastating for farmers and ranchers who want to keep their farms in
their families. I heard about it this past weekend in Sheridan, WY,
with the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. As for the families who
have had the ranches or the farms in their families for over 100 years,
we call them centennial families in Wyoming, and we celebrate them
every year. They have all said, if this happens--if the Biden
administration does this with what it wants to do with the death tax--
when Grandma or Grandpa passes, every one of them is going to have to
sell the farm just to pay the taxes. They have been able to keep them
within the families for 100 years. Joe Biden is going to take the ax to
them.
Get this. He wants to hire 87,000 more bureaucrats at the Internal
Revenue Service. The Internal Revenue Service is the least accountable
and most powerful Agency in the Federal Government. The Biden goal is
to collect $700 billion more from taxpayers. What does he want to do
with the money? Use it for additional socialist spending. We have seen
the list. Under the Biden agenda, working families are going to be
paying more at the pump, more at the grocery store, and they are going
to end up paying more as well through taxes. They are seeing it now.
Our jobs reports, our inflation reports, our gas prices have all been
disappointing to all Americans.
This is a direct result of the policies that are coming out of this
administration and out of this White House. It is time for the
President to stop the attacks on American energy, to stop paying people
more to not work than to work, and to stop this irresponsible spending
spree as outlined in the budget.
We know what works. Let's return to the policies that work, to the
policies that have been giving us the best economy in a half a century.
Just 16 months ago, we had low taxes, reasonable regulations, and more
American energy. The economy was booming until the coronavirus hit. We
need to get back to that again
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.
(The remarks of Mr. SCOTT of Florida pertaining to the introduction
of S. 1990 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on
Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
Mr. SCOTT of Florida. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Baldwin). The junior Senator from Rhode
Island.
249th Anniversary of the ``Gaspee'' Raid
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am here for one of my favorite
days of the year on the Senate floor because today is the 249th
anniversary of the Gaspee raid. I can only imagine what I am going to
do next year when it is the 250th anniversary of the Gaspee raid. I may
bring pyrotechnics onto the Senate floor, in violation of every rule.
The Gaspee raid is what Rhode Island abolitionist and writer Frances
Whipple McDougall called the ``first blood'' drawn in America's
struggle for independence, and I come every year to mark this important
but overlooked event in American history.
Our typical history textbook tells us that the Boston Tea Party
sparked the American Revolution in December of 1773. Remember that
date: 1773, December. Massachusetts folks in Boston protested English
taxation by pushing tea into Boston Harbor. It was a memorable protest.
We ought to remember it. But we Rhode Islanders contend that a
different spark 16 months earlier out on Narragansett Bay ignited the
Revolution. The date was June 9, 1772, and the central players in this
saga were two ships, one a little sloop, the Hannah, embarking from
Newport for Providence, and the other a British customs schooner, the
HMS Gaspee; hence the Gaspee raid. The Gaspee was under the command of
Lieutenant William Dudingston of His Majesty's Royal Navy, patrolling
Narragansett Bay.
The meeting of the Hannah and the Gaspee and the act of defiance that
followed would be explosive.
Before I describe the encounter of the Hannah and the Gaspee, it is
important to set the stage.
England's King George had overextended his empire during the Seven
Years War, especially in the war's American theater known as the French
and Indian War. The conflict was expensive to win, and by its end,
Britain had taken on vast new territory and the cost of governing that
territory, and the British national debt soon doubled.
Meanwhile, over the course of the 18th century, Rhode Island had
become a prosperous, major distiller and distributor of rum and trader
of goods. Now, the rum trade was a corrupt and immoral enterprise, a
leg of which profited off the labor of enslaved Africans, but it was
profitable, and the British were thirsty for customs duties. So the
Crown tried to crack down on Rhode Island's trade, including its rum-
running, to collect more customs revenue to pay down the King's debts.
King George's zeal for tax collecting in Narragansett Bay got a
little out of hand. British officers started seizing cargo without
evidence, leaving the cargo's owners with no recourse. They
commandeered Rhode Islanders' ships on flimsy grounds and then used
those commandeered ships to collect more customs duties. British
authorities even pressed Colonial sailors into service, essentially
kidnapping them and forcing them to work on the ships of the Crown
[[Page S4012]]
In one incident in July 1764, the customs ship HMS St. John seized
cargo and a brig in Newport Harbor. Rhode Islanders deemed this
outright theft. The Governor, Stephen Hopkins, later a signer of the
Declaration of Independence, ordered the arming of a sloop to go out
and take on the St. John in open battle on the bay.
