money has to be spent on health care for veterans who suffered exposure from toxic burn pits. this is why this do this sort of thing, jake, because it gets very deep in the weeds and very confusing for people very quickly. it s not really about veterans spending. it s about what category of government book keeping they put the veteran spending in. my change, honest people acknowledge, will have no affect on the amount of money or the circumstances under which the money for veterans is being spent. but what i want to do is treat it for government accounting purposes the way we ve always treated it for government accounting purposes because if we change it to the way that the democrats want, it creates room in future budgets for $400 billion of totally unrelated extraneous spending on other matters. that s what i want to prevent. we are spending way too much money to use, to hide behind a veterans bill the opportunity to go on an unrelated $400 billion
opportunity. it s not a democrat bill. this is not a republican bill. it s red, white and blue. senate leaves for august recess at the end of this week. that s the schedule anyway. will you have passed this legislation before you go back home to west virginia? i sure hope so. i think that s been the plan. i didn t you know, when it came i was when it came all to fruition this past monday, and i was tested positive on monday morning, so i was kind of confined up and everything, but we were working daily, day and night, the staff is working, everyone was interacting and things start to come together. by wednesday we had text we all agreed on. the president agreed on it. so did nancy pelosi agree on it and chuck schumer and i agreed on it. so, we had an agreement for something we ve worked on for a long time. and i think that s what it s all about. if it passes, this bill is poised to be one of the biggest achievements of the biden presidency. what role did president biden pla
16 days ago you said you wanted to wait to pass any major legislation because of the inflation rate. inflation hasn t gone down in those 16 days. what s changed your mind? jake, basically what changed sour mind, chuck we re-engaged. to chuck s credit, we sat down, our staffs kept talking through. we never walked away. we organized the bill. what we had before that, there were things in there i considered thought could be considered to be inflammatory. inflation is the greatest is the greatest challenge we have in our country right now and around in my state and around the country. so, that s what we re fighting. and we started talking again. we got the bill down to where there s nothing inflammatory in this bill, even though there s some naysayers, i m sure, you ll always hear that, but there s nothing in that. we re paying down debt, $300 billion. we re increasing production as far as if you want to get the gasoline prices down, produce more energy and produce it here
to get a vote on your amendment. you want your republican colleagues to get votes on their amendments, too? it s not only up to me, jake. i mean, i do think anybody who has an amendment ought to be able to get their amendment. that probably means two or three amendment votes. we can bang that out tomorrow night, literally, and pass the bill with probably 85 votes. so, the top we ll see if our democratic colleagues want to actually pass the bill. the top republican on the senate veterans affairs committee, senator moran of kansas, he says he thinks republicans should pass this now and fix any problems that emerge later. yeah, except there s never an opportunity to fix the problems later. that s why they re not giving us the opportunity now. they know they can prevent us from fixing it later. one of the questions i think people have about what you re claiming is a budgetary gimmick is the va budgets will always remain subject to congressional oversight. they can t just spen
it looks to me like joe manchin has been taken to the cleaners. look, this bill, the corporate tax increase is going to slow down growth. probably exacerbate a recession we re probably already in. the prescription drug price controls are going to slow down the development of the next wave of life-saving and life-enhancing medicines. they re going to take this money and spend it on corporate welfare for green energy, subsidizing wealthy people buying teslas. in a blatant political bailout, the obamacare subsidies will be continued for high income americans. all of this adds up to doing nothing for our deficits. it s going to do nothing for climate change. and what does joe get for this? he gets the promise that some day in the future they ll pass some kind of legislation about energy infrastructure. if they were serious about doing this, they would put it in this bill. it s not going in this bill because they don t have democrat votes for it. by the way, we haven t seen any