John Thune

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Madam President, it is hard to believe that we are in the last few months of the 119th Congress. Two years ago at this time, Democrats were still in charge, and the country was dealing with the two defining legacies of the Biden administration: a historic inflation crisis and a historic immigration crisis. And I don't use the word ``historic'' lightly, but those two crises were truly historic. Democrats presided over the worst inflation crisis in 40 years, with inflation reaching 7, 8, and 9 percent. And they presided over 4 straight years--4 straight years--of recordbreaking-- recordbreaking--illegal immigration. Republicans' priority when we came into office was dealing with the effects of these crises, and that started with preventing a massive tax hike on hard-working Americans. As everyone knows, during the first Trump administration, Republicans passed a historic reform of our Tax Code. We cut tax rates across the board, doubled the child tax credit, and nearly doubled the standard deduction. But that tax relief was scheduled to expire at the end of 2025. The standard deduction, which is claimed by 90 percent of Americans on their taxes, would have shrunk, increasing the amount of Americans' income the government could tax. Tax rates would have increased. The child tax credit would have been reduced by 50 percent. For a typical family in my State, that would have meant sending an additional $2,500 a year to Washington. Well, Republicans were not going to let that happen. And so in 2025, we passed the Working Families Tax Cut--sometimes known as the One Big Beautiful Bill--to prevent this massive tax hike on hard-working Americans. We made the increased standard deduction permanent; we made the lower tax rates permanent; and we made the increased child tax credit permanent. In other words, more money in American families' pockets permanently. But we didn't stop there. We were well aware that Americans had had a very rough time financially under the Biden administration and so we took action to put additional money in hard-working Americans' pockets. In 2017, we had doubled the child tax credit. In 2025, we not only made that increase permanent, we boosted the child tax credit even further and indexed it to inflation so its value will never go down. We also implemented no tax on tips and no tax on overtime, substantially lowering the tax bills of millions of hard-working Americans, from Uber and Lyft drivers to hairdressers, to police officers. And we added a new bonus deduction for seniors, making retirement more affordable for millions of older Americans. And our efforts to help Americans keep more of their hard-earned money didn't stop with the Working Families Tax Cuts. We have also spent this Congress cutting burdensome regulations that have driven up prices for hard-working Americans, from the California electric vehicle mandate, which would have forced Americans into costly electric cars, to regulations that would have driven up the cost of appliances. We passed landmark housing legislation in June to help keep hard- working Americans from being priced out of the housing market, and we took action to drive down costs at the pharmacy counter as well. We passed a law to ensure that patients get the savings from any discounts or rebates from their purchases at the pharmacy counter in their healthcare plans. We removed incentives for pharmacy benefit managers to promote higher priced medications at the expense of seniors. And we improved access to more affordable generic drugs. As I said, in addition to reducing taxes and working to lower costs, Republicans were also committed to dealing with the Biden border crisis. President Trump took action immediately to get the situation at our southern border under control, and the reduction in illegal immigration has been staggering. During the last full year of the Biden border crisis, which was fiscal year 2024, there were well over 2 million illegal immigrant encounters at our southern border. Well, we are almost done with fiscal year 2026, and do you want to know how many encounters there have been at the southern border? Fewer than 120,000. We are looking at somewhere on the order of a 90-percent decrease. And do you want to know how many of those illegal immigrants have been released into the United States? Zero. That is right, not a single illegal immigrant has been released into the United States during the entire 2026 fiscal year. Now, that has been the case for 15 straight months, in fact, under President Trump. And I don't need to tell anyone what a massive turnaround that is from the Biden administration, which presided over the release of millions of illegal immigrants into our country's interior. The dangers of the unchecked illegal immigration that we saw under the Biden administration are manifold. And to help prevent anything like that from happening again, the Working Families Tax Cut included substantial resources to help guarantee the security of our Nation's border from additional Border Patrol agents to security technology. We also boosted funding for our national defense and for law enforcement. Safer communities and a safer country, that has been and will continue to be a Republican priority. Our work isn't done, but I am proud of what we have been able to do this Congress to put more money in Americans' pockets and to help make our country more secure. And hard-working Americans will continue to be at the top of Republicans' agenda. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.