The British got wind of it, and they reinforced the St. John with the
powerfully armed, if meekly named, HMS Squirrel. So the Rhode Islanders
scrapped their plans for a naval battle and settled for firing on the
St. John from fortifications on Goat Island with 13-pounder canons.
When the HMS Maidstone impressed into servitude an entire crew of
colonists, Rhode Islanders carried one of Maidstone's boats that they
were able to seize from Newport Harbor to the city commons and burned
it, with hundreds of onlookers cheering.
The Royal Navy impounded prominent merchant John Hancock's sloop, the
Liberty, in 1768. Even after the charges of illegal wine importation
that had justified the seizure supposedly were dropped, the British
Navy kept his ship and used it for themselves for more customs
enforcement. The next year, colonists in Newport reclaimed the Liberty
by force.
These simmering maritime hostilities set the backdrop for the fateful
meeting of the Hannah and the Gaspee in 1772.
As the Hannah sailed north up the bay on June 9, the Gaspee
intercepted her and ordered the crew to stop for a search. The Hannah's
captain, Benjamin Lindsey, was having none of it, and he did not
comply. He held his course and continued sailing north toward
Providence.
Warning shots were fired from the Gaspee. Despite them, Lindsey
continued on. His smaller and more maneuverable vessel led the bigger
Gaspee up north toward Namquid Point. Well, the waters off Namquid
Point shoal, and there are shallows off Namquid Point. Lindsey, as an
experienced navigator and sailor in Narragansett Bay, knew this, and he
sailed his Hannah over the shallows and kept on up to Providence.
Behind them, the angry Gaspee came surging in chase and ground into the
sand and stuck.
Aground off Pawtuxet Cove, the Gaspee would need to wait for the next
high tide before it could float free. Night closed in on the Gaspee.
There was no Moon. Lieutenant Dudingston and his crew were left to wait
in darkness and exposed.
Captain Lindsey sailed the Hannah on up to Providence, and up in
Providence, he immediately arranged a meeting of local patriots in a
tavern called Sabin's Tavern, which still exists under another name
today, in what is now the East Side of Providence, just below Brown
University. Together, and no doubt after refreshments, the group
decided to end the career of the Gaspee once and for all.
Several boatloads of Rhode Islanders, led by John Brown--later to
have Brown University named for him--and Abraham Whipple--an ancestor,
I believe, of Ms. Whipple McDougall--disguised themselves and boarded
longboats in the night and rowed the 6 miles from Providence down the
bay to the Gaspee. There, they surrounded the boat, and Brown called on
Lieutenant Dudingston to surrender his ship.
The lieutenant refused and ordered his men to fire on anyone who
tried to board and warned the Rhode Islanders of that threat. Well, the
Rhode Islanders were having none of that. They stormed the Gaspee in
the dark, and a melee ensued. Shots were fired. Swords clashed. In the
struggle, Dudingston was shot and wounded by a musket ball--the first
blood there of conflict between the Colonies and the Crown; the first
blood, one could say, of the American Revolution drawn right there off
Pawtuxet Cove.
The struggle ended with the Rhode Islanders in control of the vessel.
Brown and Whipple's men ferried the British crew safely to shore,
sought medical treatment for Lieutenant Dudingston, and then returned
to the abandoned Gaspee to make sure it never carried a Rhode Islander
again. To get rid of it for good, they set it on fire and retreated
from the boat to watch it burn and burn until the fire reached the
powder magazines and, when the fire reached the powder magazines,
explode into the Narragansett Bay night, blowing the remainder of the
Gaspee to smithereens and leaving it all to burn to the waterline.
Today, we Rhode Islanders call the site of these events Gaspee Point.
Every year in early June, we celebrate the spirit of Rhode Island
defiance that blossomed that day in Narragansett Bay 249 years ago. We
will walk a parade in honor of Gaspee Day this weekend, and we will
always remember the Gaspee raid, how it preceded by over a year the
Boston Tea Party, and how, while those noble Bostonians pushed tea bags
off of British ships into Boston Harbor, we blew the boat up.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The junior Senator from Florida.