Washington, DC—On Wednesday, U.S. Representative John Rose (TN-06) took to the House Floor to encourage his colleagues, from both sides of the aisle, to vote to overturn President Biden’s veto of H.J.Res. 45. That legislation would have overturn the administration’s student loan forgiveness plan.
The full remarks, as prepared for delivery, are below:
Mister Speaker, today I rise in opposition to President Biden’s student loan scam and urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to vote to override President Biden’s veto of House Joint Resolution 45, which would overturn this ridiculous abuse of taxpayer dollars and transfer of wealth from the working class to our country’s most wealthy and educated class.
Mister Speaker, Middle Tennessee is home to many hardworking, blue-collar workers who do everything they can to provide for their families and live within their means. Many of them made tough decisions to forgo attending college to pursue careers in skilled trades like becoming an electrician, plumber, or carpenter--each valuable skillsets and careers that keep our communities running and peovide services we could never live without.
In fact, 66% of folks in Tennessee’s 6th Congressional District have no college degree. This, along with those who responsibly took out student loans and paid them back, means that an estimated 759,000 people whom I represent are ineligible for the Biden Administration’s proposed student loan giveaway. To put this into perspective, the total population of Tennessee’s 6th Congressional District is 768,525. So, a whopping 98.7% of folks whom I represent will never see a penny of the billions being wasted on this ill-guided proposal.
What’s even worse is that it will cost the folks in my district an estimated $1.53 billion or almost $2,000 per person. At a time when the U.S. national debt has surpassed $32 trillion dollars for the first time in our country’s history, meaning each citizen owes almost $100,000 of the national debt, the last thing Americans need is another $2,000 in debt to pay for other people’s decisions to pursue college degrees.
Mister Speaker, when we debated this legislation on the House Floor previously, I said that America is a country built on the idea of freedom. Freedom does not mean freedom from individual responsibility, but freedom from unreasonable constraints. By forcing Tennesseans to foot the bill for the college degrees of wealthy lawyers and doctors in New York and California, President Biden is chipping away at our freedom.
Back home in my district, where the median household income is $57,373, President Biden’s student loan bailout will cost almost an entire paycheck for the hardworking folks of Tennessee’s Sixth District. Now, Mister Speaker, I’d encourage the president and those who support this transfer of wealth from the blue-collar folks of Tennessee to the coastal elites, to take a visit to my constituents and tell them this news that their hard-earned paychecks will be going to some of the most well-educated and wealthy Americans in our country. I have a feeling, a lot of folks who support this policy would have a hard time going door to door taking people’s paychecks without college degrees away so those with college degrees can reap the rewards and benefits of the president’s policy.
So, Mister Speaker, let’s call this proposal what it is: an election-year gimmick that has no chance of ever becoming law through the normal procedures of being passed by the House or Senate. Even some democrats understand this policy is just plain wrong, and that is why they joined Republicans to pass this legislation which would have stopped this proposal in its tracks.
Now that is our chance to override the president’s veto, let’s hope more commonsense and fiscally responsible Democrats would join us to send a message to the president to reverse course on this disastrous decision.
And with that, I yield back.
You can watch the full speech here.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://johnrose.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-rose-condemns-president-bidens-student-loan-forgiveness-program-urges